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More "Middle-aged" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of November, 1509, Ojeda set sail, leaving Encisco to bring after him another ship with needed supplies. With Ojeda was Francisco Pizarro, a middle-aged soldier of fortune, who had not hitherto distinguished himself in any way. Hernando Cortez was to have gone along also, but fortunately for him, an inflammation of the knee kept him at home. Ojeda was in such a hurry to ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... told her the truth. It was not right that a young and attractive woman should wander about in the East, unattended save by a middle-aged companion. It would provoke the devil in men who were not wholly bad. Women had the fallible idea that they could read human nature, and never found out their mistake until after they were married. He knew her kind. If she wanted to walk through the bazaars in the evening, she ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... horse-dealers and basket-makers, as one could see from the drove of lean horses and heap of wicker-work near the waggon. Several children were playing about among the huts. Some women were at their basket-making by the waggon. A middle-aged man, smoking a pipe, stood by the hedge, mending what looked like an enormous butterfly net. In spite of my adventure on the road, I was not at all frightened by these gipsies, because I liked their looks, and ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... portico, and a French window gave access to the roof of this portico from a bedroom or dressing-room. As Hewitt and his companion approached the house the French window was pushed open, and a man appeared—a middle-aged, slightly stoutish man with a short, grey beard; commonplace enough in himself, but now convulsed with noisy anger, shaking his fists ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... the cab, and they passed through into the broad, vaulted passage which connected the street with the courtyard of the hotel. By the dim light afforded by an old-fashioned hanging lamp Nancy Dampier saw that three people had answered the bell; they were a middle-aged man (evidently mine host), his stout better half, and a youth who rubbed his eyes as if sleepy, and who stared at the newcomers with a dull, ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... in through the window panes upon the heads and shoulders of the venerable patriarchs of the hamlet, and upon the middle-aged, and upon the young; upon men and women who had played out, or were to play, tragedies or tragi-comedies in that nook of civilization not less great, essentially, than those which, enacted on more central arenas, fix the attention of the world. One of the party was a cousin of Nicholas ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... Marne valley the fields were being harvested for the first time since those fatal days in September. Among the harvesters were a number of middle-aged men with the soldiers' kepi, who had been given leave to make the crop, which was unusually abundant. The fields of old Champagne, watered with the best blood of France, had yielded their richest returns. Outside the charred and crumbled ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... itself as we crossed the threshold into a man's voice. The speaker was out of sight, in an upper room to which a ladder gave access, but his oaths, complaints, and imprecations almost shook the house. A middle-aged woman, scantily dressed, was busy on the hearth; but perhaps that which, next to the perpetual scolding that was going on above, most took my attention was a great lump of salt that stood on the table at the woman's ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... them rising, Sophronia contributing soft thuds of a good-sized middle-aged body and Lizzie with a light scramble suited to ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... York debutante recently ordered "four seats on the aisle" at the theater. When her party arrived at the performance, they were surprised to find themselves arranged in a column instead of a row. Nothing daunted, the debutante turned to a bored, middle-aged man next to her. Surely he would not mind changing with her ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... later and Hugh, clad in fresh garments of sweet linen, bathed and shaved, sat at table in a great, cool room with Sir Geoffrey and his lady, a middle-aged and anxious-faced woman, while Grey Dick ate at a lower board with certain ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... them—and there was in his face the whimsical and appealing naughtiness of a child. Suddenly Gabriella felt that as far as character and experience counted, she was immeasurably older than George. Her superior common sense made her feel almost middle-aged when he was in one of his boyish moods. At the age of nine she had not been so utterly irresponsible as George was at twenty-six; as an infant in arms she had probably regarded the universe with a profounder philosophy. Though of course George was charming, ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... things, Old, middle-aged, and new; Is the new better than the old, More bright, more ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... can get within two miles of the place without any difficulty whatever—he says anybody can do it. The only difficulties are on the last two miles. But up to the last two miles, it's a holiday journey for a middle-aged woman.' ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... humiliating expedient had to be adopted. Hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money were squandered in advertisement and appeal, and a chaos of indiscriminate enlistment was inaugurated. Again, with what results? With these results: First, that myriads of middle-aged men with families have been taken while unmarried slackers have been left; secondly, that invaluable war-workers have been drawn from necessary tasks while useless wastrels have remained at large; thirdly, that the rate of recruiting has been spasmodic and wholly ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... noise from the stairs in the hall.) Whisht! It's the doctor comin' down from Eileen. What'll he say, I wonder? (The door in the rear is opened and Doctor Gaynor enters. He is a stout, bald, middle-aged man, forceful of speech, who in the case of patients of the Carmodys' class dictates rather than advises. Carmody adopts a whining tone.) Aw, Doctor, and how's Eileen now? Have you got her ...
— The Straw • Eugene O'Neill
... the notary-general, who had acted as one of the chief mourners, took a seat. He was a short, thin, middle-aged man, with a pale complexion, twinkling gray eyes, and a sharp expression of countenance. Before him lay a sealed packet, on which the eyes of Nisida darted, at short intervals, looks, the burning impatience ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... middle-aged man, stout and florid, rough as a chunk of wood, but dressed in his best brown for the fair. Tears were rolling down his vast round cheeks as he expatiated on his grievances ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... residuary legatee. He felt sure that there was an understanding between them that either after the war, or after Mrs. Guthrie's death—he could not of course tell which—they intended to make one of those middle-aged marriages which often, strange to say, turn out more happily than earlier marriages are sometimes apt ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... for St. Joseph, in Missouri, going by way of St. Louis. Mr. Donald Ferguson, a middle-aged Scotchman, is my companion. A younger and livelier companion might prove more agreeable, but perhaps not so safe. Mr. Ferguson is old enough to be my father, and I shall be guided by his judgment where my own is at fault. He is very frugal, as I believe his countrymen ...
— The Young Adventurer - or Tom's Trip Across the Plains • Horatio Alger
... mother and me to the ground. We entered a large room with a huge cooking-stove at one end, and a long table down the middle, flanked by benches. A middle-aged woman, with three strapping girls, her daughters, advanced to meet us, and conducted my mother and me up to the stove, that we might warm ourselves; for as it was early in the year, the evening had set in cold. Our hostess talked away at a rapid rate, giving us all the news ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... of the stalls were principally occupied by middle-aged and rather elderly gentlemen. Many had grey moustaches and a military bearing. Others were inclined to be stout, with brilliant exuberant manners and very dark hair that simply wouldn't lie flat. There were a great many parties made up like those of our friends—of ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... on the counter negligently collecting scattered toothpicks, and conversing laughingly with a carefully dressed middle-aged man with a handsome face and curly brown hair. His hair and Lucy's fluffy topknot were almost touching. Hiram saw him grasp playfully at Lucy's hand, saw her jerk it ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... Melville with a striking chapter. Discussing the matter in my presence once, the captain of a frigate said, "There is one reply to objectors; if they do not wish to conform, they can leave the service." Clearly, however, a middle-aged man cannot throw up ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... a castle. I don't care what Mr. Jerry said," she told Aunt Kate as they went up the steps and into the principal's office where a pleasant-faced middle-aged lady looked questioningly at Mary Rose and ...
— Mary Rose of Mifflin • Frances R. Sterrett
... and considered the face upturned toward his own innocent, benevolent, middle-aged, worn, too, with hopes and disappointments, yet unscarred by such bitter knowledge as men ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... without some excuse for this unpardonable sentiment. For there was another English family in Passy—the Prendergasts, an older family than ours—that is, the parents (and uncles and aunts) were middle-aged, the grandmother dead, and the children grown up. We had not the honor of their acquaintance. But whether that was their misfortune and our fault (or vice versa) I cannot tell. ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... recognizing the finality of the tone, sighed and yielded. Already Bishop was moving down the line. For Mr. Blood, as for a weedy youth on his left, the Colonel had no more than a glance of contempt. But the next man, a middle-aged Colossus named Wolverstone, who had lost an eye at Sedgemoor, drew his regard, and the ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... her clattered up and its sole occupant, a middle-aged American, asked her in Spanish if she would like to ride. She hesitated, instinctively fearing speech with any one, and glanced shyly at the Americano, who was smiling down good-naturedly at her from the wagon. The ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... at hearing her tongue spoken so well, and looking up recognized a middle-aged Indian, that had frequently visited her house during her father's life. ...
— The Ranger - or The Fugitives of the Border • Edward S. Ellis
... his garments when he passed them by, and as they stooped they were bowled over by the uniformed burlies and some of them were trampled. Disregarding the buffeting blows of the policemen's gloved fists, men, old, young and middle-aged, flung themselves against the escorts, crying out greetings. Above the hysterical yelling rose shrill cries of pain, curses, shrieks. Guttural sounds of cheering in snatchy fragments were mingled with terms of approval and of endearment and of affection uttered in English, in German, in ...
— The Thunders of Silence • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... hall, followed by BERTA, who carries a bouquet wrapped in paper. MISS TESMAN is a comely and pleasant- looking lady of about sixty-five. She is nicely but simply dressed in a grey walking-costume. BERTA is a middle-aged woman of plain ...
