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More "Girlhood" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sacrificed herself for his advantage. All had been taken out of her hands! Yet with characteristic fatalism she did not feel rebellious. If it were ordained that she should, for fifty, perhaps sixty years, repent in sterility and ashes that first error of her girlhood, rebellion was, none the less, too far-fetched. If she rebelled, it would not be in spirit, but in action. General principles were nothing to her; she lost no force brooding over the justice or injustice of her situation, but merely ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the hearty sleep of tired girlhood till about four o'clock in the morning. Then Amy, in the room next to Betty and Mollie, rubbed her eyes, coughed a little, then sat up with a ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Army Service - Doing Their Bit for the Soldier Boys • Laura Lee Hope
... through which they may look across the green meadows and into the sunlit gardens of childhood. The result is not theories of child life but appreciation of children. How one who has read understandingly Sonva Kovalevsky's story of her girlhood could ever leave unanswered a child starving for love I cannot see. Mills' account of his early life is worth more than many theories in showing the deforming effect of an education that is formal discipline without an awakening ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... hard to remember which of the women Gertie knew as a result of her girlhood visit to New York, which from their membership in St. Orgul's Church, which from their relation to Minnesota. They all sat in rows on couches and chairs and called him "You wicked man!" for reasons ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... face shows new wrinkles of shadow; and new and unexpected clumping of colors in monotone and halftone appear. From the massed-up bulk of things small detached bits stand vividly out: a flower girl whose flowers and whose girlhood are alike in the sere and yellow leaf; a soldier swaggering by, his red coat lighting up the grayish mass about him like a livecoal in an ashheap; a policeman escorting a drunk to quarters for the night—not, mind you, escorting him in a clanging, ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... such persons, meeting in a far corner of the world, would honestly care for each other. My respect for Uncle Bash grew; he had married the most attractive girl in the world, and here she was with the bloom of her girlhood upon her, tripping alone through a world that might have been created merely that she might confer light ...
— Lady Larkspur • Meredith Nicholson
... the mazy crush, Ingenuous youth, half timid, and half proud, By girlhood's pity had its claims allow'd, And worshipp'd ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 27, 1893 • Various
... having a confidential talk with his old comrade upon future plans and prospects, to the accompaniment of the roaring sea, and a third party was destructive of such intention. Besides, poor May, although exceedingly unselfish and sweet and good, was at that transition period of life when girlhood is least attractive—at least to young men: when bones are obtrusive, and angles too conspicuous, and the form generally is too suggestive of flatness and longitude; while shyness marks the manners, ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... a tall, gilded harp that her grandmother had played in her girlhood. The heavy cover had kept it fair and untarnished through all the years it had stood unused. To the child's beauty-loving eyes it seemed the loveliest thing she had ...
— The Little Colonel • Annie Fellows Johnston
... gracious, deferential. Always she had felt strangely shamed when he stood bareheaded before her. Beauty Stanton had foregone respect. Yet respect was what she yearned for. The instincts of her girlhood, surviving, made a whited sepulcher of her present life. She could not bear Neale's indifference and she had failed to change it. Her infatuation, born of that hot-bed of Benton life, had beaten and burned ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... conversation, though there was a charm about a tete-a-tete with her that earnest persons, men and women, felt without being able to define it. For the change, without doubt, was there. It was as if a quiet hand had been passed over her exuberant, happy girlhood and left a serious, thoughtful woman in its stead. A subtile change like this is not speedily noticed by outsiders; it requires usage before an acquaintance will account it a characteristic instead of a mood. But her family knew it. ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... Roll of Honour came in, week by week, that Roll of Honour with its photographs of splendid types of young manhood that no Anglo-Saxon can look at without a clutch at his throat? What did she think when, one by one, the friends of her girlhood put on the black of bereavement and went uncomplainingly about the good works in which hers was the guiding hand? What thoughts were hers during those anxious days before the Prince of Wales went to the front, when, like any other mother, she took every possible moment to ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... college years if they wish to keep as well and strong as they ought to be. The story of motherhood is told in a very interesting manner, and valuable advice is given regarding the physical preparation for it, which the author believes should begin in early girlhood. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... into what department of her life you inquire, she is still found the same active, energetic, and strong-minded woman. Nothing weak or puerile is found in her character. From girlhood to maturity, from maturity to gray hairs, she pursues the same steady, uniform course. Her life is consistent with the principles which she had laid down for her own self-government, and which she believed were deduced from ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... Mr. Upton. The portrait had been painted in Paris, where, orphaned, lovely, but not largely dowered, she had, under the wing of an aunt domiciled in France for many years and bearing one of its oldest names, failed to make the brilliant match that had been hoped for her. This touch of France in girlhood echoed an earlier impress. Imogen had told him that her mother had been educated for some years in a French convent, deposited there by pleasure-loving parents during European wanderings, and Imogen had intimated that her mother's ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... Leslie had got letters from the Josselyns and Dakie Thayne. There was news in them such as thrills always the half-comprehending sympathies of girlhood. Leslie's vague suggestion of romance had become fulfilment. Dakie Thayne was wild with rejoicing that dear old Noll was to marry Sue. "She had always made him think of Noll, and his ways and likings, ever since that day of the game of chess that by ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... feeling in his middle-aged heart as he scampered along the deck. The girl had wonderful dark auburn hair and brown eyes, with a milk-white skin that sun and wind had sought in vain to blemish. And for all her girlhood she was a woman—bred from a race (his own people) to whom danger and despair merely furnished a tonic for their courage. What a mate for a man! And she had looked at ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... maxim once expressed by Emerson, "Every brave heart must treat society as a child, and never allow it to dictate." Emerson greatly admired Bettina, and Louisa M. Alcott relates that she first made acquaintance with the famous 'Correspondence' when in her girlhood she was left to browse in Emerson's library. Bettina's influence was most keenly felt by the young, and she had the youth of Germany at her feet. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... to bring before young people who have read her books some qualities of her mind and character which made her the rare woman, teacher, and writer that she was. I knew her from early girlhood. We went to the same schools, in more and more intimate companionship, from the time we were twelve until we were twenty years of age; and our lives and hearts were "grappled" to each other "with links of steel" ever after. She was a precocious child, ...
— The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball - That Floats in the Air • Jane Andrews
... all he has done for me. I have promised my hand to one I do not love; even he forsakes me. But love is not the portion of princesses. Love to them is a fairy story. To secure my father's throne I have sacrificed my girlhood dreams. Ah! and they were ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... presents a very interesting development. The subject has at one time or other—probably the critical period of girlhood—sustained a severe physical and ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... suddenly he stopped. Upon a bench sat a sweet-faced mother holding a sleeping babe in her arms, while a curly-pated boy nestled his head in her lap and slept through the magic lanes and fairy woods of dreamland. The woman's face was one of those that blend the confidence of girlhood with the uncertainty of womanhood. 'Twas a pretty face, which had been plainly tagged by its Maker for a light-hearted trip through this world, but it had been seared by the iron of ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson
... McVey. She was born two years, six months after freedom in Corinth, Mississippi. My father was born in slavery. Grandma lived with us at her death. Her name was Emily McVey. She was sold in her girlhood days. Uncle George was sold to a man in the settlement named Lee. His name was Joe Lee (Lea?). Another of my uncles was sold to a man named Washington. His name was George Washington. They were sold at different times. Being sold was their biggest ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... had never been handsome, even in her days of early girlhood, and now she was middle-aged, distorted with work and child-bearing, and looking faded and worn as one of the boulders that lay beside the pasture fence near where she sat ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... angel visitant. My mother, why did you leave your hapless babe? Oh! why? my mother! I was left much to myself, and followed unrestrained my own inclinations. You know my fondness for books; that fondness was imbibed in girlhood, as I wandered in my own sunny home—my lost home. My father taught me to conceal my emotions—to keep down the rising sob, to force back the glittering tear; and when I smiled over some childish grief, applauded ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... Dangler's prosy platitudes, which some deemed wit—Horner, par exemple—sank into nothingness, and Baby Blake, one of the "gushing" order of girlhood, appeared as a stick, or, rather, a too pliant sapling—her inane "yes's" and lisping "no's" having an opportunity of being "weighed in the balance," and consequently, in my opinion, "found wanting." All were mediocre beside her. Perhaps ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... friendship of Mr. Wallace, and had been a constant visitor at his house from the first days of that gentleman's married life. He himself was alone in the world, a confirmed bachelor. He had seen Mildred creep from babyhood into childhood, and bud from girlhood to womanhood. To Mildred he was one of that numerous army of brevet relations known as "gran-pop," "pop," or "uncle." To ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... be said that Ann Lee had married previously to these manifestations, her husband being Abraham Stanley, like her father, a blacksmith. By him she had four children, all of whom died in infancy. It is related that she showed from girlhood a decided repugnance to the married state, and married only on the long-continued and urgent persuasion of her friends; and after 1770 she seems to ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... would be pleasant to know how each has reached the same platform, through the tangled labyrinths of human life." Soon all was silence and one after another related the special incidents in childhood, girlhood and mature years that had turned her thoughts to the consideration of woman's position. The stories were as varied as they were pathetic and amusing, and were listened to amidst smiles and tears with the deepest interest. And when all[89] had finished the tender ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... knows. But she was glad to be rid of them, and when they had gone, she got her sacred "Commonplace Book," and glanced through it dreamily. Then, rousing herself a little, she went to her writing table, and sat down and wrote: "This is the close of the happiest girlhood that girl ever had. I cannot recall a single thing that ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... sleeper, stretched at length, A spectre stripped of charm and shorn of strength, In yon dismantled chamber. Dreams she of girlhood's couch, the lavender Of country sheets, a roof where pigeons ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... hollow—pathetic remains of dolls. But a doll is seldom given to Kojin during the lifetime of its possessor. When you see one thus exposed, you may be almost certain that it was found among the effects of some poor dead woman—the innocent memento of her girlhood, perhaps even also of the girlhood of her mother and of ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... these poor beasts of burden to be decent in their toil. Out of protection of womanhood as the central thought, she must build ramparts against cruelty, poverty, and crime. All this in turn—but now and first, the innocent girlhood of this daughter of shame must be rescued from the devil. It was her duty, her heritage. She must offer this unsullied soul up unto God in mighty atonement—but how? Here now was no protection. Already lustful eyes were in wait, and the child was ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... in the beer-house or the gin-shop, and then carry you on to the catastrophe in his ruined home or in his penal death. Hood, in his "Bridge of Sighs," brings you into the presence of death, and you gaze, weeping, over the lifeless form of beauty that had once been innocent and blooming girlhood, but from which the spirit, early soiled and saddened, took violent flight in its despair; Crabbe would give us the record of her sins, and connect her end retributively with her conduct. Much is in Crabbe that is repulsive and austere; but he is, notwithstanding, an earnest moral teacher ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... in her girlhood Her life was given away, The solemn promise spoken She kept so well to-day; How to her brother Herbert She had been help and guide, And how his artist nature On ...
