|
|
|
More "Spinster" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... want you, and I don't want Dublin Bay herrings, or boot-laces either, so you can go away.—The crankiness of that man is more than tongue can tell. As Miss Carty says, I shouldn't stand it for an hour—Come in, can't you—and well she may say it, and she a spinster without a worry under heaven but her suspicious nature and her hair falling out. And then to be treated the way I am by that girl! It'd make a saint waxy so it would.—Good heavens! can't you come in, or are you deaf or lame or what?" and in some exasperation she arose and went to the door. She looked ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... bounded at this intelligence, as he knew that it must be Isabel who was still a spinster. This was shortly after corroborated by an English gentleman who came on board. Their stay at Madras was intended to be short, and Newton resolved to ask immediate leave on shore. Apologising to Captain Oughton for making ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... ordinary legal view of the man with the pot of beer. For instance, it was logical to allow some degree of distinction between beer and tea, on the ground that a man may be moved by excess of beer to throw the pot at somebody's head. And it may be said that the spinster is seldom moved by excess of tea to throw the tea-pot at anybody's head. But the whole ground of argument is now changed. For people do not consider what the drunkard does to others by throwing the pot, but what he does to himself by drinking ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... not having encountered the gray, keen eyes of the spinster. She knew they would read unfailingly the whole extent of the revelation that had dawned upon her. That the spinster herself knew the truth, and had long known it, she was sure; and she recalled with a shudder the look of those uncanny eyes upon the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... I'm sure," returned Cope in a carefully generalized tone of suavity. It was successful with the spinster in the side room above, but it was no tone to use with a ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... virgin spinster), felt herself out of it because she had no son at the Front to talk about. I gathered that it was not so much a case of unsatisfied yearning for motherhood, as that she wanted to hold her own with the other charwomen who were represented in the trenches. So she assumed the relationship ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 18, 1917 • Various
... substantial house, the two pleasantest rooms of which, to me, were the small apartment on the ground floor, lined with books from floor to ceiling, and my own peculiar lodging in the upper regions, which, thanks to my mother's kindness and taste, was as pretty a bower of elegant comfort as any young spinster need have desired. There I chiefly spent my time, pursuing my favorite occupations, or in the society of my own especial friends: my dear H—— S——, when she was in London; Mrs. Jameson, who often climbed thither for an hour's pleasant discussion of her book on Shakespeare; and a lady with whom ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... forbid that I should encourage the giving of your young life to such a consuming passion. Happiness and success in the pursuit of any ideal can only come to one who dwells in a sympathetic atmosphere. Do you think a people that lauds Mr. Spinster as a great novelist and Mr. Perchance as a great critic can have any knowledge of that deity you would follow, or any ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... our people who possesses so the full the supreme gift of silence. Finally I mentioned the report of a case of measles in the village, and Ev'leen Ann responded in kind with the news that her Aunt Emma had bought a potato-planter. Ev'leen Ann is an orphan, brought up by a well-to-do spinster aunt, who is strong-minded and runs her own farm. After a time we glided by way of similar transitions to the ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... Mannering might have had more politeness," he said to himself—"it is not every man that can bring a good chance of 400L a year to a penniless girl. Singleside must be up to 400L a year now—there's Reilageganbed, Gillifidget, Loverless, Liealone, and the Spinster's Knowe—good 400L a year. Some people might have made their own of it in my place—and yet, to own the truth, after much consideration, I don't see ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... two ladies (with Mr. Bangs tagging) went from the pier directly to the St. Simon, the elder woman to stay until her town-house could be opened and put in order, the girl while she looked round for a spinster's studio or a small apartment within ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... moved and seduced by the instigation of the devil, upon the 15th day of May, in the 36th year of our sovereign lord King Charles the Second, with force and arms in the parish aforesaid, in and upon Ann Clark, spinster, of the same place, in the peace of God and of our said sovereign lord the King then and there being, feloniously, wilfully, and of your malice aforethought did make an assault and with a certain knife value a penny the throat ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... surpassingly beautiful Venetian whose love affairs upset a Quarter, a common-sense, motherly nurse whose heart warmed toward her companion in the adjoining berth, a plucky New England girl with the courage of her convictions, and a prim spinster whose only consolation was the boarder who ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... or form matrimonial connections, are ever on the alert for something or somebody better than themselves; and under such circumstances, naturally enough, Miss Alice Somebody—though a pretty girl—talented, as the world goes, highly educated, too, as many hundreds beside her, was still a spinster at twenty-three. The fact was, Mrs. Somebody was a woman of experience in the world—indeed, a dozen years' experience in life at Washington, had given her very definite ideas of expediency and diplomacy; and hence, as the means ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... The spinster colored up at the nurse's odd way of using the possessive pronoun, and dropped her eyes, as was natural on hearing ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... write his Panegyric, "Because, says the Critick, it is a pitiful Comparison of Alexander the Great with a Schoolmaster." What then wou'd he have said of Sir Richard's Metaphorical Comparison of the CREATOR Himself, to a Spinster, and a Weaver? The very Beasts of Mr. Milton, who kept Moses in his Eye, carry Infinitely more Majesty, than the Skies of ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill
... good do-out,' if two or three troublesome children have to be housed and fed during the critical days after an operation on father or mother, do I look for assistance from 'the cleanest woman in the street?' Alas, no; whether she be wife, widow, or spinster, I pass her by, careful not to tread on her pavement, much less her doorstep, and seek the happy-go-lucky person whose own premises would be better for more water and less grease, but from whose presence neither husband nor child ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... until you supplied this information I was feeling profoundly dubious about poor old Gussie's chances of inducing any spinster of any parish to join him in the saunter down the aisle. You will agree with me that he is ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... for winning the affections of a sweet Italian girl, and then leaving her to pine in discontent! Yet in the face of this, an old companion of mine in Rome, with whom I accidentally met the other day, wondered how on earth I could have made so tempting a story out of the matronly and black-haired spinster with whom I happened to be ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... of hearing herself praised. The men—at least those of high position and great prospects—had no scruple in offering a married woman that homage which might have entailed their own domestic subjugation if laid at a spinster's feet; and the women—all except the very smartest ladies (who liked her for her utter fearlessness and sang-froid as well as for her own sake)—thought it a fine thing to be on intimate terms with "Maud Bearwarden," ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... waved his handkerchief, and Aunt Hester, who was a spinster, cast down her eyes and fidgeted with some papers which she ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... marriage was contested on the ground of undue publication of the bans, both parties having a knowledge of the fact. I am a parson, you know, and this bit of law lies in my way. The bride appeared in the register as spinster, whereas she was the widow of an old pupil of her uncle's, whose surname you bear. It was not an easy victory by any means. The judge of the Consistory Court held that the inaccuracy in question was insufficient to invalidate the ceremony; ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... par sa foye She swore by her faith 20 Quelle ne pigna oncques That she kembyth neuer Laine si bien; Wulle so well; Pour ce lui payera on bien. Therfor men shall paye her well. Cecile la fyleresse Cecyle the spinster 24 Vint auecques elle. Cam with her. Elle prise moult vostre fylet She preyseth moche your yarn Qui fu filee a le keneule; That was sponne on the dystaf; Mais le fil But the yarne 28 Quon fila au rouwet That was sponne on the ...