— Hedda Gabler - Play In Four Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... smile that in its gentleness contrasted with the sharpness of the pull, that it might be brought at once, she paused near the table to lean over and smell her sheaf of roses, and to read again, listlessly, Miss Harriet Robinson's words of affectionate greeting. Miss Robinson was a middle-aged American lady who lived in Paris, and had long urged Althea to settle there near her. Ten years ago, when she had first met Miss Robinson in Boston, Althea had thought her a brilliant and significant figure; but she had ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... the matter, and Flora, not without some difficulty, got rid of the promising candidate for matrimony and emigration. Her place was instantly supplied by a tall, hard-featured, middle-aged woman, who had been impatiently waiting for Miss Pack's dismissal, in the kitchen, and who now rushed upon the scene, followed by three rude children, from six to ten years of age, a girl, and two impudent-looking boys, who ranged themselves in front of Mrs. Lyndsay, with open mouths, and eyes ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... moment could think of nothing further to say. The thing was incomprehensible to her, appalling, yet strangely touching. This twenty-year-old girl, groping her way toward safety, that refuge of the middle-aged, as eagerly as other young things grasp at happiness, at romance!—She recalled phrases spoken by another startled mother to another girl quite as headstrong: "You are only a child! He is twice your ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... a house not far off from here," was the reply; "five of them, it seems, have been the widows of the pasha before last, and they are rather old; six belonged only to Youssouf Pasha, and are middle-aged." ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... other name, had no knowledge of his habitats or of what friends he had among the ranchers and townspeople. His description of the elder man was meager; all he seemed sure of was that Garland had once been a miner, that he wanted to quit "the road," and that he was middle-aged, somewhere around forty-five or it might be even fifty. Hop Sing, the Chinaman, was equally in the dark as to the man who, the papers decided, had been the brains of the combination. The restaurant keeper had merely been ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... up at Dijon—saw himself spare, quick-moving, carefully brushed and dressed, but furrowed, gray about the temples, with a stoop which he corrected by a spasmodic straightening of the shoulders whenever a glass confronted him: a tired middle-aged ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... ache for her, what of hers? And she was so young. His life, at all events, was a free one; but hers tied to Josiah Brown! And this thought drove him to madness. She belonged to Josiah Brown—not to him whom she loved—but to Josiah Brown, plebeian and middle-aged and exacting. He knew now that he ought to have gone away at once, the next day after they had met. His whole course of conduct had been weak and absolutely ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... the services she loved. One man, saved from nameless sins, slow to speech, and clouded in intellect, would spend his money on Testaments, and 'War Crys,' and walk miles to visit gipsy camps to read and pray with these wanderers, and other isolated people. He knew that 'mother,' as this middle-aged man always called ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... startled me; also, it brought me out of a reverie and sharpened my wits, and as I replied to him, I took him in from head to foot. A thick-set middle-aged man, tidily dressed in a blue serge suit of nautical cut, the sort of thing that they sell, ready-made, in sea-ports and naval stations. His clothes went with his dark skin and grizzled hair and beard, and with the gold rings which he wore in his ears. And there was that about him which suggested ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... with perfect resignation to the will of God, seems to have been throughout, since the introduction of Christianity, a characteristic of the Irish people. It is often witnessed in our own days, and manifested, equally by the young, the middle-aged, or the old. The young, closing their eyes to that bright life whose sweetness they have as yet scarcely tasted, never murmur at being deprived of it, though hope is to them so alluring; the middle-aged, called away in the midst of projects yet unaccomplished, ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... a middle-aged man and conducted across the road to a hotel, which had been a roller-skating rink in other days, and was not prepossessing. However, they were ushered into the parlor, which resembled the sitting room of a rather ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... buried in a vault under the floor of the church, not far from the windows of her house. Her sister, Miss Branwell, came up from Penzance to look after the children. You can see this small, middle-aged, early Victorian spinster, exiled for ever from the sunshine of the town she loved, dragging out her sad, fastidious life in a cold and comparatively savage country that she unspeakably disliked. She took possession of the room ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... shoutings and barking dogs. However, the strange object of the strange-looking stranger in coming to the town, interested some of the wild native boys, and they rushed about to tell it, and in less than five minutes a nice neat-looking middle-aged man stood at my elbow and said he had a good horse and trap and for seven-and-sixpence would drive me to the hill, help me there to find what I wanted, and bring me back in time to catch the conveyance. Accordingly in a few minutes we were speeding ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... appeared to him, for the first time, the results of common prudence; and his rude but wise rhyme, when, in the joy of his heart, he told his father he had absolutely received five guineas as one fee from an ancient dame who had three middle-aged daughters (he had not, however, acquainted his father with that fact,) came more forcibly to his memory than it had ever done ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... gentle-faced middle-aged gentleman came along, and began to look around here and there and under tables and everywhere, and I said ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... was turning over a third chop, when the door opened and a stoutish, middle-aged little gentleman, clad in deep black, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... The middle-aged lover may be as impulsive as a boy, and his friends will smile, but not with the contempt they would show to the woman. He is generally very much in earnest, even if his motive be practical rather than romantic. He should be most careful ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... of outdoor games, and is to be especially advised where one has the vitality and endurance which fits him for an exercise of this character. Golf is an example of a milder outdoor pastime that is particularly suited to middle-aged and elderly persons, although young men and women are benefited by it, too. It affords excellent exercise in walking, and the swinging of the golf clubs affords more exercise for the chest, arms and back than is usually supposed. One who is not accustomed to the game will usually find the muscles ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... Mrs. Fairfield was a middle-aged tidy woman, with that alert precision of movement which seems to come from an active orderly mind; and as she now turned her head briskly at the sound of the Parson's footsteps, she showed a countenance prepossessing, though not handsome,—a countenance from which a pleasant ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... practice sign language, though the Cheyenne either are more familiar with it than the Kaiowa or have a greater degree of expertness. The Comanche women, he says, are the peers of any sign-talkers. Colonel Dodge makes the broad assertion that even among the Plains tribes only the old, or at least middle-aged, men use signs properly, and that he has not seen any women or even young men who were at all reliable in signs. He gives this statement to show the difficulty in acquiring sign language; but it ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... on to rain, and we had not got far from the shore before the tide swept us clean out into the Atlantic. We were shortly in a situation sufficiently perilous for the heroic. There we were, three lads, whose united years would not have made up those of a middle-aged man, in a very little boat, in a very high sea, with a strong gale that would have been very favourable for us, if we had wished to steer for New York. As we could not make head at all against the ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... were driven by Trajan's aqueduct. Day and night the wheels made their clapping noise, seeming to clamour for the corn which did not come. At the door of one of the mills, a spot warmed by the noonday sun, sat a middle-aged man, wretchedly garbed, who with a burnt stick was drawing what seemed to be diagrams on the stone beside him. At the sound of a footstep, rare in that place, he hastily smeared out his designs, and looking up showed a visage which ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... like any other sycamore, middle-aged and without any singularities, ought to have had the painful feeling that it served in a measure to deceive the public. In fact, upon the advertisement of the Batifol institution (Cours du lycee Henri IV. Preparation au baccalaureat et aux ecoles de l'Etat), ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... they belonged to the equestrian order. Hence it added considerably to Tom's recovered self-complacency to find a smart two-wheel dog-cart awaiting him, drawn by a remarkably well-shaped and well-groomed black horse. The coachman was to match. Middle-aged, clean-shaven, his Napoleonic face set as a mask, his undress livery of pepper-and-salt mixture soberly immaculate. He touched his hat when our young gentleman appeared and mounted beside him; the horse, meanwhile, shivering a little and showing the red of its nostrils as the train, with strident ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... the secretary, was a lean, bitter man with a long, scraggy neck and nervous, jerky limbs, a man of incorruptible fidelity where the finances of the order were concerned, and with no notion of justice or honesty to anyone beyond. The treasurer, Carter, was a middle-aged man, with an impassive, rather sulky expression, and a yellow parchment skin. He was a capable organizer, and the actual details of nearly every outrage had sprung from his plotting brain. The two Willabys ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... Kaiserin Elizabeth, more than 300 men, who had left Tsing-tau by railroad before Austria decided to join her ally in the Far East as well as in Europe, hurried back in small groups and in civilian clothes to escape detection. Squads of the Landsturm, the last reserve, middle-aged men who had left their families and their business in all parts of China joined the ranks and went to drilling in preparation for the hard fighting expected as soon as the invading fleet passed the outer defenses of ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... he was very short sighted. It rather conveyed the impression that he was poking about with it, and that he hunted for questionable clauses or illegalities in a document, much as a pig might hunt for truffles in a wood. For the rest, he was middle-aged, with hair nearly white, and small grey whiskers. He beamed ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... "Wanted, a middle-aged man to act as companion to an invalid. He must have a knowledge of French and German, and be able to play the violin." That ...
— Duty, and other Irish Comedies • Seumas O'Brien
... common to meet with a condition in which the patient complains of severe burning or aching pain in the region of the foliate papilla, which is situated on the edge of the tongue just in front of the anterior pillar of the fauces. The patient is usually a middle-aged, neurotic woman, and often with a gouty or rheumatic tendency. The pain, for which it is seldom possible to discover any cause, is usually worst at night, and may last for months, or even years. The practical importance of the condition ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... terrible women had not allowed him a day's peace. However, as he passed the Mehudins' stall he was very much surprised to hear the old woman address him in a honeyed tone: "There's just been a gentleman inquiring for you, Monsieur Florent; a middle-aged gentleman. He's gone to wait ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... orchards were in bloom. I had no premonition of danger. The adventure, reduced to its elements of canned food, alcohol lamp, sleeping-bags and toothbrushes, seemed no adventure at all, but a peaceful and pastoral excursion by three middle-aged women into green fields and ...
— More Tish • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... seemed an unnatural and awful thing that women's hands should be busied thus, fashioning means for the maiming and destruction of life—until, in a remote corner, I paused to watch a woman whose dexterous fingers were fitting finished cartridges into clips with wonderful celerity. A middle-aged woman, this, tall and white-haired, who, at my remark, looked up with a bright smile, but ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... one" was a middle-aged English gentlewoman of the usual governess type. Isabelle knew the kind thoroughly. She had initiated whole companies of them into life at The Beeches. Miss Watts, this one was called. She was putting her things into bureau drawers, when ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... are for young men, too. Indeed, it is not the young man, but the old and middle-aged man who has the right to complain. The exactions of modern business are discriminating in favor of the man under forty. There are calls for all kinds of men. But the fiercest demand is for first-class men. You have only to be a first-class man in ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... him—whether they abused him? He answers that several of the rebels, soldiers and others, came to him at one time and another. A couple of them, who were together, spoke roughly and sarcastically, but nothing worse. One middle-aged man, however, who seem'd to be moving around the field, among the dead and wounded, for benevolent purposes, came to him in a way he will never forget; treated our soldier kindly, bound up his wounds, cheer'd him, gave him a couple of biscuits and a drink of whiskey and ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Cicely said, with a calm, middle-aged self-possession. "It is the thing Peter and I like best ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... and showed us his coffee and plantains in full growth, as well as a magnificent Spanish chestnut-tree, coeval with the dragon-tree. Out of one of its almost decayed branches a so-called young tree was growing, but it would have been thought very respectable and middle-aged in any ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... seen personal friends of mine among the Koreans, educated men, middle-aged men, who up to that time had no part in the demonstrations, parts of whose bodies had been beaten to a pulp ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... gadding, more pleasure, more excitement. It's been like a brass-band playing all the time, my life this past ten years. I'm sick of it. It's only some big thing that can take me out of it. I've got to make some great plunge, or in a few years more I'll be a middle-aged peeress with nothing left but a double chin, a tongue for gossip, and a string of pearls. There must be a bouleversement of things as they are, or good-bye to everything except emptiness. Don't you see, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... strolled across the courtyard, paused for a moment to tease the parrot, and sauntered on to his favourite seat in the summer-house. He had barely established himself with a cigarette when who should appear in the gateway but Miss Constance Wilder, of Villa Rosa, and a middle-aged man—at a glance the Signor Papa. Jerymn Hilliard's heart doubled its beat. Why, he asked himself excitedly, why had ...