— Legends and Lyrics: Second Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... murmurs by), And sadly into the clear blue tide The salt tear fell from her clear blue eye. "'Tis fixed for better, for worse," she cried, "And to-morrow the bridegroom claims the bride. Oh! wealth and power and rank and pride Can surely peace and happiness buy. I was merry, nathless, in my girlhood's hours, 'Mid the waving grass when the bright sun shone, Shall I be as merry in Marmaduke's towers?" (The rippling ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... Javanese parents of exalted rank treat their daughters with disdain, the approved discipline of family life consisting in stamping an impression of abject insignificance deeply on the plastic mind of girlhood. Fertile plain and wooded slopes are alike destitute of domestic animals. The sheep was unknown to native races in this pastureless land, and, though introduced by the earliest colonists, is still spoken of as "the Dutch goat," no other term ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... a white, seamless face, sad, prayerful blue eyes too large for the sockets, a little piquant nose that she had somehow managed to bring along with her unchanged from a frivolous girlhood, and a quaint old hymnal mouth. Looking up from the rug she took on an expression of pure and undefiled piety and began in the strident, cackling tones of ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... up the next morning in the chamber where her girlhood had passed. The birds of spring were singing under her windows in the old ancestral gardens. As she recognized these friendly voices, so familiar to her infancy, her heart melted; but several hours' sleep had restored to her her natural courage. She banished ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... to girlhood, Jeanne had heard continually of the woes of the war, and had herself witnessed some of the wretchedness that it caused. A feeling of intense patriotism grew in her with her growth. The deliverance of France from the English was ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... once been a family servant—an indoor domestic, and handmaiden to a white mistress. This in the days of youth—the halcyon days of her girlhood, in "Ole Varginny"—before she was transported west, sold to Ephraim Darke, and by him degraded to the lot of an ordinary outdoor slave. But her original owner taught her to read, and her memory still retains a trace of this early education—sufficient for her to decipher ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... square miles of ranch while her father guarded the other. She could handle firearms with speed and accuracy equal to any man on the range, where she had been bearing a man's burden since her early girlhood. ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... rich in stories adapted to the juvenile mind, among which the most prominent are Mrs. Whitney's "Faith Gartney's Girlhood," Miss Alcott's "Little Women," and Mr. T.B. Aldrich's "Story of a Bad Boy." Edgar Allan Poe's "Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque," are remarkable for intensity and vividness of conception, combined with a circumstantial invention almost equal to that of Defoe. ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... look down when our great galleon sails Close over earth, and see them always here Dancing upon the moonlit shores of night. But how to choose!—and though they are young and fair Their every grace foretells the fatal change, The swift short bloom of girlhood, like a flower Passing away, for ever passing away. Have you not one with petals tenderer yet, More deeply folded, further from the hour When the bud dies into ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... as fair as a rose, but a trifle too weak. When a maid she had suitors as proud as Ulysses, But she ne'er bent her neck to their arms or their kisses, Till McNair he came in With a brush on his chin— It was love at first sight—but a trifle too thin; For, married, the dreams of her girlhood fell short all, And she found that her husband was ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... twenty-three and singularly free from ties. Her mother had died when she was a child. Her father, the physician of the surrounding country, a man of engaging energy with an empirical education and a speculative habit of mind, had been the companion of her girlhood. During the last few years since his return from the war an invalid from a wound, her care for him had left her time for ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... turned out the light and crawled in beside Mary. Of a sudden, he had seen Judith through his father's eyes and he found himself very unwilling to permit John to see her so. Her loneliness had assumed an entirely new aspect to him. It was the loneliness of girlhood, of girlhood without father, mother, or brother. That was what it amounted to, he told himself. He never had been a real brother to Judith, never had looked out for her as if she had been his sister. And Jude's mother! Just tired and sweet and ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... fire. Hitty rested her weary head against the window-frame and sent her wearier thoughts upward to the stars; there were the points of light that the Chaldeans watched upon their plains by night, and named with mystic syllables of their weird Oriental tongue,—names that in her girlhood she had delighted to learn, charmed by that nameless spell that language holds, wherewith it plants itself ineradicably in the human mind, and binds it with fetters of vague association that time and chance are all-powerless to break,—Zubeneschamali and Zubenelgunebi, Bellatrix ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... made the Jew the pariah of the civilized world. Oh, father, dear father, do not barter me for gold! Let me remain your child, your darling; living and dying in the home which your love has made like Eden to my girlhood!" ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... could see herself trapping Esther in a still place and cutting her dusky hair off so that she'd betray no more men. For she began to suspect that Alston Choate, too, was caught in the lure of Esther's inexplicable charm. Lydia was at the moment of girlhood nearly done where her accumulated experience, half of it not understood, was prepared to spring to life and crystallise into clearest knowledge. She was a child still, but she was ready to be a woman. Alston Choate now was gazing at ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... rich, heavy house at Lancaster Gate, on the other side of the Park and the long South Kensington stretches, had figured to her, through childhood, through girlhood, as the remotest limit of her vague young world. It was further off and more occasional than anything else in the comparatively compact circle in which she revolved, and seemed, by a rigour early marked, to be reached through long, straight, discouraging vistas, which ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... been called as a Jewess, Hannah, had spent her girlhood under the rule of a stepmother. Peter was a young man earning a fair salary as a clerk at the Town Hall. He was a frequent visitor at Bendet's wine-shop. And Peter was an expert judge of the comeliness of Jewish maidens in ...
— In Those Days - The Story of an Old Man • Jehudah Steinberg
... long received her. There Ethembria ruled, Green Erin's earliest nun. Of princely race, She in past years before the font of Christ Had knelt at Patrick's feet. Once more she sought him: Over the lovely, lovelier change had passed, As when on childish girlhood, 'mid a shower Of lilies earthward wafted, maidenhood In peacefuller state assumes her spotless throne; So, from that maiden, vestal now had risen: - Lowlier she seemed, more tender, soft, and grave, Yet loftier; hushed in quiet more divine, Yet wonder-awed. Again she knelt, and ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... shared her girlhood's happier day, And forms now mingling with the dust arise, The early loved recalled with pensive tears, Though once in pride half scorned and lightly prized; Fair pictured scenes long vanished from her sight, Soft tones of songs and voices loved of yore. And words of tenderness and ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... as a buxom bright-haired lassie: but oaks had now grown old that she had planted acorns; and grandmothers had died palsied, whom she remembered born; still, around the mountains and the lakes, those changeless features of her girlhood's rugged home, the old woman's memory wandered; they were pictured in her mind's eye hard, and clear, and definite as if she looked upon them now. And her soul's deep hope was to see them ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... very easy to accuse a young person for suffering herself to be deceived, in the desire to escape, at any price, from the condition of girlhood; but such an accusation is only just in the present condition of our manners. At the present day, a young person knows nothing about seduction and its snares, she relies altogether upon her weakness, and ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... sufficient to show that a change had come over these two young women, since the giddy days of their girlhood. Jane was pale, but beautiful as ever; she was holding on her knees a sick child, about two months old, which apparently engrossed all her attention. What would be her system as a mother, might be foretold ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... a New England atmosphere, is rarely carried forward into womanhood. The lips grow pinched and bloodless; the skin blanched against all proof of blushes; the eyes sunken, and the blithe sparkle that was so full of infectious joy is lost forever in that exhausting blaze of girlhood. But we make no prophecy in regard to the future of our little friend Rose. Adele thinks her very charming; Reuben is disposed to rank her—whatever Phil may think or say—far above Suke Boody. And in his reading ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... people in a strange land, and in difficult circumstances who had for the time lost their grip of things, and needed special assistance. It all came upon her in a flash, transforming her from a follower to a leader; from dependent girlhood to ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... ‘The Girlhood of the Virgin’ in the so-called Free Exhibition or Portland Gallery. The artist who had perhaps the strongest influence upon Rossetti’s early tastes was Ford Madox Brown, who, however, refused from the first to join the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood on the ground that ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... of the oleander blossoms and the sunset over the garden made a harmony with her dream. To the widow who had been no wife, the girl who had seen no girlhood, the child who had never had a home, the lady who was losing her life in gilded servitude, that dream ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... that now left behind a dull pang, made her forget Stewart, her surroundings, everything except to search her heart. Maybe here was the secret that had eluded her. She trembled on the brink of something unknown. In some strange way the emotion brought back her girlhood. Her mind revolved swift queries and replies; she was living, feeling, learning; happiness mocked at her from behind a barred door, and the bar of that door seemed to be an inexplicable pain. Then like lightning strokes shot ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... succumbed to overwork, dying in Boston on the 6th of March 1888, two days after the death of her father in the same city. Miss Alcott's early education had partly been given by the naturalist Thoreau, but had chiefly been in the hands of her father; and in her girlhood and early womanhood she had fully shared the trials and poverty incident to the life of a peripatetic idealist. In a newspaper sketch entitled "Transcendental Wild Oats,'' afterwards reprinted in the volume Silver Pitchers (1876), she narrated, with a delicate humour, which showed what ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... changed. She was once more free to indulge in those dreams which had gladdened the days and nights of her lonely girlhood out in far-off England: dreams which somehow had not even found their culmination when St. Genis first told her of his love for her. They had always been golden dreams which had haunted her in those distant days, dreams of future happiness ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... eyes and drew the baby closer. It looked like a rose dipped in milk, she thought, this pink and white blossom of girlhood, or like a pink cherub, with its halo of pale yellow hair, ...