— Dialogues in French and English • William Caxton
... completely beyond me. Can you understand a poor middle-aged spinster being frightened into doing a dangerous thing? That may seem to be nonsense. But if you ask why I took a morsel of paper, and wrote the warning which I was afraid to communicate by word of mouth—why ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... some inquiries about you,' said Mr Witherden, 'little thinking that I should find you under such circumstances as those which have brought us together. You are the nephew of Rebecca Swiveller, spinster, deceased, of Cheselbourne ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... was nothing against her! An elderly spinster Were such a grammatical mate For a spider and spinner, I swore I would win her, I knew I had met ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... were Empire and Alhambra programmes, a bundle of racing wires, and an account from a bookmaker showing a small debit balance. There were other miscellaneous bills, a plaintive epistle from a lady signing herself Flora, and begging for the loan of a fiver for a week, and an invitation to tea from a spinster who called herself Poppy. Amongst all this mass of miscellaneous documents there were only three which Wrayson laid on one side for further consideration. One of these was a note, dated from the Adelphi a few days before the tragedy, and written in a stiff, legal hand. ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... half believe that they may learn from omens at Christmas time what manner of marriages are in store for them. Divinings of this kind are known to all lands, and bear a strong family likeness; but it is, of course, only in a cold country that a spinster can find an opportunity of sitting beside a hole cut in the surface of a frozen river, listening to prophetic sounds proceeding from beneath the ice, and possibly seeing the image of the husband who she is to marry within the year trembling in the freezing water. Throughout the whole period ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... same as the sun in heaven 's a fact. God A'mighty's Self couldn't undo it wi'out some violent invention; an' for that matter I doan't see tu clear how even Him be gwaine to magic a married woman into a spinster again; any more than He could turn a spinster into a married woman, onless some ordinary human man came forrard. You must faace it braave an' strong. But that imp o' Satan—that damn Blanchard bwoy! Theer! I caan't say what ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... sharp as ever, but not quite so sour. She was not a spinster. There were few spinsters in those days! She had married a man of the neighbouring valley, whom she loved to distraction, and whom she led the life of a dog! But it was her nature to be cross-grained. She could not help it, and the poor ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... be supposed, it formed the subject of conversation at the breakfast-table when it was announced where my uncle had gone. His return was accordingly looked for with no little anxiety, especially by the young ladies of the party, including my three spinster aunts. Mr Kilcullin ...
— Ben Burton - Born and Bred at Sea • W. H. G. Kingston
... them, whether you want to or not," continued the indomitable spinster, "and I don't see any use in palavering the truth. Master Hightower and Mr. Arthur knows it by this time, and there's no harm in talking before them. Helen's an uncommon child. She's no more like other children, than my fine linen thread is like twisted tow. ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... which customers were led there, and to the grace with which the canvasser dipped the pen in the handsome silver inkstand. The county squire, the owner of racehorses, the undergraduate, and the Brixton spinster, are easily led by him to the commodious desk. Go and see the man, and you ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... to call and bring some of her work. Flamby had never forgotten the visit. The honey of Miss Kingsbury was honey of Trebizond, and it poisoned poor Flamby's happiness for many a day. Strange is the paradox of a woman's heart; for Flamby, well knowing that this spinster's venom was a product of jealousy—jealousy of talent, super-jealousy of youth and beauty—yet took hurt from it and hugged the sting of cruel criticism to her breast. In this, for all her engrafted wisdom, she showed herself a ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... the case, the spinster who had found her parents a hindrance to her extensive enjoyment of male companionship. She had literally ...
— Take the Reason Prisoner • John Joseph McGuire
... Francesco; but Francesco died in infancy, and the name, in spite of the omen, was given to the next son, who followed his father's profession, but never married. The next child was a daughter, who died a spinster; the next was a son, who became a priest, and the next a son, who died a bachelor. The failure of all their children to marry does not indicate a particularly happy home-life, but this is mere speculation. We only know that Stradivari's ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... her manners and deportment are irreproachable. The ghost-seer's independence of character are so firmly insisted upon that it seems impertinent to doubt the veracity of his story. My Aunt Margaret's Mirror was told to Scott in childhood by an ancient spinster, whose pleasing fancy it was to read alone in her chamber by the light of a taper fixed in a candlestick which she had formed out of a human skull, and who was learned in superstitious lore. She describes accurately the mood, when ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... brought up in a little country town with a spinster aunt and a whole good-natured, tolerant village for company. Well, she has accepted you and your entire household, even down to Dong Ling, on the ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... feel that my days are numbered, and that their number is scant. To all the world my life seems to have been successful beyond the wishes of mortal man, but to me it is a dismal failure, in that I die bachelor Archbishop of Cologne, and you are the spinster ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... considerably exhausted. Miss Payne had gone out to dine with one of her former girls, now the wife of a rackety horsy man, whose conduct made her often look back with a sigh of regret to the tranquil days passed under the guardianship of the prudent spinster; so having partaken of tea at their usual dinner-time she sat and mused awhile on the one subject from which she could derive comfort—Errington and his wonderful kindness to her. If he took the matter in hand she thought herself ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... 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 her sister died in (it was the most cheerful room in the house), and lived in ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... coming in sight of the promontory of Sunium, where the Greek Muse, in an awful vision, came to me, and said in a patronising way, "Why, my dear" (she always, the old spinster, adopts this high and mighty tone)—"Why, my dear, are you not charmed to be in this famous neighbourhood, in this land of poets and heroes, of whose history your classical education ought to have made ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... surrendered the babe. The lady danced him with the spinster's charming awkwardness, yet with instinctive feminine security, about the hall, while the little girls in pigtails, daughters of the house, followed like adoratory angels in an altar-piece, and the old peasant-woman looked benignly on, a myriad-wrinkled St. Elizabeth. ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... boy. But I can assure you that that sort of thing might touch the heart of an elderly spinster, and she might adopt you, and then there would be no need for you to be a young adventurer ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... mother's family in Virginia—a branch that had gone out with a King's grant when Virginia was a crown colony. The collateral ancestor, Pendleton, had been a justice of the peace in Virginia, and a spinster daughter had written down some of the strange cases with which ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... led the race; The next Ulysses, measuring pace with pace; Behind him, diligently close, he sped, As closely following as the running thread The spindle follows, and displays the charms Of the fair spinster's breast and moving arms: Graceful in motion thus, his foe he plies, And treads each footstep ere the dust can rise; His glowing breath upon his shoulders plays: The admiring Greeks loud acclamations raise: To him they give their wishes, hearts, and eyes, And send their souls before him as he ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... and closed the door with a bang that impoverished invective—for volumes may be spoken—in the banging of a door. The moment was inauspicious for the entrance of Harriet Penny. At best, Chloe merely endured the little spinster, with her whining, hysterical outbursts, and abject, unreasoning fear of God, man, the devil, and everything else. "Oh, my dear, I am so glad!" piped the little woman, rushing to the girl's side: "we need never ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... Carlyle Terrace, Edgware Road, son of Arthur Hawkehurst, journalist; Charlotte Halliday, spinster, of the Lawn, Bayswater, daughter of ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... the Fawners strain and relax the Muscles of their Faces in making Distinction between a Spinster in a coloured Scarf and an Handmaid in a Straw-Hat, the Worriers use the same Roughness to both, and prevail upon the Easiness of the Passengers, to the ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... his pocket a soiled piece of paper, which professed to be a certificate of the marriage of Thomas Wychecombe, barrister, with Martha Dodd, spinster, &c. &c. The document was duly signed by the rector of a parish church in Westminster, and bore a date sufficiently old to establish the legitimacy of the person who held it. This extraordinary precaution produced the very natural effect of increasing the distrust of the vice-admiral, and, in ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... 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 these customers to the selection of the inappropriate. A few of them had taste, or ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... domicile a spinster sister presided, who reflected, on compulsion, in the manner of a sickly moon, the attenuity ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... disdaining the customary twaddling topics of the rhymesters. Such an amazing allegory as "On Raiding the Ice Box," which deals, of course, with the experience of a man who attempts to explore the mind of an elderly Boston spinster, marks this powerful poet as a man of unusual satirical ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... o' your sad loss, my dear, and our old hearts have ached for you. 'Tis a heavy cross to have the hope of bein' a happy wife snatched away, and a lone and loveless spinster's lot instead stretchin' out in front o' you. 'Tis a long and weary road ...