— Jerry • Jean Webster
... the eighth house set back a little from the road was partially open as the new arrival made his way up the box-bordered path, with beds on either side of it gay with flowers; and before he could knock a neatly dressed middle-aged woman threw it wide and surveyed him from ...
— The Village by the River • H. Louisa Bedford
... that every one else has, all the mechanical business of romance. The Fox is postponed to the third adventure, and there, though he has not quite grown out of his original likeness to the Gille Mairtean, he is evidently constrained. Sir Gawain of the romance, this courteous but rather dull and middle-aged gentleman in armour, is ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... by the sound of that well-known footstep on the walk, and the words of love in that well-known voice which they can never hear on earth again. 'I cannot stay on earth alone,' they cry; 'I shall grow wicked in my wild grief. Let me go to them, since they cannot come back to me.' The middle-aged who have outlived the quick feelings of youth, sigh over the years still before them, years neither dark nor light, neither hard nor easy, the dull, monotonous path lengthening out before them, with neither great joy to lighten ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... unfitness for the subordinate commands which I have mentioned, another classification may be made. In an agricultural community (and the greater part of our population was and is agricultural), a middle-aged farmer who had been thrifty in business and had been a country magistrate or a representative in the legislature, would be the natural leader in his town or county, and if his patriotism prompted him to set the example of enlisting, he would probably be chosen to ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... two hours for the strong; of play for the young, middle-aged and old. A land where there is plenty of candy for the kiddies, playgrounds for all; and from which the spectre of want ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... a long counter and the wall, taken off a spacious, vaulted room with a grated window and a glazed door giving daylight to the further end. The first thing I saw right in front of me were three middle-aged men having a sort of romp together round about another fellow with a thin, long neck and sloping shoulders who stood up at a desk writing on a large sheet of paper and taking no notice except that he grinned quietly to himself. They turned very sour at once when they saw me. I heard one ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... and wanting to get him caught by Mr. Painter—whatever it was, that medicine had an awful power and did even more than he said it would. When every one had taken a good swallow, except the last one in line—he being a middle-aged person named Waters, who had to take what was left, which was only about a spoonful and very disappointing to Mr. Waters—they all felt the curling sensation begin, and commenced the new muscle-practice Somers had mentioned; and just then Mr. Painter, who had probably heard ...
— Hollow Tree Nights and Days • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Garie was so much indisposed at to be unable to rise, and took her breakfast in bed. Her husband had finished his meal, and was sitting in the parlour, when he observed a middle-aged coloured lady coming into ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... win himself a considerable position and a little (very little) money as a lawyer; but the study, in the broadest sense, of which these years were full, evidently contemplated a larger education of himself as a man than professional keenness, or any such interest as he had in law, will explain. Middle-aged and from his own point of view a failure, he was set upon making ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... understand that this was the place of their residence. We accordingly landed, among several hundreds of the natives, who conducted us into a house of much greater length than any we had seen. When we entered, we saw a middle-aged man, whose name was afterwards discovered to be Tootahah; mats were immediately spread, and we were desired to sit down over against him. Soon after we were seated, he ordered a cock and hen to be brought out, which ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... rooms were cheerful and elegant; a motherly, middle-aged woman had been engaged to remain with her as companion and nurse during her husband's absence; she had an abundance of money at her command, and Dr. Knox had promised to look in upon her every day. Surely she had nothing ...
— Virgie's Inheritance • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... liable to relapse in matters of prudence, seemliness, or in any of the highest cares of his functions; and by way of return for these benefits to the pupil, it will often happen that the zeal of a middle-aged or declining incumbent will be revived, by being in near communion with the ardour of youth, when his own efforts may have languished through a melancholy consciousness that they have not produced as much good ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... if they brought mutation, it was of a slow, and decaying, and depressing kind. Old Peggy died. Her silent sympathy, concealed under much roughness, was a loss to Susan Dixon. Susan was not yet thirty when this happened, but she looked a middle-aged, not to say an elderly woman. People affirmed that she had never recovered her complexion since that fever, a dozen years ago, which killed her father, and left Will Dixon an idiot. But besides her gray sallowness, the lines in her face were strong, and deep, ...
— Half a Life-Time Ago • Elizabeth Gaskell
... their hikes through the woods. The Winnebagos were charmed and agreed they had never met such a delightful man. They couldn't agree as to whether he was young or old and finally came to the decision that he was middle-aged, for to eighteen anything above thirty is middle-aged. ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... stroke that made him wonderful and piteous the Vicar's character and his temperament were changed. Nothing was left of Ally's tyrant and Robina's victim, the middle-aged celibate, filled with the fury of frustration and profoundly sorry for himself. His place was taken by a gentle old man, an old man of an appealing and childlike innocence, pure from all lust, from all self-pity, enjoying, ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... and soon Mrs. Lockton walked upstairs, leading with her a quite insignificant, ordinary-looking, middle-aged, rather portly man with shiny black hair, bald on the top of his head, and ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... well-dressed, prosperous-looking, middle-aged men came strolling around the corner of the building. As Dick was about to cover his fish one of them caught sight of the ...
— The High School Boys' Fishing Trip • H. Irving Hancock
... The Caid's chamberlain, a middle-aged man of dignified appearance, advanced to meet us between bowing clients and tradesmen. He led us through cool passages lined with the intricate mosaic-work of Fez, past beggars who sat on stone benches whining out their blessings, and pale Fazi craftsmen laying ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... ha'd. He was middle-aged, and shabby, with a German diploma and accent and a large family. It was the first time in his five years of office that one of his congregants had suggested such authoritativeness on his part. Elected by their vote, ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... Three people remained, a middle-aged man and his wife and their son, a boy of about twelve. They stood in the corner, staring white-faced at the Leiter, at the ...
— The Crystal Crypt • Philip Kindred Dick
... large crowd in one of the yards leading from the street to a factory. Upon making his way to the centre of this crowd, he saw an old woman in a 'fit,' real or feigned, he could not say, but he believed the latter, and over her stood an angry, middle-aged man, gesticulating violently, and threatening the old dame, that he would hang her from an adjacent beam if she would not pronounce the word 'God' to a child which was held in its mother's arms before her. It was in vain that the old woman protested her innocence; ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... in the half light of the passage as the top of a grimy cap over Ethel's shoulder and two black sleeves about her neck. She emerged as a small, middle-aged woman, with a thin little nose between silver-rimmed spectacles, a weak mouth and perplexed eyes, a queer little dust-lined woman with the oddest resemblance to Ethel in her face. She was trembling ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... who could afford to go to the club would eat out of a basket. He rather blushed for Becky that she must sit there in the sight of everybody and share a feast with a shabby old Judge, a lean and lank stripling with straight hair, a lame duck of an officer, and two middle-aged women, who made spots of black and purple on the landscape. Like Oscar, George's ideas of life had to do largely with motor cars and yachts, and estates on Long Island, palaces at Newport and Len ox and ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... from the captain's seat on the approach of that middle-aged pair who in the first hour of the voyage had enjoyed seeing Hugh and Ramsey together; a couple whose home evidently was far elsewhere—if anywhere—and who as evidently had seen the world to better advantage than ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... shouted by Mercer as we approached the cottage door, and had the effect of bringing out a stiff-looking, sturdy, middle-aged man with a short pipe in his mouth, which he removed, carried one hand to his forehead in a salute, and then stood stiff and erect before ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... a correctly dressed, middle-aged man passing down the street, bearing a somewhat cumbersome burden of lilies-of-the-valley and forget-me-nots, must have had its peculiar significance to the inhabitants of the village, and many curious glances were my reward. I ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... the hatchways and called down, announcing simply that the voyage was ended: and in the dusk there I saw monk after monk upheave himself from the straw and come clambering up the ladder; tall monks and short, old monks and young and middle-aged, lean monks and thickset—but the most of them cadaverous, and all of them yellow with sea-sickness; twenty-eight monks, all barefoot, all tolerably dirty, and all blinking in the fresh sunshine. When they were gathered, at a sign from one ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... his attentions to her I will be as polite as either of you can wish. I, too, feel a very deep sympathy for Belle. She is little more than a child, and yet her life is imposing upon her the monotonous work of a middle-aged woman, and I fear the consequences. It's contrary to nature, and no one knows it better than she. If he will help us take care of her I shall be grateful indeed; but if he grows sentimental and follows ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... next century is inevitably judged. The effect of his sudden uprising is almost as confusing to our judgments of his own poetry as of that of his unhappy 'successors.' Brought up, as most of us poor middle-aged critics have been, on textbooks which grudgingly devoted a scanty thirty or forty pages to all that happened ere Surrey and Wyatt began to write an English which literary historians could read without taking any trouble, we inevitably got it into our heads that with Chaucer we were at ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... alone. I have an old mother still living, Mary, whose chief prayer is that she may see me once again before she dies. I was her last-born—the child her arms kept the shape of. What am I to her now? ... what does she know of me, of the hard, tired, middle-aged man I have become? And you are in much the same box, my dear; unless you've forgotten by now that ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... to different Inmates. The first was a middle-aged, scholarly man, who was seated at a table with a Webster's Dictionary and a sheet of paper ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... asked his cousin, eagerly. "I've been watching that middle-aged gentleman who seems to be pressing close in on the flank of the crowd. There, see, he is speaking to Manuel, our purser, now, asking him some question. He looks up here at us; yes, and waves his hand, with a smile! That must be ...