— The Bird's Christmas Carol • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Ville Marie! Spread wide thine ample robes of state; The heralds cry that thou art great, And proud are thy young sons of thee. Mistress of half a continent, Thou risest from thy girlhood's rest; We see thee conscious heave thy breast And feel thy rank and ...
— Thoughts, Moods and Ideals: Crimes of Leisure • W.D. Lighthall
... right up to the top. There was a want of bold action; he didn't see what they were waiting for. He didn't suppose they were waiting till she was fifty years old; there were old ones enough in the field. He knew that Miss Chancellor appreciated the advantage of her girlhood, because Miss Verena had told him so. Her father was dreadfully slack, and the winter was ebbing away. Mr. Pardon went so far as to say that if Dr. Tarrant didn't see his way to do something, he should feel as if he should ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... was brushing and coiling up her thick black hair—a favourite task, because it seemed to renew the days of her daughter's girlhood—Janet told how she came to send for Mr. Tryan, how she had remembered their meeting at Sally Martin's in the autumn, and had felt an irresistible desire to see him, and tell him her ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... back at their few days together he saw that their intercourse had been marked, on her part, by the same hesitations and reserves which had chilled their earlier intimacy. Once more they had had their hour together and she had wasted it. As in her girlhood, her eyes had made promises which her lips were afraid to keep. She was still afraid of life, of its ruthlessness, its danger and mystery. She was still the petted little girl who cannot be left alone in the dark...His memory flew back to their youthful story, ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... clung to her illusion, finding comfort therein, wholly blind to those failings in her protector which to the woman who had loved him from her earliest girlhood were as obvious and well-nigh as ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... America. It is a moving record of the conquest of self-consciousness and fear through mastery of manners and customs. It has been written by one who has not sacrificed the strength and honesty of her pioneer girlhood, but who added to these qualities that graciousness and charm which have given her ...
— The Log-Cabin Lady, An Anonymous Autobiography • Unknown
... divine of genius-souls, Their wasting cares and agonizing throes! I had a friend, a sweet and precious friend, One passing rich in all the strange and rare, And fearful gifts of song. On one great work, A poem in twelve cantos, she had toiled From early girlhood, e'en till she became An olden maid. Worn with intensest thought, She sunk at last, just at the "finis" sunk! And closed her eyes forever! The soul-gem Had fretted through its casket! As I stood Beside her tomb, I made a solemn vow To take in charge that poor, lone orphan work, ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... spent much of her girlhood at Kingthorpe, and had always been made welcome at The Knoll; but although she saw the Wendovers established upon their native soil, the rulers of the land, and revered by all the parish, she had grown up with the firm conviction that Dr. ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... not knowing why, she would look into the glass. It seemed to her that the girlhood she had somehow missed was awakening in her, taking possession of her, changing her. The lips she had always seen pressed close and firm were growing curved, leaving a little parting, as though they were not quite so satisfied with one another. The level brows were becoming slightly ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... talked about her father's Mississippi plantation and her girlhood home in the old Kentucky bluegrass country. She was an American woman, with a small infusion of French which seemed to have been lost in dilution. She read a letter from her sister, who was away in the East, and who had engaged herself to be married. ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... "Such happy girlhood hours as I have passed here! After all there is nothing like the home feeling, is there, for us women at any rate! We're the natural conservatives, who cling to the simple, elemental satisfactions, and there's a heart-hunger ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... at the mention of girlhood days, but said nothing, and Silas turned to Elizabeth again with his honest face alight with memories ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... house which had made a point of never marrying below its rank since the reign of Louis XIV. Every daughter of the house must sooner or later take a tabouret at Court. So, Antoinette de Navarreins, at the age of eighteen, came out of the profound solitude in which her girlhood had been spent to marry the Duc de Langeais' eldest son. The two families at that time were living quite out of the world; but after the invasion of France, the return of the Bourbons seemed to every Royalist mind the only possible way of putting ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... The great armies roll along their hideous waves, and leave behind them smoking and depopulated deserts. The pillager is in every house, plucking even the morsel of bread from the lips of the starving child. Gray hairs are dabbled in blood, and innocent girlhood shrieks in vain to Lust for mercy. Laws, Courts, Constitutions, Christianity, Mercy, Pity, disappear. God seems to have abdicated, and Moloch to reign in His stead; while Press and Pulpit alike exult at universal murder, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... in a knot, closer to her head, and that altered her expression a little and made her look much older; but there was more than that, there was something very hard to describe, something one might call conviction—the conviction that the world is real, which comes upon girlhood as suddenly as waking on sleep, or sleep on waking. She had crossed the narrow borderland between play and earnest, and she had crossed it ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... perfectly delightful if our daughters might remain innocent. They should have that privilege. Innocence belongs to childhood and girlhood, but under present conditions, it is as dangerous and foolish as level and unguarded railway crossings, or open and unguarded trap doors. It is no pleasant task to have to tell a joyous, sunny-hearted ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... depends on how the health is cared for in childhood. The foundation for disease is often laid during school years. The making of strong bodies that will live joyous lives for long years must begin in boyhood and girlhood. ...
— Health Lessons - Book 1 • Alvin Davison
... his girl-wife while their child was still tender, down to the amazing iniquity of that child's revolt, in her thirty-first year. Dumbly, dutifully, had she submitted to all his restrictions and severities, stonily watching her girlhood go, through a fading, lining and hardening of her prettiness. Then all at once, with no word of pleading or warning, she had done the monstrous thing. He awoke one day to know that his beloved child had gone away to marry the handsome, swaggering, fiddle-playing good-for-nothing who ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... summer Poppy seemed care enough. A neighbor across the canyon, who had known her in her girlhood, took too vital an interest in her daily life. It was maddening to be called on the telephone at all hours and told that Poppy had had no fresh drinking water since such and such an hour, or to have Donald waylaid and ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... mill-stream, if she were but Leone Noel once again, with her life all unspoiled before her; if she were anything on earth except a woman possessed by a mad love. If she could but exchange these burning ashes of a burning love for the light, bright heart of her girlhood, when the world had been full of beauty which spoke to her in an ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... accustomed to it all. She had been born beside that sea. Etna had looked down upon her as she sucked and cried, toddled and played, grew to a lusty girlhood, and on into young womanhood with its gayety and unreason, its work and hopes and dreams. That Oriental song—she had sung it often on the mountain-sides, as she set her bare, brown feet on the warm stones, and lifted her head with a native ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... her slim but rounded figure in tattered boy's garb—but the woman's lines were unmistakable. And her face, with clustering curls. Gentle girlhood. A face of dark, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... of an overwrought soul. Lord Marshmoreton, whose thoughts had wandered off to the rose garden, pulled himself together and tried to look menacing. Maud went on without waiting for a reply. She was all bubbling gaiety and insouciance, a charming picture of young English girlhood that nearly made her brother foam at ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... through her, of which I should never have had any idea. Even now when we go to the Louvre with papa, or to the exhibition of the 1st of May, that special feeling I have about a beautiful piece of sculpture, a good picture, carries me back immediately to Felicia. In my early girlhood she represented art to me, and it corresponded with her beauty. Her nature was a little vague, but so kind, I always felt she was something superior to myself, that bore me to great heights without frightening ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... woman now: she only tried during her few minutes of solitude to gather up her thoughts, to realize what had happened to her, and who it was that sat in the next room—under her roof—at her very fireside. Then she clasped her hands with a sudden sob, wild as any of the emotions of her girlhood. ...
— The Laurel Bush • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... faintly illumined by the full moon that was rising, incredibly large and white, above the dark line of the spruce tops. For all the regularity of his rather handsome features, his was never an attractive face to her, even in first, susceptible girlhood; and in the moonlight it suddenly filled her with dread. Ray Brent was a dangerous type: imperious willed, slave to his most degenerate instincts, reckless, as free from moral restraint as the most savage creatures that roamed his native ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... had been in her service since girlhood, and was spoken of as "Smither—a good girl—but so slow!"—the maid Smither performed every morning with extreme punctiliousness the crowning ceremony of that ancient toilet. Taking from the recesses of their pure white band-box those flat, grey curls, the insignia of personal dignity, she placed ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... She would have gone anyhow. She is expecting a visitor, an old friend of her girlhood days. I must tell you a story about him later, a love story with a real hero and a real heroine, and ending with resignation. It will make you open your eyes wide with amazement. Moreover, I saw mama's old friend over ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... wholly accept her freedom. Still she was more like the Rose of girlhood, though she no longer climbed or ran races. The Sieur was whiling away the heavy hours of uncertainty by teaching several Indian girls, and Rose found this ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... of his labors lay principally between the years 1774 and 1790, when the evils against which Mrs. Fry had to contend were intensified and a hundred times blacker, it cannot do harm to recall the condition of prisons in England during the last quarter of the eighteenth century; that is, during the girlhood of Elizabeth Fry. Possibly some echoes of the marvellous exertions of Howard in prison reform had reached her Earlham home, and produced, though unconsciously, an interest in the subject which was destined to bear fruit at a later period. At any rate, the fact cannot be gainsaid ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... value to be placed on the very trappings of girlhood which do not in the least interfere with womanliness. At sixteen or eighteen, perhaps at twenty, a girl can toss a jaunty little felt hat upon her head, pin it in a twinkling above her wayward hair, tie on a ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... in the back of his mind; in his subconscious mind, perhaps, but he seemed to have put her away, like his skill with revolver and lasso. Now she burst upon him again with all that beauty and charm which had so magnetised him in those glad, golden days, and the frank cleanness of her girlhood made him disgusted and ashamed. It was to fit himself for her that he had come to town, and what sort of mess was he making of it? He was going down instead of up. He had squandered his little money, and now he was squandering his life. He had ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... extremely, and taking in so little of it that it has appeared to them since as not one of the least of Dickens's glories that he could write a book about the scum of London which children may read and re-read well into their young girlhood without receiving even the shadow of an impression of any evil beyond pocket-picking ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... word she rose and confronted him, smiling into his troubled eyes; grace of girlhood and dignity of womanhood adorably mingled ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... said, bored by the general atmosphere of innocent and bounding girlhood at the Temperance Home Club, and she persuaded Una to join her in taking a flat—three small rooms—which they made attractive with Japanese toweling and Russian, or at least Russian-Jew, brassware. Here Mrs. Lawrence's men came calling, and sometimes Mr. Julius ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... complication. It had begun to rain. Hopelessly lost in the woods and a storm coming on! It was a situation to try the patience of a saint. And the girls were not saints. They were just happy, fun-loving, lovable specimens of young American girlhood who could upon occasion show ...