— The Carved Cupboard • Amy Le Feuvre
... you have to say the folks around Yimville are when you get inside. Yes siree! Got the court house full. Seems as if we had every farmer from forty miles around here, and——" he stopped and chuckled loudly—"every farmer's wife and every spinster! The women are certainly mighty anxious to know how you stand on votes for 'em! Talk about home industries for the men, and the usual bunk about protective tariff, but—go easy about national votes for women, Judge!—Go easy. ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... upon his pillow, the young man mildly wondered about the woman next door to him. She must have come in on the evening train while he was at the moving pictures, and retired immediately. Very likely she was, as Mr. Penrose asserted, some acrimonious spinster, but, at any rate, she had temporarily silenced the rich old tyrant of whom all the hotel stood ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... the wind, and the "something" would doubtless bear fruit; for this elderly spinster aunt, with a mania for psychical research, had brains as well as will power, and by hook or by crook she usually managed to accomplish her ends. The revelation was made soon after tea, when she sidled close up to him as they paced slowly along ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... Higgins she would not marry him if he asked her, was not coquetting: she was announcing a well-considered decision. When a bachelor interests, and dominates, and teaches, and becomes important to a spinster, as Higgins with Eliza, she always, if she has character enough to be capable of it, considers very seriously indeed whether she will play for becoming that bachelor's wife, especially if he is so little interested in marriage that a determined ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... tall, by no means bad-looking, and standing on the list in the Family Bible No. IV. From this union Mr. Witherington had issue: first, a daughter, christened Moggy, whom we shall soon have to introduce to our readers as a spinster of forty-seven; and second, Antony Alexander Witherington, Esquire, whom we just now have left in a very comfortable position, and in ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... time, for family curiosity never concerned itself with Raymond Mortimer unless he was annoyingly obtrusive or disobedient. But the first domestic records of her arrival, kept naturally enough by Miss Greene, whose lonely spinster heart was the boy's domestic refuge, went back to a day in June when he was five. He was in his nursery and she in an adjoining room, the communicating door of which was open. She had heard him in the nursery talking to himself, as she supposed, ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... But be considerate, I beg 'ee, mee deer. Well—I wasn't a bachelor when I married 'ee, any more than you were a spinster. Just as you was a widow-woman, ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... introduction appears insufficient; but Nares knew what he was doing. The sight of her old neighbourly depredator shivering at the door in tatters, the very oddity of his appeal, touched a soft spot in the spinster's heart. "I always had a fancy for the old lady," Nares said, "even when she used to stampede me out of the orchard, and shake her thimble and her old curls at me out of the window as I was going by; I always thought she ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... it came over her that a woman with more experience would never have written such a letter. Everybody knew that men forget, change, easily replace first loves. Nobody but such a cloistered, academic spinster as she would have trusted a seven years' promise. This was another result of such lives as they led—such helpless, provincial women. Her resentment grew against the place. It had made her ...
— A Reversion To Type • Josephine Daskam
... spinster of seven years' standing, was first taken into the confidence of Ginger Stott's mother, the scheme which she afterwards elaborated immediately presented itself to her mind. This fact is a curious instance of Ellen Mary's mobility of intellect, ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... "dear Lady Wilde!" I noticed that her glance went towards Willie, who was standing on the other side of his mother, talking to a tall, handsome girl. Willie's friend seemed amused at the lyrical outburst of the green spinster, for smiling a little ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... to go on so," returned the spinster, shaking her head in vehement agitation; "you may just tell her it's no use, my pa isn't likely to be ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... capable, dependable woman, too; and found suited to her the adjective "motherly." This for the same reason which moved new acquaintances instinctively to address her as "Mrs." For Sue Milo, at forty-five, bore none of the marks of the so-called typical spinster. ...
— Apron-Strings • Eleanor Gates
... of mischief, he was sent to a sort of kindergarten, kept by a spinster around the corner. The spinster devoted rather more attention to the Browning boy than to her other pupils—she had to, to keep him out of mischief—and soon the boy ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... any special knowledge of stage-craft. "I know as little about the division of a drama as the spinster about the division of a battle, to use Iago's simile,"[114] he once wrote to a friend. Yet as a critic he had of course some general ideas about the making of plays, without having worked out any subtle theories on the subject. In criticising a play by Allan Cunningham, who ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... Tom Hopkinson thought you were setting your cap at him," retorted Alma. She relished the dignity of her married state, and enjoyed giving her spinster sister little claws when occasion called. However, Amanda had a temper of her own, ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... great spinning-wheels that are used in this country for spinning the wool, and if attitude were to be studied among our Canadian lasses, there cannot be one more becoming, or calculated to show off the natural advantages of a fine figure, than spinning at the big wheel. The spinster does not sit, but walks to and fro, guiding the yarn with one hand while with the ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... expect to marry. I don't know as I do at my time of life," responded the spinster. "I rather guess my day for chances ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... sight, so common alas! in England, of the affluent spinster, "growing pointlessly rotund on rich food at one of the smug hotels or boarding-houses for parasitic nonentities, which are distributed so plentifully all over the land," while thousands of promising young men had to wait too long before they were able to take their bride to the ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... season he'd growed well-t'-do: a drive in the teeth o' hell, in season—if hell's made o' wind an' sea, as I'm inclined t' think—an' the ease of a bachelor man, between whiles, in his cottage at Rickity Tickle, where he lived all alone like a spick-an'-span spinster. 'Twas not o' the sea he was scared. 'Twas o' want in an unkind world; an' t'was jus' that an' no more that drove un t' hard sailin' an' contempt o' death—sheer fear o' want in the wolf's world that he'd made this world out t' ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... already chose my Officer. And what was he? For-sooth, a great Arithmatician, One Michaell Cassio, a Florentine, (A Fellow almost damn'd in a faire Wife) That neuer set a Squadron in the Field, Nor the deuision of a Battaile knowes More then a Spinster. Vnlesse the Bookish Theoricke: Wherein the Tongued Consuls can propose As Masterly as he. Meere pratle (without practise) Is all his Souldiership. But he (Sir) had th' election; And I (of whom his eies had seene the proofe At Rhodes, at Ciprus, and on others grounds ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... Dresden shepherdess, as unfit for the scrutiny of polite eyes; and on the table where Miss Prudence did work in water colors, after the fashion of the impressionists, lay a prim and impossible composition representing a moss-rose and a number of heartsease, colored with that caution which modest spinster artists ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... Juferouw Cornelia Van Antwerp who kept a little school in the basement of her dwelling, the family fortune having dwindled until this home was about the only property left to the Juferouw. In this school my sister Althea and I were taught the three R's and not much else. The ancient Dutch spinster was a lady, well-bred, dignified and courteous, who held a high place in the elect circle or Old Colonie society, and was not the less esteemed because of her straitened circumstances. Her walk and ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... did not wish at that moment to think of her nurse-maid or even of her baby, and certainly not to give her attention to the tales of her landlady and the spinster ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... near forty; a thin, hard-featured spinster, dwelling alone with her mother the Lady Balgarnock. Her two younger sisters had married early—the one to Captain Luce, of Dunragit in Wigtownshire, the other to a Mr. Forbes, of whom I know nothing save that his house was in Edinburgh: and as they had no great ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... morrow was to be conveyed to the Trenchards', across the county. Wanless had