— The Aeroplane Boys on the Wing - Aeroplane Chums in the Tropics • John Luther Langworthy
... schools you will see an occasional pretty face, but fewer than I expected to see; and to my eyes the Hawaiian girl is rarely very attractive. Among the middle-aged women, however, you often meet with fine heads and large, expressive features. The women have not unfrequently a majesty of carriage and a tragic intensity of features and expression which are quite ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... been helping a middle-aged, pleasant-faced woman out of a cab, and then, as she turned, their eyes met, and into Joan Meredyth's cheeks there flashed the tell-tale colour that proved to him and to all the world that this chance meeting with him meant something ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... a country weighed down with standing armies and conscriptions and fortifications. How could one live in a town like Coblentz, or Metz, or Brest? The poor wretches marching this way and marching that—you watch them from your hotel window—the young men and the middle-aged men—and you know that they would rather be away at their farms, or in their factories, or saw-pits, or engine-houses, working ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... protect and safeguard their terrestrial friends. I could make you acquainted with numberless examples of the help they give. But to be short I'll repeat to you one single case which was told to me by Madame la Marechale de Grancey herself. She was middle-aged, and a widow for several years, when, one night, in her bed, she received the visit of a Sylph, who said to her: 'Madame, have a search made in the wardrobe of your deceased husband. In the pocket ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... chair as voices sounded behind the door. Dawes was kicking it open with his foot, his arms laden with two rather large feet, still encased in bedroom slippers. Charlie was at the other end of the burden, which appeared to be a middle-aged man in pajamas. The Sheriff followed the trio up with a sad, undertaker expression. Behind him came Mrs. ...
— Dream Town • Henry Slesar
... passengers and Katavasov as he got in was concentrated upon them. More loudly than all talked the tall, hollow-chested young man. He was unmistakably tipsy, and was relating some story that had occurred at his school. Facing him sat a middle-aged officer in the Austrian military jacket of the Guards uniform. He was listening with a smile to the hollow- chested youth, and occasionally pulling him up. The third, in an artillery uniform, was sitting on a box beside ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... showed the way into the parlor while she went up to prepare her mistress for the call. Reading by the window was a middle-aged gentleman who bowed gravely and ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... don't know what sailors are, my dear sir. Let me just show you by an instance. One day in dock at home, while loafing on the forecastle head, I noticed two respectable salts come along, one a middle-aged, competent, steady man, evidently, the other a smart, youngish chap. They read the name on the bows and stopped to look at her. Says the elder man: 'Apse Family. That's the sanguinary female dog' ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... far too late to turn, ride down the ravine to a place where the bank could be scaled, and cut across country once more. The posse came like a whirlwind, yelling, shooting as if they hoped to attract attention, and attention they certainly won, for now Dan saw a tall middle-aged fellow, his long beard blowing over one shoulder as he ran, come down into the farm-yard with a double-barreled shotgun in his hands. He was a type of those who do not know what it is to miss their target—probably because ammunition comes ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... honeycombed—that was her word—with conventionality and false standards, and she made confessions like these to Laura, sitting in the girl's bedroom in the twilight. They were very soothing, these confessions. Laura would take Mrs. Simpson's thin, veined, middle-aged hand in hers and seem to charge herself for the moment with the responsibility of the elder lady's case. She did not attempt to conceal her pity or even her contempt for Mrs. Simpson's state of grace: she made short work of special services ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... built of spruce logs with an immense stone fireplace at one end of a long living room,—a comfortable backwoods place where one felt very close to the out-of-doors. Here the new arrivals found awaiting them Phillips, another member of the Jefferson eleven, and an athletic looking middle-aged man whom Norris introduced as his uncle, Wolcott Norris. There was no one else at the cabin except Peter Kearns, the ...
— The Mark of the Knife • Clayton H. Ernst
... Bay neighbourhood, four modes of disposing of the dead obtain, according to Mr. Meyer:—old persons are buried; middle-aged persons are placed in a tree, the hands and knees being brought nearly to the chin, all the openings of the body, as mouth, nose, ears, etc. being previously sewn up, and the corpse covered with mats, pieces of old cloth, nets, etc. The corpse being placed ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... that your mother had a very poor opinion of me while she was alive; I should like her to know, if the dead know anything, that she was mistaken, and that I am not quite unworthy of her respect. You will marry Lady Mabel Ashbourne, Rorie: and ten years hence, when we are sober middle-aged people, we shall be firm friends once again, and you will thank and praise me for having counselled you to cleave to the right. Let go the bridle, Rorie, there's no time to lose. There's a glorious gallop from Queen's ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... plunged into matters with which we need not concern ourselves, and proceeded to rend and destroy the character of that most respectable, middle-aged gentleman, Sir Roderick Ayre. The historian hastens to add that their remarks were, as a rule, entirely devoid of truth, with which general ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... prominent, they are well marked, and taken together with the apparently well developed frontal sinuses, and the condition of the sutures, leave no doubt on my mind that the skull is that of an adult, if not middle-aged man. ...
— On Some Fossil Remains of Man • Thomas H. Huxley
... She was a middle-aged woman, in the earlier half of middle age; she was shabbily dressed, and had a face that would not have been ill- looking, but that the upper lip was long and cleft, and the lower one unusually large. As the Cheap ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... me with any great hope. He was a middle-aged man of the country practitioner's type. I judged that he could be quite useful in dealing with ordinary ailments, but he did not strike me as a man who looked beneath the surface of things, and who could deal successfully with a case like Edgecumbe's. Evidently ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... He is a middle-aged gentleman, of reprobate and romantic tendencies, and tries to be a friend ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... seat, where a middle-aged lady was sitting alone, the pop corn man passed out his basket and said, "fresh pop corn." The lady took her foot down off the stove, looked at the man a moment with eyes glaring and wild, and said, "It is—no, it cannot be—and yet it is me ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... quarters. Harvey grasped at the offer. His landlord was a man named Buncombe, a truss manufacturer, who had two children, and seemingly no wife. The topmost storey Buncombe assigned to relatives of his own—a middle-aged woman, Mrs. Handover, with a sickly grownup son, who took some part in the truss business. For a few weeks Rolfe was waited upon by a charwoman, whom he paid extravagantly for a maximum of dirt and discomfort; then the unsatisfactory person ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... moist gleam in Cahew's blue eyes, and he snuffed as if he had a cold. Henley was glad of the interruption brought about by the arrival of a stranger who entered the front door and came back to them with swift, steady strides. He was fat, middle-aged, short, had a round, smooth face, and in removing his straw hat to fan his pink brow he disclosed a very ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... how they're posted?" he said to a tall, thin middle-aged man who had a chew of tobacco in his cheek. "I carry dispatches to General Pemberton, and the more information I ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... roads remained hard and smooth, for gangs of men, with scrapers and steam-rollers were at work everywhere repairing the wear and tear. This work is done by peasants, who are too old for the army, middle-aged, sturdily built fellows who perform their prosaic task with the resignation and inexhaustible patience of the lower-class Italian. They are organized in companies of a hundred men each, called centurias, and the company commanders are called (shades of the ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... during the Carlist contest; "and as long as it lasts, there is no good to be done in Spain." So, instead of bringing up their sons to work, they just let them live on from day to day, gossiping and smoking; and at the present moment there are many hundred thousand young and middle-aged men of the lower and middle classes, especially the latter, who are idlers by profession, and exactly correspond to Captain Widdrington's description. These gentry have nothing particular to lose by any political rumpus, and they ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... men at work in the shop—one of them a middle-aged man, the other two young men. They looked like persons of intelligence, and as soon as Bobby saw them his hopes ...
— Now or Never - The Adventures of Bobby Bright • Oliver Optic
... in the sophistry of society, loves the first woman he meets, provided, of course, she shows toward him a bit of soft, feminine sympathy. This accounts for the ease with which very young men so often fall in love with middle-aged women. The woman does the courting; the man idealizes, and endows the woman with all the virtues his imagination can conjure forth. Love is a matter ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... was the Vailima cook; Sina, his wife; Tauilo, his mother; Mitaele and Sosimo, his brothers. Lafaele, who was married to Faauma, was a middle-aged Futuna Islander, and had spent many years of his life on a whale-ship, the captain of which had kidnapped him when a boy. Misifolo was one of the "house-maids." Iopu and Tali, man and wife, had long been in our service, but had ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... broken off, and Freda, I am sure, felt nothing but relief. She went abroad for some time, however, and we did not see her till long after Lawrence had been comfortably married to 1,500 pounds a year and a middle-aged widow, who had long been a hero-worshipper, and who, I am told, never allowed any visitor to leave the house without making some allusion to the memorable battle of Saspataras Hill and ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... for the Nor'-West brigade billed to pass from Fort William to Athabasca," jeered the boldest of the crowd, a red-faced, middle-aged man with blear eyes. "We're looking for the Nor'-Westers' ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... it contained a singular group. A young man, with a powerfully-made frame, which must once have been robust, but was now terribly reduced by the wasting fires of a deadly fever, was held forcibly down by a middle-aged man, whose resemblance to him revealed his fatherhood. Two women helped the man, yet all three were barely able to restrain the youth, who, in the fury of his delirium, gnashed with his teeth, and struggled like a maniac. ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... "A highly-respectable middle-aged rustic; a smiling, smoothly-shaven, obliging man, dressed in a blue swallow-tailed coat, with brass buttons, and exhibiting his bardic legs in a pair of extremely stout and comfortable ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... of woman was Miss Blake?" I asked, eagerly, forgetting my few troubled tears at the thought of Uncle Geoffrey's one romance. The romance of middle-aged people always came with a faint, far-away odor to us young ones, like some old garment laid up in rose-leaves or lavender, which must needs be of quaint fashion and material, but doubtless precious in the eyes of ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... personally; and to all, by repute, as a grave, clever, promising young man, rather prudent than lavish, and never suspected to have got into a scrape. What the deuce did he do there? Mr. Avenel puzzled them yet more. A middle-aged man, said to be in business, whom they had observed "about town" (for he had a noticeable face and figure)—that is, seen riding in the park, or lounging in the pit at the opera, but never set eyes on at ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... more than to explain the state of mind which led a distinguished politician and moralist, a married, middle-aged man, to victimise—that is the "worldly" way of looking at it—a beautiful young girl who had fallen in love with his genius. Here we have the life-story and character of Remington portrayed at ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... who held the lantern and looked at him in silence with a half-deprecating air was a middle-aged man, bearded and bare-headed. He had thrown over his shoulders a piece of sacking, that hung from him almost like a robe. The light that he carried threw heavy wavering shadows about the stable, and Frank noticed the great head of ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... took lodging in a room in one of the most crowded of the low boarding-houses,—a room accommodating two beds besides his own: the first occupied by a brother neophyte in marble-cutting, and the second by a morose middle-aged man with one eyebrow a trifle higher than the other, as if it had been wrenched out of line by the strain of habitual intoxication. This man's name was Wollaston, ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Britton; a breezy alert-looking middle-aged man, who came in escorted by Polton and shook our hands cordially, having been previously warned of my presence. He carried a small but solid hand-bag, to which he clung tenaciously up to the very moment when its contents were required ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... man, a citizen of London, healthy, middle-aged, successful in business, whose interest in golf is as keen, according to his lights and limitations, as the absorption of Rembrandt in art. Suppose this citizen, having one day a loose half-hour of time to fill in the neighbourhood of South Kensington, remembers the articles he has skimmed ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... were brought on board—the captain being the last to come along the line. The first four were women, or rather, the first two were women; the third a girl of ten years old, and the fourth a woman. Then came a middle-aged man, evidently a passenger. Then came ten sailors, a steward, two mates, ...
