She wanted a gentleman; she wanted cultivation, refinement-even to its last debilitating excess.
"Under the Skylights"
Henry Blake Fuller
Only it was a bit debilitating to contemplate, as the mirror insisted one must, the shortcomings of machine-made evening clothes, whose obviously exorbitant cost as a post-War luxury did nothing to make amends for their utter want of personal feeling.
"Alias The Lone Wolf"
Louis Joseph Vance
Even in the debilitating heat of the tropics it was always a pastime, never a task, to put into words my ideas of the historic places which I knew so well from years of reading and which I had just seen.
"The Critic in the Orient"
George Hamlin Fitch