— Billie Bradley on Lighthouse Island - The Mystery of the Wreck • Janet D. Wheeler
... the soft, white draperies, her face made an attractive picture for the passer-by. Mrs. McAlister's girlhood had passed; a certain girlishness, however, would never pass, and her clear blue eyes had all the life and fire they had shown when, as Bess Holden she had been the leader in most of the pranks of her class at Vassar. The brown hair was still unmarked by grey ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... something to lighten this weary waiting; at least she would show them all that she had still old friends. Yet she did not dream of returning to her Blue Grass home; her parents had died since she left; she shrank from the thought of dragging her ruined life before the hopeful youth of her girlhood's companions. ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... world is so changed since our girlhood!" rejoined the other: "young people have such old heads now. But to return, Monsieur. Madame Pelet will mention the subject of your giving lessons in my daughter's establishment to her son, and he will speak to you; and then to-morrow, you will step over to our house, and ask to see ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... brothers and sisters grew from merry playmates, to loving, trustful friends; from Christmas gatherings and romps, the summer festivals in bower or garden; from the secure backgrounds of her childhood, and girlhood, and maidenhood, looks out into the dark and unilluminated future away from all that, and yet unterrified, undaunted, leans her fair cheek upon her lover's breast, and whispers—"Dear heart! I cannot see, but I believe. The past was beautiful, but ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... gift presents types of the principal phases of human development; from the easy mobility of infancy and childhood,—the ball,—we pass through the half-steady stages of boyhood and girlhood, represented in the cylinder, to the firm character of manhood and womanhood for which the ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... into the room with her swaying, graceful carriage of old days, but with a new dignity and reserve of manner, carrying her lovely head with just a little more pride than in her girlhood, greeting Irving, for all her warm friendliness, like a young queen graciously ready to accept homage from her subjects. She sank into a low chair beside the fire, the flames casting a warm glow over her arms and neck from which her ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... you; the same delicacy of proportion; the same graceful curvature of limb, only less rounded, less womanly. But you must be younger by about two years than she then was. Your age cannot exceed seventeen; and time will supply what your mere girlhood renders you ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... lying in a corner room, close to the stream which rippled through the little orchard, and its gentle murmur had been a comfort to her—it carried her back to her home in Oxford County (State of Maine), where her early girlhood had been spent. At times it seemed that she was in the little, old, gray house in the valley, and that her father's sharp voice might come at any moment to break her ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... doubtless become so when unduly heightened by Christian sentiment, and especially if it leads, as to some extent it has led in my Russian correspondent, to an abnormal feeling of the sexual attraction of girls who have only or scarcely reached the age of puberty. The sexual charm of this period of girlhood is well illustrated in many of the poems of Thomas Ashe, and it is worthy of note, as perhaps supporting the contention that this attraction is based on Christian feeling, that Ashe had been a clergyman. An attentiveness to ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... From early girlhood onwards Cleopatra had cherished very definite ideas about the man of her taste. In this she was by no means exceptional. But perhaps the circumstances that she had abided more steadfastly than most by the ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... in him he remarked a development in her which was a little short of wonderful. She was at that age when the woman is breaking through the beautiful chrysalis of girlhood. In those two months a remarkable change had come over her, a change which he could not for the moment define, for this phenomenon of development had ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... curls over her temples; you saw that the keenest wind of Fall brought the red to her cheeks only in two bright spots, and that no soft Spring air would ever bring her back the rosy, pink flush of girlhood: you saw these things as others saw them—no, indeed, you did not; you saw them as others could not, and they only made her the more dear to you. And you were having one of the best and most valuable ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... through all the weary, chilling years of her girlhood to that hardly remembered morning of her life when the cry she uttered was answered by the light of loving eyes, the kiss of clinging lips, the embrace of ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... good luck; that she had left her parents against their will to go to Neufchateau, and lived in that place among a debauched set of people: that in consequence of all these wicked acts, a youth who intended marrying her had not done so. Then, having left not a stage or an act of her innocent girlhood unblasted, and covered with the slime of the Bishop's reptile-like imagination, her acts when with the King were reviewed. She had promised Charles to slay all the English in France; her cruelty and love of bloodshed were insatiable; ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... tremendous forces of the upper and the nether world which play for the mastery of the soul of a woman during the few years in which she passes from plastic girlhood to the ripe maturity of womanhood, he may well stand in awe before the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and through, with no chance for a supper, forlorn and discouraged. I sat on the bulwark, listening to the falling rain and the swish of the dark tide, and thinking of home. How far it seemed, and how impassable the gulf now between the "castle" with its refined ways, between her in her dainty girlhood and me sitting there, numbed with the cold that was slowly stealing away my senses with my courage. There was warmth and cheer where she was. Here—— An overpowering sense of desolation came upon me. I hitched a little nearer the edge. What if——? Would they miss me or long at home if ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... youngest of the three; she was about forty. But she had forgotten, like Jasmina and Saloma, to erase twenty years from the calendar: all three had preserved the youthful charm of their girlhood. ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... how Peruna did for them. Give this boy and girl of yours a few good books and you're starting them on the double-track, block-signal line to happiness. Now there's 'Little Women'—that girl of yours can learn more about real girlhood and fine womanhood out of that book than from a year's paper dolls in ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... Love's drapeau rouge the truth has told! O' er girlhood's yielding barricade Floats the ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... what the sight roused in him was not so much disapproval as pity, and an immense longing to help and comfort. He loved her; he understood her; he honestly believed he could help her to rise above the weaknesses of girlhood, and become the fine large-hearted woman which Providence had intended her to be; and the time had come when he intended to speak his mind and ask her to be his wife. The silence had lasted so long that at last Joan herself ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... one in a stupor of amazement—so dazed and white that I repeated my words. Then, suddenly, she gathered herself into composure like my own, but her poor lips trembled. I saw in her my girlhood long dead. ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... reaching the sands that now lay before her, warm, sweet-scented from short beach grass, stretching to a dim rocky promontory, and absolutely untrod by any foot but her own. It was this virginity of seclusion that had been charming to her girlhood; fenced in between the impenetrable hedge of scrub-oaks on the one side, and the lifting green walls of breakers tipped with chevaux de frise of white foam on the other, she had known a perfect security for her sports and fancies that had captivated her ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... on, and the girls continued their chatter, and their high-shrieking trebles arose triumphant above all the clatter. It was American girlhood rampant on the shield of their native land. Still there was something about the foolish young faces and the inane chatter and laughter which was sweet and even appealing. They became attractive from their audaciousness and their ignorance that they were troublesome. Their ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... morbid, at any rate, whatever they are," our heroine said to herself; and she deemed this a great charm, for two or three of the friends of her girlhood had been regrettably open to the charge (they would have been so nice without it), to say nothing of Isabel's having occasionally suspected it as a tendency of her own. The Misses Molyneux were not in their first youth, but they had bright, fresh complexions and something of the smile ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... Mlle. Meunier was considerably Ferrer's senior. Having spent her childhood and girlhood with a miserly father and a submissive mother, she could easily appreciate the necessity of love and joy in child life. She must have seen that Francisco Ferrer was a teacher, not college, machine, or diploma-made, but one endowed with ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... easy. A large coloured sketch was shown to old Mawsie as a portrait of the Le Roi who had been married in the old chapel in her girlhood. It was that of his grandson, who shortly after visited the manse ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... she was no hospital matron, but a young and singularly graceful and accomplished gentlewoman of wealth and position, who had, not in a moment of national enthusiasm, but as the set purpose of her life from girlhood up, devoted herself to the studying of God's great and good laws of health, and to trying to apply them to the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... down at her young, questioning face. It was grave, although she spoke gaily, and looked so mere a slip of girlhood with her brown throat and cheek and lifted ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... her with twinkling eyes. They were great pals, these two; had been since they met in Portland, five years ago. He was on his way to Stanford, and had seen her doing a singing