— A Chapter of Adventures • G. A. Henty
... could you be such an ass?" said Mackinnon. "As it has turned out, there is no very great harm done. You have insulted a respectable middle-aged woman, the mother of a family, and the wife of a general officer, and there is an end of it;— unless, indeed, the general officer should come out from England to call ...
— Mrs. General Talboys • Anthony Trollope
... The carvers were middle-aged full-ported men, with fine ruddy complexions, and moustaches of the Japanese weeping mulberry or mammoth droop variety. On signal one of them would come promptly to you where you sat, he shoving ahead of him a great trencher on wheels, with a spirit lamp blazing beneath ...
— Eating in Two or Three Languages • Irvin S. Cobb
... unconsciously sighed with excess of pleasure, I became aware of a slight movement beside the bed, and, glancing round, I perceived a middle-aged negress bending over me and looking anxiously into ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... The three middle-aged men were old friends. They had been school-fellows, and when they were hardly out of their boyhood the war came on, and they enlisted in the same company, on the same day, and happened to march away elbow to elbow. Then came the great ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... dollars a week for summer board, and not much more, are often the best of the American people, or, at least, of the New England people. They may not know it, and those who are richer may not imagine it. They are apt to be middle-aged maiden ladies from university towns, living upon carefully guarded investments; young married ladies with a scant child or two, and needing rest and change of air; college professors with nothing but their modest salaries; literary men or women ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... 1905, Mr. William Munday, a highly respected citizen of the town of Tooringa, in Queensland, was walking to the neighbouring town of Toowong to attend a masonic gathering. It was about eight o'clock, the moon shining brightly. Nearing Toowong, Mr. Munday saw a middle-aged man, bearded and wearing a white overcoat, step out into the moonlight from under the shadow of a tree. As Mr. Munday advanced, the man in the white coat stood directly in his way. "Out with all you have, and quick about it," he said. Instead of complying with this peremptory summons, ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... at Thompson's Flat that summer. He was a middle-aged man who said that his name was Montgomery Carleton—a name which instantly awoke the resentment of the camp, and was speedily converted into "Monte Carlo" by the resentful miners, who intimated very plainly that no man could carry a fifteen-inch ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... daughter Hilda, dressed in a boy's overalls and clumsy boots, at her skirts. Minna, her oldest daughter, a very pretty girl, whose love affairs were continually the talk of all Los Muertos, was visible through a window of the house, busy at the week's washing. Mrs. Hooven was a faded, colourless woman, middle-aged and commonplace, and offering not the least characteristic that would distinguish her from a thousand other women of her class and kind. She nodded to Presley, watching him with a stolid gaze from under her arm, which she held across her ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... me, and rode us across the country to Earlshall Park, where the Earl of W—— lived. There was a very fine house and a great deal of stabling. We went into the yard through a stone gateway, and John asked for Mr. York. It was some time before he came. He was a fine-looking, middle-aged man, and his voice said at once that he expected to be obeyed. He was very friendly and polite to John, and after giving us a slight look, he called a groom to take us to our boxes, and invited John to ...
— Black Beauty, Young Folks' Edition • Anna Sewell
... front door, and a middle-aged man entered, accompanying and partly shoving forward a more diffident and younger one. Neither appeared to be a sailor, although both were dressed in that dingy respectability and remoteness of fashion affected by second and third mates when ashore. They were already well ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Prince replied, "how naive you are. It is true that he is middle-aged, but he has not a ray of romance in him. Don't trust him! Maltese Knights and Maltese cats do their ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... to be there; after a series of random movements it is found that this result is to be caused by going to the City in the morning and coming back in the evening. No one would have guessed a priori that this movement of a middle-aged man's body would cause fish to come out of the sea into his larder, but experience shows that it does, and the middle-aged man therefore continues to go to the City, just as the cat in the cage continues to lift the latch when it has once found it. Of course, in actual fact, ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... the carriage emerged into full view. Beside the driver it contained three passengers—Beaton on the front seat, his face turned backward toward the two behind, a man and a woman. Westcott and Miss Donovan, peering through the screen of leaves, caught only a swift glimpse of their faces—the man middle-aged, inclined to stoutness, with an unusually red face, smoking viciously at a cigar, the woman young and decidedly blonde, with stray locks of hair blowing about her face, and a vivacious manner. The carriage rolled on to ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... he called in a loud voice for the Senora Gomez. Come forth from the chamber beyond, a middle-aged dame, apparelled in black. ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... accustomed to manual labor. It would seem that it would be nothing more than right to give him an easier task at first and let him gradually become hardened to his work at coal digging. Nothing of this kind is done. The young, the old, the middle-aged are indiscriminately and unceremoniously thrust into the mine. Down there are nearly five hundred prisoners. Among them are boys from seventeen to twenty years of age, many of whom are in delicate health. Here are to be found old men, in some ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... requires more food than indoor, and physical labor more than mental. It has been estimated "that a child of ten years requires half as much food as a grown woman, and one of fourteen an equal amount. The rapidly growing active boy often eats as much as a man, and the middle-aged man requires more than the aged. A man of seventy years may preserve health on a quantity which ...
— Public School Domestic Science • Mrs. J. Hoodless
... M. Didot, a middle-aged man with a precise and commercial air, whose speech was brief and plain as that of a man who knows the value of minutes. He desired to know what I had to say to him. I stammered for some time, and became embarrassed ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... over there on the hill," directed the sergeant-major. "It's a long way to Frederick, but Lord! with that horse—" He hesitated for a moment, then spoke up in a courageous, middle-aged, weather-beaten fashion, "I hope you'll have a pleasant ride, lieutenant! I guess I was a little stiffer'n good manners calls for, just at first. You see there's been so much talk of—of—of masquerading—and your voice is Southern, if your politics ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... mirror caught and held his attention. He looked at it, at first casually, then with growing interest. In the glass, directly facing him, was a wide studio window. It was open, notwithstanding the cold January weather, and a comfortable, middle-aged, plump woman, evidently a superior type of caretaker, was sitting on the sill, polishing an inner pane. The scene was as vivid as a mirage, and it was like the mirage in that it was projected from some point which itself ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... his father directed a glance at him in a certain mildly anxious way. Joe did not see these glances, but Bessie saw them, every one. Mr. Bronson was a middle-aged man, well developed and of heavy build, though not fat. His was a rugged face, square-jawed and stern-featured, though his eyes were kindly and there were lines about the mouth that betokened laughter rather than ...
— The Cruise of the Dazzler • Jack London
... fact the first person we beheld upon the pier platform; raw-boned, stiff-jointed, and more than middle-aged, he must nevertheless have jumped out once again before the train stopped, and that almost on top of a diminutive telegraph boy, who was waiting while the old hound read his telegram with one eye and watched emerging passengers with both. Whether we should have passed him ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... this visit, when I happened one evening to stroll into a box in one of the principal theatres of the city. A small party sat on the seats before me: a middle-aged gentleman and his lady, in front, and directly behind them my young doctor and the same very handsome young lady I had seen him walking with on the side-walk before the swell-fronts and south-exposures. As Professor Langdon seemed to be very much taken up with his companion, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... the philosophy of middle-aged youth, while the man beside him sat with clenched hands and faced the hateful vision of Dinah, the fairy-footed and gay of heart, writhing under that ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... insert myself into a pair of middle-aged pantaloons. It is needless to say that girls who may have a literary tendency will find little to interest ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... could easily have distanced his middle-aged pursuer under ordinary circumstances, but the position in which Wicksteed's body was found suggests that he had the ill luck to drive his quarry into a corner between a drift of stinging nettles and the gravel ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... went to her middle-aged repose, I sat up and went through imaginary scenes, and reviewed the situation a hundred times, and tried to convince myself of what I wanted to believe, ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris
... fifteen!" "O true believers, here is a Syrian steed which will give renown to the purchaser!" Strolling loosely about were dealers in sugar-cane and pea-nuts, which are called gooba in Africa as in America, pipe peddlers and venders of rosaries, jugglers and minstrels. At last we came to a middle-aged woman seated on the ground behind a basket containing beads, glass armlets, and such trinkets. She was dressed like any Arab-woman of the lower class, but was not veiled, and on her chin blue lines were tattooed. Her features ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... friends within. I was very thankful when Mark, looking out of the wagon, told us that we were approaching his father's house. Our cavalcade must have been seen, for in a short time two horsemen came galloping up to us: the elder, a fine-looking, middle-aged man, Mark saluted as his father; the other as brother Peter. A few words explained what had happened. Mr Praeger immediately invited us all to his house, while Peter started off as fast as he could go to summon ...
