the cream of a collection of books or pictures

By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.

I can't just plop down $50 for any old pair of jeans.

We should thus be careful never to accept such parallelings of polarities without question.