and dancing act in a wretched vaudeville company. That vision of a girlhood, beset and embattled, the pitifulness of its acquired hardness, had called to his western chivalry and made him her champion. Ever since he had helped and encouraged, his belief and friendship a spur to the ruthless energy, the driving ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... demanded. "Didn't you come to me squealing for help? Joe, take a back seat and let me try my hand without any advice from you. The girl's name is Doris Kenyon and she's an orphan. Her father used to be the general manager of my redwood mill on Humboldt Bay, and her mother was a girlhood friend of my late wife's; so naturally I've established a sort of protectorate over her. She has to work for a living, and any time there's a potentially fine, two-million-dollar husband like Joey lying round loose I like to see some deserving working ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... attention to the curvature of the spine developed by the exclusively sit-at-a-desk-and-study-a-book type of education bequeathed to the girlhood of the nation by the medieval monastery: It ignores the chorea, otherwise known as St. Vitus' dance developed by overstudy and underexercise; it disregards the malnutrition of hasty breakfasts, and lunches of pickles, ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... call her, but she had passed the days of her girlhood. Few knew it; it was wonderful how young and fresh her heart had kept. That being the case, of course her face had taken the same impress. It was hard for Ruth Erskine to realize that her friend Marion was really thirteen ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... During the girlhood of the Princess (afterwards Queen) Mary, entertainments were given for her amusement, especially at Christmastide; and she gave presents to the King's players, the children of the Chapel, and others. ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... answered Berthe Louison. "God has blasted your life in denying you the love of your own child. You rule her by fear. You, in your selfish passion, once reached out your strong hand and crushed this girl's mother, a poor, fragile flower, in her girlhood. Valerie believed Pierre to be dead or false when she timidly crossed the threshold of the wedded home which you made a prison for her! You only care for this bubble Baronetcy and for your heaped-up hoards. The tribute of the shrieking ryot! Now, here are my terms: I will go down with you to Calcutta, ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... the most beautiful and characteristic, as well as earliest, examples of this subject I have seen, is a picture in the Esterhazy Gallery at Vienna. The Virgin is in the first bloom of girlhood; she looks not more than nine or ten years old, with dark hair, Spanish features, and a charming expression of childlike simplicity and devotion. She stands amid clouds, with her hands joined, and the proper white and blue drapery: there are no accessories. This ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... darkness there an irresistible grief assailed him. He wept as never before in all his life. And he tasted the bitter salt of his own tears. He wept for his mother, aged and bowed by trouble, bewildered, ready to give up the struggle—his little sister now forced into erotic girlhood, blind, wilful, bold, on the wrong path, doomed beyond his power or any earthly power—the men he had met, warped by the war, materialistic, lost in the maze of self-preservation and self-aggrandizement, dead to chivalry and the honor of women—Mel Iden, strangest and saddest ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... as she regarded some of the grizzled women in the room, mere mechanical contrivances sewing seams and grinding out, with heads bended over their work, tales of imagined or real girlhood happiness, past drunks, the baby at home, and unpaid wages. She speculated how long her youth would endure. She began to see the bloom upon ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane
... evidently a late comer, and whose presence appeared to fill the apartment. All the others paled before her, as do the stars when the moon rises among them. She was evidently young, and yet she did not suggest youth. One would almost imagine that she had never had a childhood or a girlhood, but was rather a direct creation of metropolitan society. Her exquisitely turned shoulders and arms were bare, and the diamonds about her neck were a circlet of fire. The complexion of her fair oval face was singularly pure, and the color came and went so easily as to prove that it owed nothing ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... rarely found among our fictionists. Having said this, we must hedge in favor of Miss Jordan's most autochthonic Miss Kittie, so young a girl as to be still almost a little girl, and with a head full of the ideals of little-girlhood concerning young-girlhood. The pendant to her pretty picture is the study of elderly girlhood by Octave Thanet, or that by Miss Alice Brown, the one with its ideality, and the other with its humor. The pathos of "The Perfect Year" is as true as either in its truth to the girlhood which ...
— Different Girls • Various
... she had experienced all the freedom and happiness of girlhood; her heart had beat with a power, a fire condemned by the princess herself, but which she ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... These stirring and terrible scenes had imprinted themselves for ever upon her mind. When she began to go back over these recollections, indissolubly bound up with the days of her girlhood, when she remembered how enthusiasm and wild delight alternated with scenes of terror, her whole life seemed to rise up before her I learnt from her to be so proud of the Revolution that I have liked it since, in spite of my reason and of all ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... there never had entered into his heart a feeling or idea of real affection until he met LAURA. He fell for a moment under the spell of her fascination, and then, with cold logic, he analyzed her, and found out that, while outwardly she had every sign of girlhood,—ingenuousness, sweetness of character and possibility of affection,—spiritually and mentally she was nothing more than a moral wreck. He observed keenly her efforts to win him and her disappointment at her failure—not that ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter
... great towns that may not be dwarfed by the great pulsing of the lands sought by the lovers of rod and gun. Here she had gathered new ideas and unwonted thoughts. She is the best example I have ever seen of the sturdy, beautiful girlhood of modern life, and is an utter pleasure ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... deeds and sacrifices, especially those which show that the greatest man is not the greatest orator, or the tricky politician. They are a curse; what we need is noble men. National loss comes as the penalty for frivolous boyhood and girlhood, that gains no moral stamina ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... natives who offered for sale fruit, Irish laces, and canes made of black bog oak, with the shamrock carved on the handles. Mrs. Harris was much pleased to renew her acquaintance with the scenes of her girlhood, having sailed from Queenstown for Boston when she was ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... spell. We studied what we called Mental Philosophy, to my unmitigated delight; and Butler's Analogy, which I considered a luxury; and Shakespeare, whom I distantly but never intimately adored; Latin, to which dead language we gave seven years apiece, out of our live girlhood; Picciola and Undine we dreamed over, in the grove and the orchard; English literature is associated with the summer-house and the grape arbor, with flecks of shade and glints of light, and a sense of unmistakable ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... down. Thanks." She produced a cigarette and lit it. "Granny's got a lot of ancient photographs of her girlhood friends," she remarked with her insolent eyes on Madame Zattiany, "and one of them's enough like you to be you masquerading in the get-up of the eighties. Comes back to me. Just before mother left I heard her discussing ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... back to the first years of her girlhood. She was only eighteen when she first met him. He was the first man who had kissed her, and she had lain awake thinking of something which his sister Edith had told her. Edith knew that she did not love a man to whom she was engaged, because when he kissed her his kiss did not thrill her. ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... In girlhood, hide nothing from your mother; do nothing that, if discovered by your mother, would make you blush. When you are married, never conceal anything from your husband. Never allow yourself to write a letter that he may not know all about, or to receive one ...
— The King's Daughter and Other Stories for Girls • Various
... atmosphere, is rarely carried forward into womanhood. The lips grow pinched and bloodless; the skin blanched against all proof of blushes; the eyes sunken, and the blithe sparkle that was so full of infectious joy is lost forever in that exhausting blaze of girlhood. But we make no prophecy in regard to the future of our little friend Rose. Adele thinks her very charming; Reuben is disposed to rank her—whatever Phil may think or say—far above Suke Boody. And in his reading ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... still, however good she may be as a witness, Joanna is better; and she, when speaking to the Dauphin, calls herself in the Latin report Bergereta. Even Haumette confesses that Joanna tended sheep in her girlhood. And I believe, that, if Miss Haumette were taking coffee alone with me this very evening (February 12, 1847)—in which there would be no subject for scandal or for maiden blushes, because I am an intense philosopher, and Miss H. would be hard ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... crying. He did not know what more to say, so he just sat by. In that half hour of self-accusation, of reaction from terror, of the consciousness of the sympathy of a friend who had saved her from the police, Isabelle closed the chapter of childhood and stepped over into young girlhood. ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... rapidly, feeling almost stifled by the pressure of contending emotions. Recollecting that these spice censers of Autumn were her mother's favorite flowers, she stooped and broke several lovely clusters of orange and garnet color, hoping that a lingering breath of perfume from the home of her girlhood, might afford at least a melancholy pleasure to ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... objected to this grown up fashion. At camp Dorothy insisted that two long plaits were always in one's way. Her eyes were a clear blue with a slight hint of gray, her skin healthy and freshly colored. A fine, frank line formed her lips. Altogether she was the type of American girlhood who represents many of our ...