— Adventures in the Far West • W.H.G. Kingston
... too good to be true. In addition, the gods loved him, and so he had to die young. Some people think that a man of fifty-two is middle-aged. But if R. H. D. had lived to be a hundred, he would never have grown old. It is not generally known that the name of his ...
— Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis • Various
... and the sky appeared to have met in true Waterloo fashion, and the dark branches of the pines seemed writhing and tossing in a sea of flame, a loud knock came at the hall-door (bells are not the fashion in Dixie), and a servant soon ushered into the room a middle-aged, unassuming gentleman, whom my host received with a respect and cordiality which indicated that he was no ordinary guest. There was in his appearance and manner that indefinable something which denotes the man of mark; but my curiosity was soon gratified by an introduction. It was "Colonel" A——. ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... and whom it was therefore difficult to replace in a foreign country. The very same day the prince's banker, whom he had commissioned to provide him with another servant, was announced at the moment we were going out. He presented to the prince a middle-aged man, well-dressed, and of good appearance, who had been for a long time secretary to a procurator, spoke French and a little German, and was besides furnished with the best recommendations. The prince was pleased ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... a rather kindred-looking girl with darker hair on the right of Mr. Direck who impressed him at the very outset as being still prettier, and—he didn't quite place her at first—somehow familiar to him; there was a large irrelevant middle-aged lady in black with a gold chain and a large nose, between Teddy and the tutor; there was a tall middle-aged man with an intelligent face, who might be a casual guest; there was an Indian young gentleman faultlessly dressed up to his brown soft linen collar ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... them. They seem a race without a single beauty, possessing neither stature, nor colour, nor length of hair, nor even plump shapeliness. Undersized, leather-skinned, small-eyed, thin, and wizened, they never seem to be young. They seem to start middle-aged and go ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... by the French labels on the soiled linings? She could have made a better hat in two hours than any one of those she sold at the reduced price of ten dollars; yet even the dingiest of them at last found a purchaser, and she saw the green velvet toque, which had been rejected by the sensible middle-aged woman in the morning, finally pass into the possession of a hard-featured spinster. What amazed her, for she had a natural talent for dress, was the infallible instinct which guided the vast majority of ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... the test for the conjurer's knowledge—the sharp and unexpected trial of his skill and sagacity. After the old maid had taken her leave, possessed of the two bottles, a middle-aged, large-sized woman walked in, and, after making a low courtesy, sat down as she had been desired. The conjurer glanced keenly at her, and something like a smile might be seen to settle upon his features; it was so slight, however, that the good ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... serious thoughts of wiring for Miss Drewitt, who was spending a few days with friends in town. Thinking better of this, he walked down to a servants' registry office, and, after being shut up for a quarter of an hour in a small room with a middle-aged lady of Irish extraction, who was sent in to be catechized, resolved to let matters ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... which, somehow or other, our American girls often fail to adorn themselves during an appreciable moment. It is a pity that the English violet should grow into such an outrageously developed peony as I have attempted to describe. I wonder whether a middle-aged husband ought to be considered as legally married to all the accretions that have overgrown the slenderness of his bride, since he led her to the altar, and which make her so much more than he ever bargained for! ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... small fat man. His face was smooth and had the peculiar boylike appearance that chubbiness gives even to the middle-aged; he had bright black eyes, and before he spoke he ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... reached. George Osborne, who is the beautiful lover in Vanity Fair, is killed almost before our eyes, on the field of battle, and we feel that Nemesis has with justice taken hold of him. Poor old Dobbin does marry the widow, after fifteen years of further service, when we know him to be a middle-aged man and her a middle-aged woman. That glorious Paradise of which I have spoken requires a freshness which can hardly be attributed to the second marriage of a widow who has been fifteen years mourning for her first husband. Clive Newcome, "the first young man," if we may so call him, of the ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... open, will you, can you, as a husband, father or brother, ever permit the females under your care to even take the chance of being RECRUITING OFFICERS for these sinks of perdition, THESE ANTE-CHAMBERS OF HELL. These places, dripping with the blood of hundreds and thousands of young and middle-aged men, who, but for their enchantment, might have been good and true men, and have filled honorable graves. These places have broken the hearts of thousands of wives, mothers and: sisters, when they have seen their loved ones bound in the fetters and chains of eternal ...
— There is No Harm in Dancing • W. E. Penn
... music?" said Raskolnikov, addressing a middle-aged man standing idly by him. The man looked at him, ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... in the homely style of middle-aged ladies, and Mrs. Veal proses concerning the conversations they had formerly held, and the books they had read together. Her very recent experience probably led Mrs. Veal to talk of death, and the books written on the ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... her embrace]. How can you be Ariadne? You are a middle-aged woman: well preserved, madam, ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... I had been more or less conscious for some time of my degeneration in this respect, but it is no easy matter to escape from a rut when one is middle-aged. Josephine's stricture concerning the lack of joyousness in my apparel, however, brought me up standing, as the phrase is, and served not merely to spur me to action, but to crystallize a tissue of reflections which had been churning in my brain ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... sight of his fellow travelers, noted with some apprehension that they were being pretty closely watched by an alert-looking, middle-aged man. Receiving a covert nod from Josef, the latter had disappeared at once into the human medley. With all expedition, therefore, the American rejoined them. He read a question in Josef's eyes which changed into a defiance as the ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... the parade in front of the Fort. Some of the aristocracy of the place were out also, staid middle-aged men with powdered queues and velvet coats, elegant ladies in crimson silk petticoats and skirts drawn back, the train fastened up with a ribbon or chain which they carried on their arms as they minced along on their high heeled slippers, carrying ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... least, we know that nothing like discipline and organization, in the modern sense of the terms, were introduced into the management of fire apparatus until a time quite within the recollection of the middle-aged men of our own day. If there be anything apparently improbable in this fact, we need only recollect that many of the grandest triumphs of human genius, with which we are already so familiar, are not yet forty ...
— Fire Prevention and Fire Extinction • James Braidwood
... flying about me, and would fain coax them into my foot. I have almost tried to make them drunk, and inveigle them thither in their cups; but as they are not at all familiar chez moi, they formalize at wine, as much as a middle-aged woman who is beginning to just drink ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... of the —th was playing the "Merry Widow" waltz, still a favourite at the fort, and only one of the officers was not dancing. All the others—young, middle-aged, and even elderly—were gliding more or less gracefully, more or less happily, over the waxed floor of the big, white-walled, flag-draped hall where Fort Ellsworth had its concerts, theatricals, small hops, and big balls. Encircled by their ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... sister was a small and withered lady, who had been something of a beauty, and was now the pink of gentle and middle-aged decorum. She was one of those women it is so easy to ignore till you live with them. Then you perceive that in their relations to their own world, the world they make and govern, they are of the stuff which holds a country together, without which a country can not ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... should we graft the Persian walnut high, here in Michigan? It certainly saves time, because a middle-aged walnut tree produces, in terms of pecks and bushels, in eight to 15 years. Being well established it saves patience and disappointment. And I know it ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... for the sake of argument, that gratitude, respect, friendliness, a sense of being unprotected and alone in the world, have led to her engagement with the wealthy, middle-aged banker, and that through it all her woman's heart was never awakened: such a thing at least is possible. If this were true, she would be no more to blame than I, and we might become the happy victims of circumstances. I'm not worthy of her, and never shall be, ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... as we all change, with the passing of the years. I first remember her as a woman middle-aged, sweet-faced, hardly like a widow, nor yet like an old maid. She was rather like a young girl in love, with her lover absent on a long journey. She lived more with the memory of her husband, she clung to him more, than if she had had a child. She never ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... more sober counsels seems to be confined unhappily to the older generation, and the older generation, even if we include in it the middle-aged, must before long pass away. What we have to reckon with, especially in Bengal, is the revolt of the younger generation, and this revolt draws its inspiration from religious and philosophical sources which no measures merely political, either of repression or of conciliation, ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... literal truth; but it was impossible that I should participate in such a campaign as the one I had just passed through without making many stanch friends, both Boers and English: and some of these, middle-aged men who knew perfectly well what they were talking about, strongly advised me to raise money, either by selling a portion of my farm, or by means of a mortgage upon it. But my father had instilled into me a perfect horror of anything that savoured of getting into debt, ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... overlook the halbert for the novelty of a well-turned figure and of a pretty, winning face; and by the end of the first two or three days she had admirers even among the gentlemen. The Quartermaster, in particular, a middle-aged soldier, who had more than once tried the blessings of matrimony already, but was now a widower, was evidently disposed to increase his intimacy with the Sergeant, though their duties often brought them together; and the youngsters among his messmates did not fail ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... was middle-aged, bald, and somewhat stout—and Harleston recognized one of his visitors of the early morning. The woman was sinuous, with raven hair, dead white complexion, a perfectly lovely face, and a superb figure. Harleston would have ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... and imaginary, to bring things up to date. A rather unconvincing plot, with a dash of Great Expectations in it, yet offers a situation which has plenty of amusing possibilities. Honor and Evie Nutting, two middle-aged spinsters, find themselves the possessors of eight thousand a year, on condition that they spend it all. That sounds, of course, a very pleasant arrangement; but they have been struggling for years to make ends meet and economy has become a habit. The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 15, 1920 • Various
... got up betimes to shoot, Or hunt; the young, because they liked the sport The first thing boys like, after play and fruit; The middle-aged, to make the day more short; For ennui is a growth of English root, Though nameless in our language-we retort The fact for words, and let the French translate That awful yawn which ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... start a League to be called Anti-Holiday? Bet half the middle-aged men-folk will join! Then we might get an occasional jolly day, Free from the pests who perplex and purloin. "Health-Resort" quackery, portmanteau-packery, Cheat-brigade charges and chills I might miss. Dear-bought ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 8, 1892 • Various
... General Orphan Asylum, up on Twenty-third street. Well, it happens that this institution is the Beaubien's sole charity—in fact, it is her particular hobby. I presume that she feels she is now a middle-aged woman, and that the time is not far distant when she will have to close up her earthly accounts and hand them over to the heavenly auditor. Anyway, this last year or two she has suddenly become philanthropic, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... of Middleton, a very worthy man, who, though differing from his kinsmen upon some religious points, and not altogether approving of the conduct of one of them, was on good terms with both. The Rector of Middleton was portly and middle-aged, fond of ease and reading, and by no means indifferent to the good things of life. He was unmarried, and passed much of his time at Middleton Hall, the seat of his near relative Sir Richard Assheton, to whose family he was greatly attached, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Lady of Stahrenburg, and Kepler writes of her: "Her person and manners are suitable to mine; no pride, no extravagance; she can bear to work; she has a tolerable knowledge of how to manage a family; middle-aged and of a disposition and capability to acquire ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... people being middle-aged, and steady, John, and pretend that we are a humdrum couple, going on in a jog-trot sort of way, it's only because I'm such a silly little thing, John, that I like, sometimes, to act a kind of Play with Baby, and ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... There was a middle-aged lady among the passengers, of whom the least I can say was, that she had a great many little winning ways of making herself disagreeable. She imposed frightfully on me while on board, getting me to mark her trunks for her, and carry them into ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... Bradshaw arrived—a stout, bald-headed, middle-aged gentleman, with ruddy countenance, dressed in nankin trousers, white jacket, and broad-brimmed straw hat, which he doffed as he approached the strangers, glancing from one to the other; and then, having settled in his mind that Jack Rogers was Alick Murray, shook his hand, which ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... power, and with the intelligent brightness of eye and face which generally distinguishes men of the consummate skill and extensive knowledge which I was told he possessed. I was, however, greatly surprised to see only a heavy-looking, middle-aged, rather bulky man, with a miser-like expression of face. There was no fire in the room, and, for a cold morning, he seemed to be rather thinly clad, his only attire being a pair of trousers, without ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... the power of attorney, by which the Infanta authorised the middle-aged ecclesiastic whom she was about to espouse to take possession in her name of the very desirable property which she ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... been about a year and a half after the marriage of his daughter—Felix Millsap was on his way home from work, a middle-aged figure, moving with the clunking gait of a tired laborer who wears cheap, heavy shoes, his broad splayed hands dangling at the ends of his arms as though in either of them he carried an invisible weight. It had been ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... flickered to life. A man's face appeared—the middle-aged, soft-fleshed, almost stickily innocent face of one of the Solar Systems greatest crusaders ...