her steadily in its score pair of eyes for twenty-four hours, as Purcell, her maid, had foreseen. "You are doing a strange thing, ma'am, permit me to say." Purcell was an elderly spinster, who only required her own permission to say what she pleased. "You will be watched and reported. I suppose I am not in the servants' hall for nothing." Mrs. Wilmot said feebly that she supposed she was there for meals. Purcell stiffened her wiry ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... begrimed with flax-dirt has disappeared; the noise of his brake and swingling knife has ended, and the boys no longer make bonfires of his swingling tow. The sound of the spinning-wheel, the song of the spinster, and the snapping of the clock-reel all have ceased; the warping bars and quill wheel are gone, and the thwack of the loom is heard only in the factory. The spinning woman of King Lemuel cannot ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... thesis was that if warning were given that the world would end in three days the entire population of the globe would give itself over to an orgy of sex; sex being life itself. It is the obsession of the doomed consumptive, the doomed spinster, the last thought of a man with ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... did not say so, everybody could see from the outset the pity of its ever having come about at all. The pious and stiffly respectable priest's sister had been harmless enough as a spinster. It made the heart ache to contemplate her as a wife. Incredibly narrow-minded, ignorant, suspicious, vain, and sour-tempered, she must have driven a less equable and well-rooted man than Jeremiah ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... Katydid I know it by the trill That quivers through thy piercing notes, So petulant and shrill; I think there is a knot of you Beneath the hollow tree,— A knot of spinster Katydids,—- Do ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... some fancied disorder of hair or bonnet. "Marriage is a fountain of youth for"—with a sigh—"old maids. Susan Duran, spinster! Horrible! Do ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... of the very same mind," said a very prim spinster. "But what a pity the former governor ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... gaping of this garment revealed a breast to be likened only to that of an old peasant woman who cares nothing about her personal ugliness. The fleshless arm was like a stick on which a bit of stuff was hung. Seen at her window, this spinster seemed tall from the length and angularity of her face, which recalled the exaggerated proportions of certain Swiss heads. The character of their countenance—the features being marked by a total want of harmony—was that of hardness in the lines, sharpness in the tones; while an unfeeling ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... a portly old Gentleman, with light prominent eyes and a crest of grizzled auburn hair, in the wake of an imposing Matron in ruby velvet: they are followed by an elderly Spinster in black and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 28, 1893 • Various
... some rare spinster, grown old with years and good works, and now having a safe home with a rich and powerful benefactress. Yet Chelsea is not handsome in her old age, and Chelsea was not pretty in youth, nor fair to view in middle life; but ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... with, was either of her own choosing or due to some tragic event of early life. She did not relish the opposite pole of human experience to her companion's. Of course, he was a bachelor nominally unattached—she appreciated that—just as she was a spinster very actually unattached. But all men of his type she had understood were alike; only some—this one certainly—were much better than others. Honestly she was quite unconscious of any personal reason for assigning to him ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... a jolly, fat, good-natured man, is presented with a woollen night-cap on New Year's morning by his housekeeper, "a typical spinster not overburdened with fat." This so rejoices the Deacon that he is possessed to make others happy, goes to call upon his pastor, and makes him leave his books and spend the day skating, sleighing, and driving ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... were children. You get a valentine! I'm e'en a'most struck dumb with astonishment to hear you think of such things. Go, get your doll-baby, or your sampler, and look on that. Saints of Mercy! It seems only yesterday you were a baby in long clothes," answered Miss Henrietta Mayfield, a spinster of uncertain age; but the folks in the village, who always knew everything, declared she had not owned to a day over thirty-five for the last ten years. This, if true, was quite excusable, for Miss Henrietta's little toilette ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... Aunt Sophy, you would have to coin a term or fall back on the dictionary definition of a spinster. "An unmarried woman," states that worthy work, baldly, "especially when no longer young." That, to the world, was Sophy Decker. Unmarried, certainly. And most certainly no longer young. In figure, she was, at fifty, what is known in the corset ads as a ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... feeling more in the mood of the latter, but never dreaming how much those carriages meant to me. As I went timidly into the room I found nearly every seat full, and was greeted with cordial applause. My sister took a seat beside me. My subject was "Spinster Authors of England." My hands trembled so visibly that I laid my manuscript on the table, but after getting in magnetic touch with those before me, I did ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... might even be said that she was fond of him. But what she liked better than him was to gratify her vanity, by showing her power over the finest young fellow in the village, and to use him as a foil to aggravate George Hawker. My aunt Betsy (spinster), used to say, that if she were a man, sooner than stand that hussy's airs (meaning Mary's), in the way young Stockbridge did, she'd cut, and run to America, which, in the old lady's estimation, was the last resource left to an unfortunate human ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... turn interrupted by Cornelia Blair. Cornelia was a spinster with more freedom than most human beings ever attain, her father having worked himself to death to leave her well provided for. "The whole fault is the social system," she declared. "Because of it men have been able to take the really interesting work of the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the house for instructions, and guided by the under-butler found Lady Homartyn hiding away in the walled Dutch garden behind the dairy. She had been giving away the prizes of the flower-show, and she was resting in a deck chair while a spinster relation presided over the tea. Mrs. Britling had fled the outer festival earlier, and was sitting by the tea-things. Lady Meade and two or three visitors had motored out from Hartleytree to assist, and Manning had come in with his tremendous ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... no reply,—too wise now for that; but she winced, and bit her lip severely, as the irate spinster "gave Miss Maverick to understand that an intercourse which might possibly be agreeable to her French associations could never be tolerated at the home of Dr. Johns. For herself, she had a reputation for propriety to sustain; and while Miss Maverick made a portion of her household, she must comply ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... the ocean twice, and was a wiser, sadder woman for it. At eight she turned in, and ten minutes later Amanda came aboard with a flock of gay friends. But no temptations of the flesh could lure the wary spinster from her den; for the night was rough and cold, and the steamer a Babel ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... the daughter of Thos. Topham, of the city of London, alderman and goldsmith, who, taking the Parliamentary side in the troubles then commencing, disappointed Sir George of the property which he expected at the demise of his father-in-law, who devised his money to his second daughter, Barbara, a spinster. ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... was very select, consisted of three highly susceptible ladies and Stellato as medium-in-chief. Miss Turligood, a sort of Oroveso to the Druidical chorus, was a muscular spinster, fierce and forty, sporting steel spectacles, a frizette of the most scrupulous honesty, and a towering comb which formed what the landscape-gardeners call "an object" in the distance. Next this commanding lady, with fat hands sprawled upon the table, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... before she was enveloped in wraps. An admiring group, huddled in the doorway, murmured approval, from the leading "girl," who was the cook, a coloured widow of some sixty winters, whose admiration was irrepressible, down to a New England spinster whose Anabaptist conscience wrestled with her instincts, and who, although disapproving of "French folks," paid in her heart that secret homage to their gowns and bonnets which her sterner lips refused. The applause of this audience ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... preparation with a bishop's license, and my aunt's blessing, to go simpering up to the altar; or perhaps be cried three times in a country church, and have an unmannerly fat clerk ask the consent of every butcher in the parish to join John Absolute and Lydia Languish, spinster! Oh that I should live ...