— The Girl Scouts in Beechwood Forest • Margaret Vandercook
... I had had no fear then that she would ever grow corpulent and florid, and now I found myself asking if my boyish intuition might not have been right, and she fulfilled entirely the promise of her girlhood, defying the insidious generosity of time and the vulgar influence of Rufus Blight. Should I ever know? Should ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... it all. She had been born beside that sea. Etna had looked down upon her as she sucked and cried, toddled and played, grew to a lusty girlhood, and on into young womanhood with its gayety and unreason, its work and hopes and dreams. That Oriental song—she had sung it often on the mountain-sides, as she set her bare, brown feet on the warm stones, and ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... her girlhood met noo ceaere To peaele the bloom her feaece did weaer, An' how her glossy temple prest Her pillow down, in still-feaeced rest, While sheaedes o' window bars did vall In moonlight on the gloomy wall, In cool-air'd ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... childhood her soul had been ravaged by a terrible grief, which had never been overcome; the law had killed her brother; in her girlhood, she had been tortured by only too frequent repetitions of the sight of her father, whom the law had loaded with chains and punished with severe imprisonment; her sorely wounded heart had found consolation only in a single thought which, amid her sufferings and afflictions, ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... he who had been the fairest and sturdiest of the county of Moira's girlhood, would never work again—as superintendent or even foreman; the rest of his days must be spent in the wheeled chair sent up by the sympathetic Miss Lewis of the Neighborhood Settlement House. It was fixed with a contrivance so that he could move ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... restful peace of happy, innocent girlhood, God called her to her divine work of helpin' to redeem ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... and pencil seem to justify this assertion, so far as the precocity of such a mere child may warrant the ungarnered fruits of future years. But with her parent's person she received the frailties of its constitution; and, ere girlhood had fairly opened upon her way of life, she succumbed to the same malady ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... knowledge that she had sacrificed herself for his advantage. All had been taken out of her hands! Yet with characteristic fatalism she did not feel rebellious. If it were ordained that she should, for fifty, perhaps sixty years, repent in sterility and ashes that first error of her girlhood, rebellion was, none the less, too far-fetched. If she rebelled, it would not be in spirit, but in action. General principles were nothing to her; she lost no force brooding over the justice or injustice of her situation, but merely tried to digest ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... entertainment, nor did he repulse her. Moments there were undeniably when he had a great tenderness toward her; moments when she lay in his embrace as some pure gift from this haven of darkness and of evil, a fragile helpless figure of a girlhood he idolized. Then, perchance, he loved her as Lois Boriskoff hungered for love, with the supreme devotion, the ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... heart, as she watched the automobile with her brother and his friend glide away up the green arched street. After all, Mary was young and loved the country, and John Ward's roadster was a wonderful machine, and the boy who had lived in the old house next door had been, in her girlhood days, a ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... womanhood she was a constant source of anxiety to her father. To him it seemed that she had passed from an awkward and rather jolly girlhood into a peculiarly determined new kind of womanhood over night. Her adventurous spirit worried him. One day he had sat in his office reading a letter announcing her homecoming. The letter seemed no more than a characteristic outburst from an impulsive girl ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... bulwark, listening to the falling rain and the swish of the dark tide, and thinking of home. How far it seemed, and how impassable the gulf now between the "castle" with its refined ways, between her in her dainty girlhood and me sitting there, numbed with the cold that was slowly stealing away my senses with my courage. There was warmth and cheer where she was. Here—— An overpowering sense of desolation came upon me. I hitched a little nearer the edge. What if——? Would they ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... the love in all their watching faces, Martie never forgot. Like a great river of warmth and sunshine it lifted her free of her dry, thirsty girlhood; she felt the tears of joy pressing against her eyes. There was nothing critical, nothing calculating, nothing repressing here; her lover wanted her, just as she stood, penniless, homeless, without a dress except the blue ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... of Marion's mind in the matter was an equally irrational affair. Her training had been one, not simply of silences, but suppressions. An enormous force of suggestion had so shaped her that the intense natural fastidiousness of girlhood had developed into an absolute perversion of instinct. For all that is cardinal in this essential business of life she had one inseparable epithet—"horrid." Without any such training she would have been a shy lover, but now she was an impossible one. For the rest she had ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... afterwards proprietor of a newspaper published in Philadelphia, entitled the Gazette of the United States. Between this young lady and Verplanck there grew up an attachment, and in 1811 they were married. I have seen an exquisite miniature of her by Malbone, taken in her early girlhood when about fifteen years old—beautiful as an angel, with light chestnut hair and a soft blue eye, in the look of which is a touch of sadness, as if caused by some dim presentiment of her early death. I remember hearing Miss Sedgwick say that she should always think the better of Verplanck for having ...
— A Discourse on the Life, Character and Writings of Gulian Crommelin - Verplanck • William Cullen Bryant
... the seminary in New Haven, and as they were now considered sufficiently accomplished to enter at once upon all the gayeties of fashionable life, John Jr. had come on "to see the elephant," as he said, and to accompany them home. Carrie had fulfilled the promise of her girlhood, and even her brother acknowledged that she was handsome in spite of her nose, which like everybody's else, still continued to be the most prominent feature of her face. She was proud, too, as well as beautiful, and throughout the city she was known as the "haughty southern belle," admired ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... Ruth said, "brought up by a stern and Puritanical old aunt in New England. I had no joy or pleasures in my childhood or girlhood days. I ran away from home to become an actress. Tibbetts, my old nurse, who lived in the same village, followed me to keep an eye on me and protect me in need. I was a chorus girl for just one week when Randolph Schuyler discovered me ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... changed but that his hungry and unhappy eyes could rest on her, appeased and comforted. And yet she was changed, too. Her girlhood, with all its innocence of suffering, had died in her. But the touch of that death was masterly, it had redeemed her beauty from the vagueness of its youth. Grief, that drags or sharpens or deforms the faces of older women, ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... forbidding cloud of sadness which veiled her face a few days before. But how lovely! Time had given fulness and perfection to her beauty, while the effect of the trials she had undergone was seen only in the look of womanly dignity and self-control she had acquired. It was the freshness of girlhood joined to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... Lizzie Dangler's prosy platitudes, which some deemed wit—Horner, par exemple—sank into nothingness, and Baby Blake, one of the "gushing" order of girlhood, appeared as a stick, or, rather, a too pliant sapling—her inane "yes's" and lisping "no's" having an opportunity of being "weighed in the balance," and consequently, in my opinion, "found wanting." All were mediocre ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... faint touches of white among the crisp little curls over her temples; you saw that the keenest wind of Fall brought the red to her cheeks only in two bright spots, and that no soft Spring air would ever bring her back the rosy, pink flush of girlhood: you saw these things as others saw them—no, indeed, you did not; you saw them as others could not, and they only made her the more dear to you. And you were having one of the best and most valuable experiences of your boyhood, to which you may look back ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... in this obstructive fashion and wishing that I could write about my childhood like Tolstoi, about my girlhood like Marie Bashkirtseff, and about the rest of my days and my work like many other artists of the pen, who merely, by putting black upon white, have had the power to bring before their readers not merely themselves "as they lived," but the most homely and intimate details ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... the major part of the talking, answering questions about Mrs. Engle's girlhood home, telling something of herself. Now John Engle, reminding his wife that their guest must be consumed with curiosity about her new environment, sought to interest her in this and that, in and ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... trivial and unmeaning compared to the exhilarating present. She was living now, feeling the force of a rising growth, her horizon widening to suit that which her eyes sought, the dependence of her sheltered girlhood gone from her as the great adventure called upon untouched energies and untried forces. It was like looking back on another girl, or like a woman looking back ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... Ah, reluctant maid, Love's drapeau rouge the truth has told! O'er girlhood's yielding barricade Floats the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... conducted Jurgen, through the changeless twilight of Barathum, like that of a gray winter afternoon, to a quiet cleft by the Sea of Blood, which she had fitted out very cosily in imitation of her girlhood home; and she lighted a candle, and made him welcome to her cleft. And when Jurgen was about to enter it he saw that his shadow was following him into ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... all the warm materialism of this life, she had communed with a vision, and had been the better for such intercourse. Faithful to the husband of her maturity, and loving him with a far more real affection than she ever could have felt for this dream of her girlhood, there had still been an imaginative faith to the ocean-buried, so that an ordinary character had thus been elevated and refined. Her sighs had been the breath of Heaven to her soul. The good lady earnestly desired that the proposed monument should be ornamented with a carved border of marine ...
— Chippings With A Chisel (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... cruelty to refuse the appeal of a sweet girl who had been wronged, and who was passing from earth and would soon be put to rest in a grave within easy reach of the springy links and glossy sands where so many days of her joyous girlhood had been spent in innocent and jovial scenes! A last appeal was made to the hard old squire, who, to do him justice, believed he was an instrument in the hands of divine Providence to enforce the cultivation and carrying out of high ideals. Human fallibility was not sanctioned ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... in the country, at a little church set down in a beautiful grove which reminds all visitors of the saying about God's first temples. Near here Mrs. Paynter was born and spent her girlhood; here Fifi, before her last illness, had come every Sabbath morning to the Sunday-school; here lay the little strip of God's acre that the now childless widow called her own. You come by the new electric line, one of those high-speed suburban roads which, all over the country, are doing so ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... counted the gains they had made, it seemed as if she had been in some fairy palace, and by charms the old wrongs had dropped away and new good had sprung up. They had fought for woman's rights, and had taken hold of the hands of little girls growing out of girlhood into womanhood—girls who must stand on their own feet and earn a living for themselves. When there was no father's hand or brother's arm to help, what could woman do? She looked out into the great thoroughfares ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... void, and forgot her own clamorous personality and "the something that infects the world;" and doing this, though she did not voice her anxiety, it passed from her heart into the Infinite Heart, and thus she was calmed and comforted. Then, suddenly, the prayer of her childhood and her girlhood came to her lips, and she stood up, and clasping her hands, she cast her eyes towards ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... you used to stand between me and childish punishments, through all the happy days of girlhood, the sorrowful days of womanhood, on up to the bitter-sweet present, ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... is very seldom spoken? Others may not be thinking so much of your loss—your supposed loss," the old gentleman conscientiously supplied—"as your sensitiveness leads you to imagine. But you will give occasion for thinking and for talking if you tear open now your girlhood's secrets. Whom does it concern, my dear, to know where or how your ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... breakfast together, and then Florence went to pack her grips and things. Old Hurlbird took the opportunity to read me a full-blooded lecture, in the style of an American oration, as to the perils for young American girlhood lurking in the European jungle. He said that Paris was full of snakes in the grass, of which he had had bitter experience. He concluded, as they always do, poor, dear old things, with the aspiration that all American women should one ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... first great crisis in her life—her going away to school—this world into which she was born had been to Kitty an all-sufficient world. The days of her childhood had been as carefree and joyous, almost, as the days of the young things of her father's roaming herds. As her girlhood years advanced, under her mother's wise companionship and careful teaching, she had grown into her share of the household duties and into a knowledge of woman's part in the life to which she belonged, as naturally as her girlish form had put on the graces of young ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... he replied, as he sat down beside her. Dreamily she leant her head on his shoulder, and the fragrance of her fresh, sweet girlhood ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... little girl to the dark thin one. Hitherto Anne had been his ideal of gentle girlhood, but in Judy he now found a kindred spirit, a girl with a daring that more than matched his own—a girl who loved the sea—who knew about the sea—who could ...