— A World is Born • Leigh Douglass Brackett
... very unsympathetic study of whom James afterward contributed to the "English Men of Letters" series. But in the name-story of the collection he was already in the line of his future development. This is the story of a middle-aged invalid American who comes to England in search of health, and finds, too late, in the mellow atmosphere of the mother-country, the repose and the congenial surroundings which he has all his life been longing for in his raw America. The pathos ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... man, middle-aged, bald, bland, and with a heavy moustache, had been sitting opposite to us during dinner, and had attracted my attention by the way he looked at my partner from time to time. It was a difficult look to describe, because ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... introduced by Mrs. Goudie as the higgler, or itinerant poulterer and greengrocer, who served the house in Mr. Bates' time. He was a thin middle-aged man, with light watery eyes, a straggling beard, and an astoundingly dilatory manner. He used to pull his pony and cart into the hedge or bank by the roadside, and leave them there an unconscionable time, while he pottered about the back doors of his ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... in the morning she wore the high look she had been wont to wear in the years gone by, when she ruled in her father's house, and rode to the hunt with a following of gay middle-aged and elderly rioters. Her eye was brilliant, and her colour matched it. She held her head with the old dauntless carriage, and there was that in her voice before which her women quaked, and her lacqueys hurried ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... novelists, she finds 'a pleasant little rondelette of a woman, something of my own style. We talked and laughed together, as good-natured women do, and agreed upon many points.' The learned Mrs. Somerville is described as 'a simple, little, middle-aged woman. Had she not been presented to me by name and reputation, I should have said she was one of the respectable twaddling matrons one meets at every ball, dressed in a snug mulberry velvet gown, and a little cap with a red flower. I asked her how she ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... common with all middle-aged gentlewomen, was to put her hand to her head and reflect that she had not on her best cap; and Mary looked down at her dimpled hands, which were blue from the contact with mixed yarn ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... The Dancing Master? He is a middle-aged gentleman, of reprobate and romantic tendencies, and tries to be a friend ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... the walls. One by Ricard represented Philippe Dechartre, very pale, with rumpled hair, and eyes lost in a romantic dream. The other showed a middle-aged woman, almost beautiful in her ardent slightness. It was Madame ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the introduction. Elias M. Pierce, receding a yard or so into perspective, revealed himself as a spare, middle-aged man who looked as if he had been hewn out of a block, square, and glued into a permanent black suit. Under his palely sardonic eye Hal felt that he was being appraised, and in none too ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... in his earlier poems. Byron's senior by twenty years, he was destined to outlive him by more than a quarter of a century; but when 'English Bards, etc.', was in progress, he was little more than middle-aged, and the "three score years" must have been written in the spirit of prophecy. As it chanced, the last word rested with him, and it was a generous one. Addressing Moore, in 1824, he says ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... long black coat and a crepe veil to her heels, rode a bicycle back and forth to church, the long veil floating out behind. One evening she was struck by an automobile and killed instantly. The niece to whom she had left her little house had made an arrangement with a middle-aged woman living there that if she took care of "Aunt Martha" she could have the house tax free all her days. Her days are still continuing—and with all the advance in prices of houses, the niece can't do a thing about ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... generations been kept gloriously in the little peninsula, though no case was known of any earl's attaining his majority as being already Earl of Cairnforth. The Montgomeries were usually a long-lived race, and their heirs rarely came to their titles till middle-aged fathers of families. ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... and for the rest of the day Mr. Hurst saw him no more. At one o'clock a savoury smell passed the door on its way upstairs, and at five o'clock a middle-aged woman with an inane smile looked into the room on her way aloft with a loaded tea-tray. By supper- time he was suffering considerably from ...
— Deep Waters, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... of lighter complexion than the young brave; this one lighter than the middle-aged man, and the middle-aged man lighter than the superannuated homo, who, by smoke, paint, dirt, and a drying up of the vital juices, appears to be the true copper-colored Dakota. The color of the Dakotas varies with the ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... I don't care what Mr. Jerry said," she told Aunt Kate as they went up the steps and into the principal's office where a pleasant-faced middle-aged lady looked questioningly at Mary Rose and ...
— Mary Rose of Mifflin • Frances R. Sterrett
... creature he had become as a hound on the scent, the keenest on earth—that of self-interest. He was changed, while yet living, from a being outside the world to one with the world before him. He felt young, although he was a middle-aged, almost elderly man. He had in his pocket only a few dollars. He might have had more had he not purchased the checked suit and had he not given much away. There was another man whose term would be up in a week, and ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... yards away to a shady spot, where he sat down on the green slope of the foss to cool himself. He had been riding many hours in a burning sun, and wanted cooling. He attracted everybody's attention on his arrival by his appearance: middle-aged, with good features and curly brown hair and beard, but huge—one of the biggest men I had ever seen; his weight could not have been under about seventeen stone. Sitting or reclining on the grass, he fell asleep, and rolling down the slope fell with a tremendous ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... aware of Mr. Greeley's early obligation to Mr. Jones, by the volley of oaths and vituperation which he heaped upon him because he did not go West instead of hanging around there seeking office. No wonder the gentleman, who was a reputable middle-aged man, fled from the presence of this famous expounder of 'Moral Ideas.' However, when all this has been said we cannot help but admit that a great and good man died on December 29th, 1872. Certain it is that Journalism lost one of its ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... in England what you are up against. You have no idea what it means to be in a country where everybody, the women, the elderly people, the steady middle-aged men, are taking war as seriously as business. They haven't the slightest compunction. I don't know what Germany was like before the war, I had hardly gotten out of my train before the war began; but Germany to-day is one big ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... had broken out in a blaze of patriotic display. In all the windows of the stores there were signs: "Wake up, America!" Across the broad Main Street there were banners: "America Prepare!" Down in the square at one end of the street a small army was gathering—old veterans of the Civil War, and middle-aged veterans of the Spanish War, and regiments of the state militia, and brigades of marines and sailors from the ships in the harbor, and members of fraternal lodges with their Lord High Chief Grand Marshals on horseback with gold sashes and waving white plumes, ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... one in the loft and came out very boldly. When Bobbie sneezed, the rat was quite shocked and hurried away, for he saw that a hay-loft where such things could happen was no place for a respectable middle-aged rat that liked ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit
... sensations when he discovered the law of planetary motion. He could not keep still. He forgot that he was a sober, middle-aged person, and acted as if he were a small boy who had just got the answer to his sum in vulgar fractions. Nobody had helped him; he had found it out for himself; and now he could go out and play. ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... and sweetness void of pride." Of that admired world likewise are the lovers that Matthew Prior creates, who woo neither with stormy passion nor with mawkish whining, but in a courtly manner; lovers who deem an epigram a finer tribute than a sigh. So the tender fondness of a middle-aged man for an infant is elevated above the commonplace by assuming ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... amusement lasted so long that Owen grew weary, and was thinking of retreating from his post by the door, when some little bustle was occasioned, on the opposite side of the room, by the entrance of a middle-aged man, and a young girl, apparently his daughter. The man advanced to the bench occupied by the seniors of the party, who welcomed him with the usual pretty Welsh greeting, "Pa sut mae dy galon?" ("How is thy heart?") and drinking his health passed on to him the cup of excellent ...
