at the first blush

"Quite simply everyone expects Fed to cut and politicians to panic via more stimulus checks, rebates, debt forgiveness, at the first blush of recession."

To look at the first blush of reconstruction down here in the 1990s is to grow nostalgic for a New York that moved at a different tempo.

He at once writes to the journals, shows up the fraud, and sheds humanitarian crocodile tears over the sad spectacle of men, apparently intelligent, allowing themselves to be taken in by impostures, detected by him at the first blush.

It may seem, at the first blush, ungenerous to say so, but the fact remains that, had he quitted this scene but seven years earlier, his reputation had been brighter to-day, and this through no shortcoming of his own.

At first blush, or At the first blush, at the first appearance or view.