— Judy • Temple Bailey
... consumption is "advanced"—involves nothing other than adequate recognition of the importance of woman in the most important of all matters. It is true that my primary concern has been to furnish, for the individual woman and for those in charge of girlhood, a guide of life based upon the known physiology of sex. But it is a poor guide of life which considers only the transient individual, and poorest of all ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... to the face whose beauty is the harmony between that which speaks from within and the form through which it speaks, power is added by all that causes the outer man to bear more deeply the impress of the inner. The pretty woman fades with the roses on her cheeks, and the girlhood that lasts an hour; the beautiful woman finds her fullness of bloom only when a past has written itself on her, and her power is then most irresistible when it ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... picture after picture comes up from my own past girlhood, and my heart stands still as I remember how ferocious a thirst for fun and ignorance can be in a child. How many sleepy-looking toads I have seen, with their backs all jewels, and their throats yellow gold, that asked nothing but a burdock leaf ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... had no time to think. Sometimes in the midst of her social activities, she stopped to ask herself if she was really happy, if this nerve-racking existence of idleness and pleasure—with its bridge parties, its dinners, its opera and theatre-going—was the kind of life she had dreamed of in her girlhood days. Sometimes she felt a longing, a yearning for a more useful existence, ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... the joyous hopes of youth! The faith that knew no flaw of doubt! The spotless innocence and truth That clothed my maiden soul about! Bring back the grace of girlhood gone, The rapturous zest of other days! The dew and freshness of the dawn, That lay on life's untrodden ways— The glory that will shine no more For me on earthly sea ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... she never romp? Did she never, from girlhood to now, hoyden? The innocent kinds of freedom taken and allowed on these occasions, would have familiarized her to greater. Sacrilege but to touch the hem of her garment!—Excess of delicacy!—O the consecrated beauty! How can she think to be ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... principal entertainments at Mrs. Vesey's, who collects all the graduates and candidates for fame, where they vie with one another, till they are as unintelligible as the good folks at Babel.' 'Lady Spencer,' said Samuel Rogers, 'recollected Johnson well, as she used to see him often in her girlhood. Her mother, Lady Lucan, would say, "Nobody dines with us to-day; therefore, child, we'll go and get Dr. Johnson." So they would drive to Bolt Court and bring the doctor home with them.' Rogers's Table Talk, p. 10. 'I told Lady Lucan,' wrote Johnson on April ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... evidently has a taste for that kind of thing, might have been fascinated by the morbid beauty of the girl in the picture. I could understand how the fascination might become an enduring thing; a great love; how Ascher would still be drawn to the woman long after the elfishness of girlhood passed away. The soul would still remain gleaming out ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... exceptionally rich in stories adapted to the juvenile mind, among which the most prominent are Mrs. Whitney's "Faith Gartney's Girlhood," Miss Alcott's "Little Women," and Mr. T.B. Aldrich's "Story of a Bad Boy." Edgar Allan Poe's "Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque," are remarkable for intensity and vividness of conception, combined with a circumstantial invention almost equal to that of Defoe. Mrs. Burnett and Mr. J.W. De ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... been extravagant, she told Ruyler plaintively. It had been like a fairy tale, this sudden release from the rigid economies of her girlhood, when she had rarely had a franc in her pocket, and they had lived in a suite of the old family villa on one of the hills of Rouen, Madame Delano paying her brother for their lodging, and dressing herself and Helene with the aid of a half paralyzed ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Thus, from infancy to girlhood, Jeanne had heard continually of the woes of the war, and had herself witnessed some of the wretchedness that it caused. A feeling of intense patriotism grew in her with her growth. The deliverance of France from the English was the subject of her reveries by day and her dreams by ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... and splendour' in the inimitable pages of Tom Jones. There is indeed a mature wisdom and patience in Amelia such as none but a pedant could demand of her enchanting younger sister Sophia. In these later pages Sophia has grown up into a gracious womanhood, while losing none of her girlhood's gaiety and charm. That Amelia, his older and wiser though scarce sadder child, was the nearest, as he himself tells us, to Fielding's own heart, is one more indication that here is the perfected image of that beloved wife, from whose youthful grace and beauty ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... over her old life again and her tears flowed unrestrained. Her pride was humbled, her spirit was broken. Her memory found but one resting place; it lingered about her young girlhood with a caressing regret; it dwelt upon it as the one brief interval of her life that bore no curse. She saw herself again in the budding grace of her twelve years, decked in her dainty pride of ribbons, ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 7. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... and her one son George there was a deep unexpressed bond of sympathy, based on a girlhood dream that had long ago died. In the son's presence she was timid and reserved, but sometimes while he hurried about town intent upon his duties as a reporter, she went into his room and closing the door knelt by ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... Gerda's Journey on the Reindeer. 1. The Lapland woman, a. Cares for Gerda. b. Sends message on a codfish. 2. The Finland woman. a. Cares for Gerda. b. Tells what has happened to Kay. c. Tells what ails Kay and says Kay may be saved by the power of innocent girlhood. VIII. Kay's Rescue. 1. At the Snow Queen's palace. a. Kay cannot write eternity. b. The Snow Queen leaves for Italy. c. Gerda finds Kay. d. Her tears melt his icy heart. e. Her song brings tears that clear his eyes. f. Kay knows Gerda. g. Pieces of ice spell the word ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... bay, the brief thrill and tantalization of the stolen kiss still haunted him. Through his long, shy abstention from society, and his two years of solitary exile, the fresh beauty of this young Western wife, in whom the frank artlessness of girlhood still lingered, appeared to him like a superior creation. He forgot his vague longings in the inception of a more tangible but equally unpractical passion. He remembered her unconscious and spontaneous admiration of him; he dared to connect it with her forgiving ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... that the Puritan woman imbibed from girlhood to old age went further than this; it taught the theory of a personal devil. To the New England colonists Satan was a very real individual capable of taking to himself a physical form with the proverbial ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... cave door near which the others sat enjoying the balmy midsummer afternoon, beckoning to one of her brothers to follow her, as the big fellow did unquestioningly, for Lightfoot had been, almost from young girlhood, the dominant force in the family, even the strong father, though it was contrary to the spirit of the time, admiring and yielding to his one daughter without much comment. The great, hulking youth, well armed and ready for any adventure, joined ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... sitting-room. One day she became a woman! Every one noticed it. Neighbours used to meet her mother in the strasse and say, "Frau Schmidt, your Gretchen is a woman." Frau Schmidt would nod proudly and reply, "Yes, we have seen that; my Peter and I—we are very happy." Thus Gretchen left her girlhood behind her. It was her habit, so Grundelheim tells us, to walk out in the forest with one Hans Breitel, an actor at the municipal theatre. He used to teach her to talk to the birds, and when she besought him ardently to tell her stories of the theatre, he would ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... the flat chest, straight back and forward falling shoulders of the patient and enduring working woman, though her body was now still in its milder girlhood and work had not yet made these ...
— Three Lives - Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena • Gertrude Stein
... life was still not destined to be altogether devoid of an animating purpose. When I first knew Margaret Sherwin, she was just changing from childhood to girlhood. I marked the promise of future beauty in her face and figure; and secretly formed the resolution which you afterwards came forward to thwart, but which I have executed, and will execute, ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... to look at. Her eyes were big, brown, intrepid and bright. Under her flat sailor hat, planted jauntily on one side, her crinkly, tawny hair parted and was drawn back, low and massy, in a thick, pendant knot behind. The roundness of girlhood still lingered in her chin and neck, but her cheeks and fingers were thinning slightly. She looked upon the world with defiance, suspicion, and sullen wonder. Her smart, short tan coat was soiled and expensive. Two inches below her black dress dropped ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... stood silent before her, her face being bathed in tears. The contour of the child-like forehead and of the small and graceful head was very pleasing. Genji, as he surveyed the scene from without, thought within himself, "If she is thus fair in her girlhood, what will she be when she is grown up?" One reason why Genji was so much attracted by her was, that she greatly resembled a certain lady in the Palace, to whom he, for a long time, had been fondly attached. ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... earn a living and by industrial independence develop the best qualities of her nature, and I undertook to teach her self-reliance and to lead her into the new life of social and economic freedom. Had she been thus trained from girlhood this tragedy would have been impossible, and her life would have been full of beauty, for I have never known a sweeter character. In the meantime I loaned—not gave, but loaned her the money to live ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... was enslaving Charles by her opulent charms, the queen of his many mistresses, Frances Stuart was growing to beautiful girlhood, an exile at the French Court, with no dream or care of her future conquest of a king. Her father, a son of Lord Blantyre, had carried his death-dealing sword through many a fight for the first Charles, a distant kinsman of his own; and, when the Stuart sun set in ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... she had lost the sense of happy irresponsibility that goes so far towards making up one of the sweetest essentials of youth. Luckily there is one thing which can never be quite destroyed at secondhand—the romance and illusions that beguile boyhood and girlhood, and the liability to be so beguiled still lived in ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... a woman's life are girlhood and maturity. If girlhood is not sufficiently attractive a girl may go ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... in a class by herself. She never impressed me as a natural story-teller, save when she lived over again that happy girlhood which served to relieve the sadness of her mature life. In parts of Adam Bede and throughout The Mill on the Floss she seems to tell her stories as though she really enjoyed the work. All the scenes of her beautiful girlhood in the pleasant Warwickshire ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... b. Honolulu, Dec. 3. Came to California in young girlhood. Writer of verses to accompany her own artistic photographs. Address: ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... be the little girl. I"—with a pathetic tremble in her voice, "I'm barely twenty yet, and I've never had much of a girlhood." ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... literary coterie and gave little, if any, outward evidence of that immoral and dissolute character with which she had been credited in her earlier days. There can be no doubt that the corrupt influences which surrounded her in her girlhood early destroyed her purity of mind and led her to dissolute practices, but the legend which has grown up about her, filled with fearful stories of poison and murder, has been much exaggerated. A sensual woman she was, but she ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... thought. "You wonder if I really know him? Yes, I do. But, somehow, I cling to those I knew in my girlhood. You don't believe that, but I do." She glanced at ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... undisputed sway. The cause of the fire was unknown, my wife being at her father's house at the time; but on discovering the flames, she picked up the baby and ran to the burning cabin, entered it and rescued the little tin trunk that held her girlhood trinkets and a thousand certificates of questionable land scrip. When the men dashed up, my wife was sitting on the tin trunk, surrounded by the children, all crying piteously, fully unconscious of the fact that she had ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... eye rested, memories of a happy girlhood welled up in her soft and suffering breast. The geraniums in the window she had watered daily. The canary—she had fed it with groundsel. The brass skillets on the mantelshelf—they had been burnished by her hand. The cushion ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... while, lookin' out the window an' up to the of gray mountains; and as I watched her with her lips tremblin, an' her eyes misty, with courage winnin' a battle over pain, I saw the woman lines of her face steal forth an' bury the last traces o' girlhood. After a time she sez softly, "Poor ol' Dick, I wonder how it happened"; but never one tear got by her ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... rose the ruins of a castle, its tower still intact. Marta always referred to the castle as the baron; for in her girlhood she had a way of personifying all inanimate things. If the castle walls were covered with hoar frost, she said that the baron was shivering; if the wind tore around the tower, she said that the baron was groaning over the democratic tendencies of the time. On such a summer afternoon as this, the ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... through her heart, not for a lost love, but for the vanished dreams of girlhood. The chord he had hoped to touch remained mute. In view of the fact that she believed love to be dead between them, this method of stimulating an outworn romance seemed sentimental and insincere. Had ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... the hour, made her look rather small. In reality she was nearly as tall as her mother or the dignified Mrs. Abbott, who rejoiced in every inch of her five feet eight, and retained the free erect carriage of her girlhood. ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... apartment. All the others paled before her, as do the stars when the moon rises among them. She was evidently young, and yet she did not suggest youth. One would almost imagine that she had never had a childhood or a girlhood, but was rather a direct creation of metropolitan society. Her exquisitely turned shoulders and arms were bare, and the diamonds about her neck were a circlet of fire. The complexion of her fair oval ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... seems to be a variant of the end of Chapter 1 and the beginning of Chapter 2. A revised and expanded version of the first part of Mathilda's narrative follows (Chapter 2 and the beginning of Chapter 3), with a break between the account of her girlhood in Scotland and the brief description of her father after his return. Finally there are four pages of a new opening, which was used in Mathilda. This is an extremely rough draft: punctuation is largely confined to the dash, and there are many corrections and alterations. ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... behind all her familiarity, and of a very defiant sort of shyness. Her character in fact is one of which it is easier to feel the beauty than to analyse or describe it. Like all transitional phases, girlhood is full of picturesque inequalities, strange slumbers of one faculty and stranger developements of another; full of startling effects, of contrasts and surprises, of light and shade, that no other phase of life affords. Unconsciously month after month drifts the buttercup ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... the days when queens preferred the snug seclusion of those dainty rooms overlooking the dank inner courtyard to the frigid grandeur of their State chambers. Therein it was that Marie Leczinska was wont to instruct her young daughters in the virtues as she had known them in her girlhood's thread-bare home, not as her residence at the profligate French Court had taught her ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... so touched by our meeting that she abandoned herself to the genial impulse of the moment, and gave Philip a kiss. The outraged claims of propriety instantly seized on her. She blushed as if the long-lost days of her girlhood had been found again, and ran out ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... lover's breast! She who sleeps was first and sweetest — none we have to take her place! Empty is the little cradle — absent is the little face. Other children may be given; but this rose beyond recall, But this garland of your girlhood, will be dearest of them all. None will ever, Araluen, nestle where you used to be, In my heart of hearts, you darling, when the world was new to me; We were young when you were with us, life and love were happy ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... which became her well, and which she carried as though she knew herself to be in very truth a countess. It was a face which bore well such signs of age as those which had come upon it. She seemed to be a woman fitter for womanhood than for girlhood. Her eyes were brighter than of yore, and, as Harry thought, larger; and her high forehead and noble stamp of countenance seemed fitted for the dress and headgear which ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... left alone, she seated herself before her old music stand which had been brought down to welcome her, and proceeded to glance over and arrange the pieces she had learned and loved in her young girlhood. Most of them made her smile, and when she reflected upon how difficult she used to think them, she realized that now that it was over she was glad for the German regime. Helen had accounted herself ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... speaker was Miss Alice Stone Blackwell whose address consisted in a solid array of facts and figures that were absolutely unanswerable. As the daughter of Lucy Stone and editor of the Woman's Journal from girlhood she was fortified beyond all others with information as to the progress of woman suffrage; the connection of the liquor interests with its many defeats; the statistics of the votes that had been taken and all phases of the subject. Mrs. Harriet Stokes Thompson, an educator and ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... of girlhood, she felt sure that something delightful would happen, and built fine castles in the air for her sister, with a small corner for herself, where she could watch Laura bloom into a healthy woman and a great artist. The desire of Jessie's heart was to earn eneugh money to enable ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... opportunities were fine and unusual, but she also knew that in spite of some facility and much good teaching she had no genuine talent and never would fulfill the expectations of her friends. She looked back upon her mother's girlhood with positive envy because it was so full of happy industry and extenuating obstacles, with undisturbed opportunity to believe that her talents were unusual. The girl looked wistfully at her mother, but had not the courage to cry out what was in her heart: "I might believe ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... father's emphasis on 'soundly' declared an approval of the deed, and she was chilled by a sickening abhorrence and dread of the cruel brute in men, such as, awakened by she knew not what, had haunted her for a year of her girlhood. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... which held me prisoner, the idle longings of an exile. But would no strong effort of will, no energy of heart or mind, break the bonds that held me down,—no steady perseverance of purpose win me a way out of darkness into light? No, for I was a woman, an ugly woman, whose girlhood had gone by without affection, and whose womanhood was passing without love,—a woman, poor and dependent on others for daily bread, and yet so bound by conventional duties to those around her that to break from them into independence would be to outrage ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... already reached the stage when womanhood and girlhood meet, but her undeniable beauty was somewhat marred by an air of self-consciousness, which was in truth more than half due to a natural shyness and diffidence in adapting herself to new conditions. Hereward, the Sandhurst cadet, and Gurth, the Eton ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... last alone with his letters and his keepsakes, in the lodgings which he inhabited—and now would inhabit no more. The letters lay still unopened before him on his writing table; he stood looking at the miniatures and photographs, all portraits of his mother, from girlhood onward. ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... broader vision Donna saw that the lives of the few must ever be counted as paltry sacrifices in the advancement of the race. Her father, her mother, Harley P. Hennage, Borax O'Bourke and the long, sad, barren years of her own girlhood had all been sacrifices to this man's insatiable greed and lust for power, and now that the finish was reached she realized the truth of Bob McGraw's philosophy—that out of all great ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... girlhood the atmosphere grows thicker. She finally faces the most perilous and beautiful of experiences with little more than the ideas which have come to her from the confidences of evil-minded servants, inquisitive and imaginative playmates, or the gossip she ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... face. Very faintly, as in a dream, I have seen an angel visitant. My mother, why did you leave your hapless babe? Oh! why? my mother! I was left much to myself, and followed unrestrained my own inclinations. You know my fondness for books; that fondness was imbibed in girlhood, as I wandered in my own sunny home—my lost home. My father taught me to conceal my emotions—to keep down the rising sob, to force back the glittering tear; and when I smiled over some childish grief, applauded my stoicism. I became unnatural, ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... as Roderick St. Jean—he dropped the 'de Roche' in time—that he returned here in 1830. His wife was dead, worn out while yet in her youth by the horrors of her girlhood. But Roderick brought with him a ten-year-old boy who had the right to both the name of Ralestone and that ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... figure in the darkness of the hall, and her hair glimmered, also, almost as if it possessed a light and a life of its own. Ronicky Doone saw that she was a very pretty girl, indeed. Yes, it must be Caroline Smith. The very perfume of young girlhood breathed from her, and very sharply and suddenly he wondered why he should be here to fight the battle of Bill Gregg in this matter—Bill Gregg who slept peacefully and stupidly in ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... his tongue would not be tied, and where his intelligence would be of more avail to him. He left me, still hoping the day would come when I could be bought. With me the lamp of hope had gone out. The dream of my girlhood was over. ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... place, she went to live at Villa Ponente, Taunton, where she had a settled home with a garden, and was able to revert to the practical cultivation of flowers, which had been one of the favorite pursuits of her girlhood. ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... sat the "missis," motionless and mute. She was slender, scarcely past girlhood, with the most exquisite little face I have ever had the pleasure of beholding; and her eyes, had they been agreeable in expression, would have been irresistible. But the only sentiment they evinced hovered between scorn ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... sure you know it is not. Mrs. Macdougal has dreamed so much rubbish, and read so much more, that all this humbug has become part of her nature, and one has to be a bit of a humbug one's self and humour her out of kindness In her girlhood there was no escape from the loneliness and stupidity of the Bush but ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... "It was from her mother that she received her teaching. I know she was not happy with her husband, who was as gloomy and fanatical as is my grandfather, and she ever looked back to the happy days of her girlhood in England. I think she did for my mother just what my mother has done for me, only the difference is that she never had sufficient influence with her husband to enable her to carry out her views for her ...
— Orange and Green - A Tale of the Boyne and Limerick • G. A. Henty
... own rooms, opening the round attic window to admit the fresh air, and pushing the table into a corner if it came in her way. The garret's bareness, its whitewashed walls and rickety furniture, realized to her mind an existence whose simplicity she had sometimes dreamt of in her girlhood. But what especially charmed her was the kindly emotion she experienced there. Playing the part of sick nurse, hearing the constant bewailing of the old woman, all she saw and felt within the four walls left her quivering with deep pity. In the end she awaited with evident impatience Doctor ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... times, for the rest which is not in camps or armies; and it is certain, that she ever combined with any plans or day-dreams of tranquillity, as their most essential ally, some aid derived from that dovelike religion which, at St. Sebastian's, as an infant and through girlhood, she had been taught so profoundly ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
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