— The Doom of the Griffiths • Elizabeth Gaskell
... of the Revolution! He was the old, the middle-aged, and the young. He was Capt. Miles, of Concord, who said that he went to battle as he went to church. He was Capt. Davis, of Acton, who reproved his men for jesting on the march. He was Deacon Josiah Haynes, of Sudbury, 80 years old, who marched with his company to the South ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... eyes.' And he said, 'You wouldn't make it a handsome face, would you?' and she says, 'A very handsome face.' And says he, 'Middle-aged?' and says she, 'Twenty-nine.' And I mind him saying, 'A little bald on the top?' and she says, says she, 'Not ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... A stoutish middle-aged man, good-looking and breezily genial, dressed in a silk smock, stockings, handsomely ornamented sandals, and a gold fillet round his brows, comes in. He is like Joyce Burge, yet also like Lubin, as if Nature had made a composite photograph of the two men. He takes ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... before the crime she offered him three thousand roubles, on condition that he would elope with her to the gold mines. But the criminal, counting on escaping punishment, had preferred to murder his father to get the three thousand rather than go off to Siberia with the middle-aged charms of his pining lady. This playful paragraph finished, of course, with an outburst of generous indignation at the wickedness of parricide and at the lately abolished institution of serfdom. Reading it with curiosity, Alyosha folded up the paper and ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... us a very stout, middle-aged man, apoplectic with the heat, was elephantinely jolly for the benefit of a bored-looking girl across the table from him, and at the next table a newspaper woman ate alone, the last edition propped against the water-bottle before her, her hat, for coolness, on ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... student remained. On the campus, not far from the dormitory, stood a building of a single story, of several rooms. In one of these rooms there lived, with his family, that tall, gaunt, shaggy, middle-aged man, in his shiny black coat and paper collars, without any cravats, who had been the lad's gentle monitor on the morning of his entering college. He, too, was to spend the summer there, having no means of getting ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... The former was known most of them personally; and to all, by repute, as a grave, clever, promising young man, rather prudent than lavish, and never suspected to have got into a scrape. What the deuce did he do there? Mr. Avenel puzzled them yet more. A middle-aged man, said to be in business, whom they had observed "about town" (for he had a noticeable face and figure)—that is, seen riding in the park, or lounging in the pit at the opera, but never set eyes on at a recognized club, or in the coteries of their 'set';—a man ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... would we miss the Letters. It is quite true that he is chary of petticoats in his earlier work: but when he reached "David Balfour" he drew an entrancing heroine; and the contrasted types of young girl and middle-aged woman in "Weir of Hermiston" offer eloquent testimonial to his increasing power in depicting the Eternal Feminine. At the same time, it may be acknowledged that the gallery of female portraits is not like Scott's for number and variety, nor like Thackeray's for distinction and ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... the superiority of the English Nation. For foreigners he had a magnificent contempt and distinguished between them and monkeys only by a certain mental effort. Art he thought nasty, literature womanish; he was a Tory, middle-aged and well-to-do. ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... a large room, in which blazed a brisk fire. Before the fire sat two stout lads, who turned upon me their heavy eyes, with no very welcome greeting. A middle-aged woman was standing at a table, and two children were amusing themselves with a kitten ...
— Finger Posts on the Way of Life • T. S. Arthur
... the cases of this disease, which have hitherto fallen under my own immediate observation, the subjects have been middle-aged men, of thin and spare habit, with a sort of hollow-eyed anxiety of expression in their countenance, free from gout and constitutional disease in general, and, as far as could be ascertained, from any organic defect in the urinary organs. In every instance they had been induced to apply for medical ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... the more than middle-aged German professor (he must be fifty-seven or so) but with a heart full of newly wakened yearnings for human life with all its joys and passions, Faust wanders, trying to feel sympathy with all these multitudinous human beings, attracted perhaps here and there, but evidently for ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... remarked Staniford, "than being younger than you look. I am twenty-eight, and people take me for thirty-four. I'm a prematurely middle-aged man. I wish you would tell me, Miss Blood, a little about South Bradfield. I've been trying to make out whether I was ever there. I tramped nearly everywhere when I was a student. What sort of people are ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... life, spending the greater part of every day in solitude. Grief was not sufficient to account for the heaviness and muteness which had fallen upon him, or for the sudden change by which his youthful-looking countenance had become that of a middle-aged man. He seemed to shrink before eyes that regarded him, however kind their expression; one might have thought that some secret shame was harassing his mind. He himself, indeed, would have used no other word to describe the ill under which ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... received from Wurzburg had informed her that the present holder of the bill was "a middle-aged man." If he had been very young, or very old, she would have trusted in the autumn of her beauty, backed by her ready wit. But experience had taught her that the fascinations of a middle-aged woman are, in the vast majority of cases, fascinations ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... closer. Many were the means shouted out in mouthfuls, of the best possible ways of ending it. "Water!" but there was none near, and many cried for it who might have got it from the well at Blackfriars Wynd. "Bite the tail!" and a large, vague, benevolent, middle-aged man, more desirous than wise, with some struggle got the bushy end of Yarrow's tail into his ample mouth, and bit it with all his might. This was more than enough for the much-enduring, much-perspiring shepherd, who, with a gleam of joy over his broad visage, delivered a terrific ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... weeds, but evidently lookin' through 'em. Anon a few single men with good-lookin' tanned faces, enjoyin' themselves round a table of their own, and talkin' and laughin' more'n considerable. Respectable, middle-aged couples, takin' their comfort with kinder pensive faces, and once in awhile a young girl as adorably sweet and pretty as only American girls can be at ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... whole town knew how Agnes had gone to the minister with her domestic troubles and how in some mysterious fashion this young man had worked a miracle. For both Agnes and Hen were as suddenly and happily in love with one another as though they were newly married instead of being a middle-aged and childless couple. ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... sat eating the remainder of his bread, the entry was darkened a little, and he saw a couple of women peer in—one a middle-aged, comely body, the other a ...
— Nic Revel - A White Slave's Adventures in Alligator Land • George Manville Fenn
... women and children brought him gusts of emotion. In one evening hour, he followed a middle-aged woman who was leading a child through the faintly-lit streets; trailed the pair for a square or two through the soft snow, a sort of miracle in the picture to him, a heaven of gentleness and order. This was his first grand reaction from the field of strife—at least, from this ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... our idea had gone abroad. I could hear the word "opium" passed from mouth to mouth, and by the looks directed at us I could see we were supposed to have some private information. And here an incident occurred highly typical of San Francisco. Close at my back there had stood for some time a stout middle-aged gentleman, with pleasant eyes, hair pleasantly grizzled, and a ruddy, pleasing face. All of a sudden he appeared as a third competitor, skied the Flying Scud with four fat bids of a thousand dollars each, and then as suddenly fled the field, remaining ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the conservative merely the creature of habit? I suppose the older generation always looks disapprovingly at the younger, and, in spite of our youth, we really belong to the past generation. We see things through the eyes of our parents. We are mentally middle-aged—for middle age is a state of mind, after all. You and I were broken in by tradition—at least I know I was, and even the war couldn't free me. It only made me restless and dissatisfied. It destroyed ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... wondering what "golden fruits" were to be found on these shores at this time, oranges and nespoli being out of season, when some boatmen in a small fishing smack began to sing the "Santa Lucia" beloved by the Neapolitans. A handsome, middle-aged woman seated near us, touched to tears by the penetrating sweetness of the song, as it reached us across the waters, and with the camaraderie induced by the common hap of travel, has just whispered in my ear that her husband proposed to her at Bellagio. I fancied the happy ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... that unseen eminence a strident, persistent voice flowed steadily, expounding the necessity and uses of "a baptism of fire," with a monotonous variety of application. Fire was needful for the young, for the middle-aged, for the old, and for those, if any, who occupied the intermediate positions. It was needful for the rich and for the poor, for the ignorant and for the learned, for church-members, for those who were "well-wishers" but not "professors," and for hardened ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... three miles at a pretty steady trot, and at the end of the third,—at the very gates of the Haviland Park, in fact,—fortune came to her rescue. A good-humored middle-aged gentleman on a brown horse came cantering down the avenue and, passing through the gates, approached her. Seeing her, he raised his hat courteously; seeing him, she stopped her pony, ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... "till she was seventeen. At that time something happened at the school which I find mildly described in these papers as 'something unpleasant.' The plain fact was that the music-master attached to the establishment fell in love with Miss Gwilt. He was a respectable middle-aged man, with a wife and family; and, finding the circumstances entirely hopeless, he took a pistol, and, rashly assuming that he had brains in his head, tried to blow them out. The doctor saved his life, but not his reason; he ended, where he had better have begun, in an asylum. Miss Gwilt's ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... conduct of the naughty little flirt. Suddenly Kate received a summons home—and right glad I was to hear of it. She announced it to us one evening, saying she expected her father the next day. The following afternoon she came over to our cottage, accompanied with two middle-aged gentlemen. The elder of the two was Mr. Barclay, her father, who had known Mrs. Morris in early life; the other she introduced as Col. Paulding, a friend. Col. Paulding's manner struck us with surprise. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... first stanza was finished a carriage appeared in the rear of the group. From it descended a middle-aged man and a stout woman, and they together helped a young girl to alight. She was clad all in white. For a moment her thin, delicate figure shrank from the cutting wind. Timid, nervous, she glanced an instant at the crowd and the dark ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... less, in casts of brains, skulls, charts, and other matters that would make the most show for the money. That would do to begin with. I would then advertise myself as the celebrated Professor Brainey, or whatever name I might choose, and wait for my first customer. My first customer is a middle-aged man. I look at him,—ask him a question or two, so as to hear him talk. When I have got the hang of him, I ask him to sit down, and proceed to fumble his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... tucked themselves in a corner from which through a hole where the tiles had fallen off the roof, they could see down into the barnyard, where white and speckled chickens pecked about with jerky movements. A middle-aged woman stood in the doorway of the house looking suspiciously at the files of khaki-clad soldiers that shuffled slowly into the barns ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... A certain landowner, middle-aged but foppish, in a tunic of fine cloth and patent leather high boots, sold her a horse, and was so carried away by talking to her that he knocked down the price to meet her wishes. He held her hand a long time and, looking into her merry, sly, ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... to a low cottage on the road side, and there we knocked. A mulatto serving-man came round cautiously to reconnoitre from the back of the house, when having ascertained that we really were English travellers benighted and wet, the front door was opened, and we found within a middle-aged very kind-looking woman, and her little daughter; her name is Maria Rosa d'Acunha. Her husband and son were absent on business, and she and the little girl were alone. As soon as we had changed our wet clothes, and had provided for the ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
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