— The Rivals - A Comedy • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... her intensely. She is thin, thirty, colourless, bosomless. I should say she was passionless—a predestined spinster. She has never drunk hot tea or lived in the sun or laughed a hearty laugh. I remember once, at my wit's end for talk, telling her the old story of Theodore Hook accosting a pompous stranger on ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... Griffith Gaunt's case. The Rev. William Wentworth published, in the usual recitative, the banns of marriage between Thomas Leicester, of the parish of Marylebone in London, and Mercy Vint, spinster, of this parish; and creation, present ex hypothesi mediaevale, but absent in fact, assented, by silence, to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... foreground, but none could fail to be impressed by the silent reverence of the congregation. No service was in process, yet many believers knelt at prayer. Here a pretty girl returned thanks for evident blessings received; there an old spinster, the narrowness of whose means forbade her expending a couple of sous on the hire of a chair, knelt on the chilly flags and murmured words of gratitude for benefits whereof her appearance bore no ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... better, she reflected, far better, that she should go into the dull and dreary exile of an English village, with the unexciting companionship of Aunt Emily, an ascetic spinster of the mid-Victorian era, and make pretence of pique with Walter, than to reveal to him the shameful truth. He would at least in those circumstances retain of her a recollection fond and tender. He would not despise nor ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... England spinster turned deprecating eyes to him. "My," she whispered shrilly, "he was just terrible, wasn't he? But so handsome! I can't help but think it was more seasickness with him than ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... friends she saw seldom. Two of them had married. One was a spinster of forty. They had all moved to the south side during the period of popularity briefly enjoyed by that section in the late '90s. Hannah had no time for their afternoon affairs. At night she was too tired or too ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... reached Harwich, he knew that this offer had been accepted without hesitation; and thenceforth, accordingly, he threw his daily letters to his wife into the form of communications meant for an imaginary group, consisting of a spinster sister, a statistical laird, a rural clergyman of the Presbyterian Kirk, and a brother, a veteran officer on half-pay. The rank of this last personage corresponded, however, exactly with that of his own elder brother, John Scott, who also, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... at Hampton Court. Some friction and some gossip is presumably inevitable wherever women herd together in an unnatural segregation from men and children. But at any rate the German Stift saves many a woman from the tragic struggle with old age and poverty to which the penniless incapable spinster is condemned in our country. It may not be a paradise, but it is a haven. As I said at the beginning, the Frenchman dowers and marries his girl, the German buys her a refuge, the Englishman leaves her ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... formed everywhere a kind of centre; their parlour, the resort of mothers, being a half-way stage between the cloister and the world. At their house, and doubtless through their means, Girard saw the ladies of the town, among them one of forty years, a spinster, Mdlle. Gravier, daughter of an old contractor for the royal works at the Arsenal. This lady had a shadow who never left her, her cousin La Reboul, daughter of a skipper and sole heiress to herself; a woman, too, ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... condition, seemed to her worthy to have a gentlewoman to wife; and seeing that for all his wealth he was fit for nothing better than to devise a blend, set up a warp, or higgle about yarn with a spinster, she determined to dispense with his embraces, save so far as she might find it impossible to refuse them; and to find her satisfaction elsewhere with one that seemed to her more meet to afford it than ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... genial Comic Paper man upon FLORA did not, indeed, pass away, until she and Miss CAROWTHERS were in their appointed quarters under the roof of Mrs. SKAMMERHORN, whither they went immediately upon the arrival of the elder spinster ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 29, October 15, 1870 • Various
... your daughter from this country,' he wrote, 'lest she should be frightened by the troops lying here. She has got one Betty Burke, an Irish girl, who, she tells me, is a good spinster. If her spinning pleases you, you may keep her till she spins all your lint.' In spite of the gravity of the situation, one cannot help thinking that Flora and her stepfather must have had a good deal of amusement concocting ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... with a tearful and blushing cheek held up to the good spinster's, "kiss me, won't ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... losing her freedom. She thought over her friends and acquaintances in Paris. Which of them would be the safest to communicate with? Which would be most useful to her, and would trouble her least? Finally she decided on telephoning to a rich American spinster whom she had known for years, a woman who was what is called "large minded," who was very tolerant, very understanding, and not more curious than a woman has to be. Caroline Briggs could comprehend a hint without demanding facts to ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... to be met and overcome were many and great. He might have betrothed himself to almost any woman in society, widow or spinster, without anticipating one hundredth part of the opposition which he must now certainly encounter. He was not even angry beforehand with the prejudice which would animate his father and mother, for he admitted that it was hardly a prejudice at all, and certainly not one ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... old chateau. I tried it again last year, but the charm was gone, for I missed my boy with his fun, his music, and the frank, fresh affection he gave his 'little mamma,' as he insisted on calling the lofty spinster who loved him like half-a-dozen grandmothers ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... And the long wooden veranda that he had invoked did not unify the trinity. But one didn't want it to. The wrongness had a character all its own. The wrongness was right—at any rate after Mary had hit on it for William. As a spinster, she would, I think, have been happiest in a trim modern villa. But it was a belief of hers that she had married a man of strange genius. She had married him for himself, not for his genius; but this added grace in him was a thing to be reckoned ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... seemingly an obstacle to anything he desired. For a moment the whimsicality of it interrupted the current of his feeling. He thought of the probable comments of the men of his London club upon the drift his conversation was taking with a New England spinster about his fitness to marry a school-teacher. With a smile that was summoned to hide his annoyance, he said, "I don't see how I ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... A wealthy New England spinster with the most elaborate plans for the education of the negro goes to visit her nephew in Arkansas, where she learns the needs of the colored race first hand and ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... figure of a man, that of a music-master, stood vigorously forth. The confessors had decided that music was a Christian art, born of the Catholic Church and developed within her. The two Maries were therefore permitted to study music. A spinster in spectacles, who taught singing and the piano in a neighboring convent, wearied them with exercises; but when the eldest girl was ten years old, the Comte de Granville insisted on the importance of giving her ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... T. C. Noble kindly communicated to me a copy of the original marriage certificate, which is as follows: "Samuell Peps of this parish Gent. & Elizabeth De Snt. Michell of Martins in the fields, Spinster. Published October 19tn, 22nd, 29th 1655, and were married by Richard Sherwin Esqr one of the justices of the Peace of the Cittie and Lyberties of Westm. December ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... thought Mary and Mr. Ashforth so suited to one another. Well, well, the heart's an unaccountable thing—to an old spinster, anyhow." ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... Francisco builder's hopes, and occupied finally in his despair. Intended originally as the palace of some inchoate California Aladdin, it usually ended as a lodging house in which some helpless widow or hopeless spinster managed to combine respectability with the hard task ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... his breast With verse, let him, fit votarist, implore Their inspiration. He perchance the gifts Of young Lyaeus, and the dread exploits, May sing in aptest numbers; he the fate 310 Of sober Pentheus, [FF] he the Paphian rites, And naked Mars with Cytherea chain'd, And strong Alcides in the spinster's robes, May celebrate, applauded. But with you, O Naiads, far from that unhallow'd rout, Must dwell the man whoe'er to praised themes Invokes the immortal Muse. The immortal Muse To your calm habitations, to the cave Corycian[GG] or ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... the pictured Madonna on every wall. Carnival comes, and completes the wreck of the proprieties. The girls secure their window and pelt their black-bearded Professor in the street below without dread of a scolding on the "convenances." The impassive spinster whose voice never rises at home above the most polite whisper screams with delight at the first sugarplum that hits her, and furtively supplies her nieces with ammunition to carry on the war. "It is such fun, isn't it, papa?" shout ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... immediately behind him. Immediately there is a terrific uproar, in which through the delighted yells of the crowd, the crashing of the overturned chairs, and the general confusion could be heard the shrieks of the little spinster and weird Scotch oaths from McTavish. After the noise had somewhat subsided and when the confusion had been reduced to a semblance of order, McTavish was discovered with his hand upon the collar of the dazed parson who in turn held the obese Teuton in a firm and ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... air-guns, sheets of paper soldiers, valentines, fire-crackers before the Fourth, elastic for slingshots, spools, needles and yards of blue calico with white dots, which hung over strings above the counters. Emily was a dark, heavy-browed spinster with a booming bass voice and a stern manner, and when you crept, awed and timid, into the store she glared at you and boomed out, 'Which side, young man?' Yet her store was a kid's paradise. I have often wondered since whether she didn't, in her heart, ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... which, though wandering melancholy and alone in the wilderness where they grow, he passeth by with neglect, making a companion of his loneliness. But, to drop all metaphor—where will you find a flower more interesting than a spinster of threescore and ten, of sixty, of fifty, or of forty? They have, indeed, "wasted their sweetness on the desert air." Some call them "old maids;" but it is a malicious appellation, unless it can be proved that they have refused to be wives. I would always take the part ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... expanded at whatever cost into something truly national and all embracing. The ancient grudging selfishness that would not feed other people's children should be cast out. In the war time the wealthy bachelor and the spinster of advancing years took it for granted that other people's children should fight for them. The ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... must be a wedding or a funeral," I whispered, feeling more in the mood of the latter, but never dreaming how much those carriages meant to me. As I went timidly into the room I found nearly every seat full, and was greeted with cordial applause. My sister took a seat beside me. My subject was "Spinster Authors of England." My hands trembled so visibly that I laid my manuscript on the table, but after getting in magnetic touch with those before me, I did ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... with his spinster sister, Anna Ivanovna, to whom Tatiana Markovna was much attached. Tatiana Markovna was delighted when she came to town. There was no one with whom she liked more to drink coffee, no one to whom she gave her confidence in the same degree; they shared the same liking ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... Newton bounded at this intelligence, as he knew that it must be Isabel who was still a spinster. This was shortly after corroborated by an English gentleman who came on board. Their stay at Madras was intended to be short, and Newton resolved to ask immediate leave on shore. Apologising to Captain Oughton for ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... not at all complimentary to the gentlemen," rejoined a thin, elderly-looking spinster of an uncertain age, dressed in an old-fashioned style, who I should have thought would have been the last person to come to the defence of a sex that had ...
— Major Frank • A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint
... moved thoughtfully towards the far end of the room, where the sunshine still slanted in through the open casements of the bay window, and where the delicate, little spinster lady stood awaiting her. Amorous pigeons cooed below on the string-course. Bees droned ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... Shargar's attentions would be disagreeable: they must always be simple and manly. What was more to the point, she had given him her address in London, and he was going to call upon her the next day. She was on a visit to Lady Janet Gordon, an elderly spinster, who ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... than the male; therefore, in these days is fulfilled the scriptural prophecy that seven women shall lay hold of one man and entreat to be called by his name. Miss Daisy Norsham, a veteran Belgravian spinster, decided, after some disappointing seasons, that this text was particularly applicable to London. Doubtful, therefore, of securing a husband at the rate of one chance in seven, or dissatisfied at the prospect of a seventh share in a man, she resolved ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... I'm e'en a'most struck dumb with astonishment to hear you think of such things. Go, get your doll-baby, or your sampler, and look on that. Saints of Mercy! It seems only yesterday you were a baby in long clothes," answered Miss Henrietta Mayfield, a spinster of uncertain age; but the folks in the village, who always knew everything, declared she had not owned to a day over thirty-five for the last ten years. This, if true, was quite excusable, for Miss Henrietta's little toilette ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... thought whether he was worthy of being loved. He was indeed more worthy of love than many to whom it is freely given; but he knew no more about it, I say, than a chicken in the shell knows of the blue sky. The shabby spinster, living with her cousin the baker in the house opposite, knew a hundred times better than he what the word love meant: she had ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... time she was near forty; a thin, hard-featured spinster, dwelling alone with her mother the Lady Balgarnock. Her two younger sisters had married early—the one to Captain Luce, of Dunragit in Wigtownshire, the other to a Mr. Forbes, of whom I know nothing save that his house was in Edinburgh: and as they had no great love for Miss ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... can not be attributed to sectional prejudice may be proved by this extract from a column of vituperation in the Grand Rapids, Mich., Times, during this same trip, headed "Spinster Susan's Suffrage Show:" ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... not very unusual type of spinster who is in a condition of retarded development (and you will find this kind of woman even on County Council's), is completely unconscious of the sexual element in herself and in human nature generally. Nay, though one went ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... marrying three beautiful wives in succession and clinging to each with a certain desperate, even if unsympathetic, affection. As a father he was, naturally, a failure,—hard, domineering, unyielding. His four children reacted characteristically: one was until past middle life a thin spinster, the mental image of her father; one died; one passed over into the white world and her children's children are now white, with no knowledge of their Negro blood; the fourth, my father, bent before grandfather, but did not break—better ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... somebody better than themselves; and under such circumstances, naturally enough, Miss Alice Somebody—though a pretty girl—talented, as the world goes, highly educated, too, as many hundreds beside her, was still a spinster at twenty-three. The fact was, Mrs. Somebody was a woman of experience in the world—indeed, a dozen years' experience in life at Washington, had given her very definite ideas of expediency and diplomacy; and hence, as ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... the compass, the chicken pox, whooping cough, measles, and scarlet fever. All these unhappy incidents of childhood left but little impression on my mind. I have, however, most pleasant memories of the good spinster, Maria Yost, who patiently taught three generations of children the rudiments of the English language, and introduced us to the pictures in "Murray's Spelling-book," where Old Father Time, with his scythe, and the farmer stoning the boys in his apple ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... now for that; but she winced, and bit her lip severely, as the irate spinster "gave Miss Maverick to understand that an intercourse which might possibly be agreeable to her French associations could never be tolerated at the home of Dr. Johns. For herself, she had a reputation for propriety to sustain; and while Miss Maverick made a portion of her ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... dear captain," retorted the irresistible spinster, spreading her skirts the wider, both arms akimbo—her thin fingers acting as clothespins, "that Sue is to take her dancing lesson next door, and as I can't fly in the second-story window, having mislaid my wings, I must use ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... day, at any of these houses, without a sitting-room for herself. The ladies' drawing-room is a desolate wilderness. The American women themselves do not use it. It is generally empty, or occupied by some forlorn spinster, eliciting harsh sounds from the wretched piano ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... answered gaily—'Oh! he made up to an elderly spinster, and married her, not long since; weighing her heavy purse against her faded charms, and expecting to find that solace in gold which was denied ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... a most devout abhorrence, mingled with awe, for this ancient spinster. He told me the other day, in a whisper, that she was a cursed brimstone—in fact, he added another epithet, which I would not repeat for the world. I have remarked, however, that he is always extremely civil to her when ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... flecks of sunlight filtered through the branches of the tall trees to caress it. In the hair, too, was a single red rose, caught into place with a natural grace that it seemed a pity to waste on three spinster aunts and two dogs, and the same note of color was repeated in another rebellious blossom at the throat. The young face was plump and oval, and the cheeks were pink, the brown eyes were wide and sparkling and—Oh, well, the young man in the pool stopped cataloguing her ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... he only believed that they were grateful for good advice, and went about among them, easy, good-natured, and utterly unconscious that for him sparkled Mrs. Ledwich's bugles, and for him waved every spinster's ribbon, from Miss Rich down ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... sigh of relief that Sara, in obedience to the warning raucously intoned by a hurrying porter, vacated her seat in the railway compartment in which she had travelled from Fallowdene. Her companions on the journey had been an elderly spinster and her maid, and as the former had insisted upon the exclusion of every breath of outside air, Sara felt half-suffocated by the time they ran into Oldhampton Junction. The Monkshaven train was already standing in the station, and, commissioning a porter to transfer ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... fat, good-natured man, is presented with a woollen night-cap on New Year's morning by his housekeeper, "a typical spinster not overburdened with fat." This so rejoices the Deacon that he is possessed to make others happy, goes to call upon his pastor, and makes him leave his books and spend the day skating, sleighing, and driving with ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... gradually in quantity and in quality, the first visible symptom of comfortable circumstances, of wealth in a house. Again, that woman always had the distaff in her hand from morning till night, and if the house-keeper was indignant, the spinster could have wept as at a profanation. Finally, unable to endure it longer, she rose, abandoned her patient, watchful attitude, and stooping over, her little green shawl displaced by every movement, began actively to pick up, smooth and fold ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... all, a little parable which Waldo Gillespie read to a certain doubting Thomas, on the very evening of the day which changed Gladys Edgecombe, spinster, into Mrs. Bruno Gillespie, may better serve in ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... make comments on big brothers," I smiled back at her. Win was nineteen and I had attained the mature age of twenty-seven. We were orphans and spinster Aunt Lucy did her best to be a parent to us; and we got on smoothly enough, for none of us had the temperament that rouses ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... us. My father took her over the bridge to the summerhouse looking on the Down. After a little while he said: "Miss L—, my son says I am to read to you," and added, "I will read whatever you like." He read some of "Maud," "The Spinster's Sweet-Arts," ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... Mr. and Mrs. Chadwick and their three daughters. The burly chancellor and his wife and clerical son from Oxford. The meagre little doctor without incumbrance. Mr. Harding with Eleanor and Miss Bold. The dean leaning on a gaunt spinster, his only child now living with him, a lady very learned in stones, ferns, plants, and vermin, and who had written a book about petals. A wonderful woman in her way was Miss Trefoil. Mr. Finnie, the attorney, with his wife, was to be seen, much ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... pressure, all the converging traditional influences he had so often ridiculed, yet, as she knew, had never completely thrown off.... Yes, those quiet invisible women at Altringham-his uncle's widow, his mother, the spinster sisters—it was not impossible that, with tact and patience—and the stupidest women could be tactful and patient on such occasions—they might eventually persuade him that it was his duty, they might put just the right ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... stronger because her father was supposed—by his unfortunate wife at least—to have been the scion of a proud and aristocratic family, who had not been too proud, however, to leave her to starve. Altogether, Miss Husted was an exceedingly romantic, high-strung, middle-aged spinster, miles and miles above her station in life, whose heart and purse were open to any foreigner who had discernment enough to see her weakness and tact enough to pander to it by hinting at his noble lineage. This love of things and beings ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... was a boat—named for the unyielding spinster whom the captain hoped to marry. Through the two Betsy's a delightful ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... the long wooden veranda that he had invoked did not unify the trinity. But one didn't want it to. The wrongness had a character all its own. The wrongness was right—at any rate after Mary had hit on it for William. As a spinster, she would, I think, have been happiest in a trim modern villa. But it was a belief of hers that she had married a man of strange genius. She had married him for himself, not for his genius; but this added grace in him was a thing to be reckoned with, ever so much; a thing she must ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... scene showed the same room in which the first act had been given. In a low rocker sat a spinster of uncertain age, very prim as to attitude and attire, her face partially concealed by a profusion of corkscrew curls that dangled from her temples. She appeared to be absorbed in reading, while there were piles of books on the table at her side, ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... bodies, I mean, hopping and "todillating"—as Bel expressed the little spinster's gait—along together; their souls walked in a sweet and gracious reality before ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... bickerings were incessant. They only had to meet for hot disagreement to break out. Mrs. Plume, already bent with age, would strike the floor with the ebony stick she always carried, and glare at the erect, defiant spinster—'That horrud, dirrty cat; its always in the room!' Then Miss Waghorn: 'It's a very nice cat, Madame'—she always called her Madame—'and when I was a young girl I was taught to be kind to animals.'—'The ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... own conduct must be irreproachable and her knowledge of the world such as can only be gained by personal experience; but she need not be an old lady! She can perfectly well be reasonably young, and a spinster. ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... heard of her through Adelaide Painter—;" and in reply to his glance of interrogation she explained that the lady in question was a spinster of South Braintree, Massachusetts, who, having come to Paris some thirty years earlier, to nurse a brother through an illness, had ever since protestingly and provisionally camped there in a state of contemptuous protestation oddly manifested by her never taking the ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... They 'm a fact, same as the sun in heaven 's a fact. God A'mighty's Self couldn't undo it wi'out some violent invention; an' for that matter I doan't see tu clear how even Him be gwaine to magic a married woman into a spinster again; any more than He could turn a spinster into a married woman, onless some ordinary human man came forrard. You must faace it braave an' strong. But that imp o' Satan—that damn Blanchard bwoy! Theer! I caan't say what I think 'bout him. Arter all that's ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... sat down between two pairs of candles to the piano in the decaying drawing-room, which like a spinster strove to conceal its age. A generous fire flamed in the wide grate behind me: warmth has always been to me the first necessary of life. I turned round on the revolving stool and faced the fire, and felt it on my cheeks, ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... it. Here I am, and here I shall stay. I take comfort in the fact that no one connects Ian Verity with an elderly and unattractive spinster hidden in a hermitage on Bessmoor. You will not betray me, I know, and it is good of you to come and visit me in my solitude. I am growing old and you have all your life before you. I have crossed to the shady side of the road while ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... future in the sunny garden of the old chateau. I tried it again last year, but the charm was gone, for I missed my boy with his fun, his music, and the frank, fresh affection he gave his 'little mamma,' as he insisted on calling the lofty spinster who loved him like ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... mere shame-faced, sister-hating, commonplace creature that the collective boy thinks it due to himself to be in society,' said Ethel, 'and me from an enjoying sister, into an elderly, care-taking, despised spinster—a burden to ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... but a young suitor, it was said, and the city a spinster not so lightly to be won. A longer courtship and more trouble ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... writes, "was eager to accompany her mamma upon this errand of charity; but I thought Aunt Lambert's visit would be best under the circumstances, and without the attendance of her little spinster aide-de-camp. Cousin Hagan was out when we called; we found her ladyship in a loose undress, and with her hair in not the neatest papers, playing at cribbage with a neighbour from the second floor, while good Mrs. Hagan sate on the ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Charley's love of a practical joke in our younger days, and I did not wish to interpose between him and the venerable spinster. I thought that he would not do anything really to ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... undecided weeks the lure seemed to attract Churchill, coupled though it was with the death of his romance. He dallied with the temptation as far as the stage of marriage-settlements; and rumour had it that the match was as good as made. Handsome Jack Churchill was to marry an elderly and gilded spinster, and to mount on ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... the house is plain now. It was once the residence of a country squire, whose family, probably dwindling down to mere spinster-hood, got merged in the more territorial name of Donnithorne. It was once the Hall; it is now the Hall Farm. Like the life in some coast town that was once a watering-place, and is now a port, where the genteel streets are silent and grass-grown, and the docks ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... and on the table where Miss Prudence did work in water colors, after the fashion of the impressionists, lay a prim and impossible composition representing a moss-rose and a number of heartsease, colored with that caution which modest spinster artists instinctively exercise. ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... my hat. I visit Crosby regularly, where I am well known, so that I was not surprised to be thus accosted by one who was a stranger to me. She was about forty, obviously a spinster, and clad in a costume not merely out-of-date, but so far out-of-date as to possess a false air of theatricalism. I can best describe her (I am not clever in matters of dress) by saying that, with the exception that she ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... called, Lyra Hybernica, for which no doubt The Groves of Blarney was his model. There have been many imitations since, of which perhaps Barham's ballad on the coronation was the best, "When to Westminster the Royal Spinster and the Duke of Leinster all in order did repair!" Thackeray in some of his attempts has been equally droll and equally graphic. That on The Cristal Palace,—not that at Sydenham, but its forerunner, the palace of the Great Exhibition,—is very good, as ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... uncle, you were employed, according to the formula, "in virtue of these and subsequent engagements," and among the "subsequent engagements" you are kind enough to reckon one between Mademoiselle Berthe Lorinet, spinster, of no occupation, and M. Fabien Mouillard, lawyer. "Fabien Mouillard, lawyer"—that I may perhaps endure, but "Fabien Mouillard, son-in-law of Lorinet," never! One pays too dear for these rich wives. ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... Mary and Mr. Ashforth so suited to one another. Well, well, the heart's an unaccountable thing—to an old spinster, anyhow." ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... be, at this very moment, Mrs. William Beresford, a highly respectable young matron who painted rather good pictures in her spinster days, when she was Penelope Hamilton of the great American working-class, Unlimited; but first Mrs. Beresford's dangerous illness and then her death, have kept my dear boy a willing prisoner in Cannes, his heart sadly torn betwixt his love and duty to his mother and his desire to be with ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... voice that asked the question, and Judith looked up with a smile. Her mother's cousin stood in the doorway—a prim little old spinster, who had been their guest for several days. Like Marguerite, she, too, had come back to her native village after an absence of four years, but not to her father's house. She was all alone in the world, save for a few distant relatives ...
— Mildred's Inheritance - Just Her Way; Ann's Own Way • Annie Fellows Johnston
... love—not within man's or woman's memory. No male or female remembers his or her first inclination any more than his or her own christening. What? You fancy that your sweet mistress, your spotless spinster, your blank maiden just out of the schoolroom, never cared for any but you? And she tells you so? Oh, you idiot! When she was four years old she had a tender feeling towards the Buttons who brought the coals up ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... full of marbles, tops, 'scholars' companions,' air-guns, sheets of paper soldiers, valentines, fire-crackers before the Fourth, elastic for slingshots, spools, needles and yards of blue calico with white dots, which hung over strings above the counters. Emily was a dark, heavy-browed spinster with a booming bass voice and a stern manner, and when you crept, awed and timid, into the store she glared at you and boomed out, 'Which side, young man?' Yet her store was a kid's paradise. I have often wondered since whether she didn't, in her heart, really love us youngsters, for ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... the affections of a sweet Italian girl, and then leaving her to pine in discontent! Yet in the face of this, an old companion of mine in Rome, with whom I accidentally met the other day, wondered how on earth I could have made so tempting a story out of the matronly and black-haired spinster with whom I happened to be ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... rebound in it which told on the Mclntosh sisters; for they, many years older than she, were already living on tolerance in their father's house, where their oldest brother and his wife ruled things with an iron hand. All hopes of a husband and a home of their own had quite died out of their spinster bosoms, and they would not have been human had they not secretly and grievously envied the comely, blooming Isabella ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... Elizabeth—the patroness of their calling, the protectress of learning and learned men. Tell them of Joan of Arc, the conqueror of even English chivalry. Tell them of all the tender mercies of the Soeurs de Charite! Tell them that, from the throne to the hospital, the spinster, unharassed by the cares of private life, has been found most ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... who has felt it to be his duty to call on his ward regularly every week, has learned to know and (I regret to say) to loathe that estimable spinster ...
— A Little Rebel - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... stay where you belonged, Clara, for quite apart from the pleasure of your company, which under sane conditions I find very delightful, I don't seem to see you in the role of a middle-aged spinster. Still, you might easily have been one. I know some charming girls in Boston who have gone ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... observe his going or his coming, otherwise than as it might affect her friend's need of him as a physician; this woman who seemed all mother while she was holding the baby, and all boy while she was trying, under old Captain Mayhew's guidance to learn to sail a boat; this woman who was a spinster in years, and a child in simplicity and directness; who was beautiful, and never once thought of her beauty; who was alone, and never seemed lonely: she was a perpetual problem and fascination to him. Dr. Eben was not ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... was once heard to remark that one of the difficulties of his social life lay in the fact that all women of forty were exactly alike, and it was impossible to recall their individual label, to which archdeacon, or canon, or form of spinster good works, they belonged. It would be dangerous, irreverent, to pry further into the recesses of the episcopal, or even of the suffragan, mind. There are snowy peaks where we lay helpers should fear ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... lawyer reading a will aloud is sure of the interest of his audience, and, on this occasion, it was evident that each member of the little group listened with strained attention, but with very different feelings. What they gathered was that Miss Victoria Bench, spinster, being of sound mind, did will and bequeath everything of which she might die possessed to her beloved great-niece, Elizabeth Caldwell, commonly called Beth. Should Beth marry, the money was to be settled upon her for her exclusive use. The present ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... Manner in Which Mr. Edward Middleton Encounters the Emir Achmed Ben Daoud The Adventure of the Virtuous Spinster What Befell Mr. Middleton Because of the Second Gift of the Emir The Adventure of William Hicks What Befell Mr. Middleton Because of the Third Gift of the Emir The Adventure of Norah Sullivan and the Student of Heredity What Befell Mr. Middleton Because of the Fourth Gift of the Emir ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... testify to a magnificent family red silk umbrella, under which a gentle little spinster, left alone of many brothers and sisters, used to patter to church on rainy days. Have you any red silk umbrellas in London? We had a tradition of the first that had ever been seen in Cranford; and the little ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... in all, daughters of the superior families of Bunkers and the surrounding district. Miss Arnott, their teacher, was a tall, bony spinster, with austere glasses and sharp elbows that ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... comic epithet—[Greek: hadou mageiros]—cook of the Inferno. And just as we are told that in Charon's boat we shall not be allowed to pick our society, so here we must accept what fellowship the fates provide. An English spinster retailing paradoxes culled to-day from Ruskin's handbooks; an American citizen describing his jaunt in a gondola from the railway station; a German shopkeeper descanting in one breath on Baur's Bock and the beauties of the Marcusplatz; an intelligent ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... latter knew that her income was very welcome to her aunt and, with a spirit of self-sacrifice not usual in the young, gave up a gay, fashionable life for the dull existence of a paying drudge in the house of an ungrateful, embittered elderly spinster. Yet her heart rejoiced when she conscientiously felt that her brother needed her more and had a greater claim upon her; and gladly she went to keep house for ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... 14, late of Burgh cum Girsby, spinster, com. Nov. 22, 1817, charged with twice administering a quantity of vitrol or verdigrease powder, or other deadly poison, with intent to murder Susanna, the infant daughter of George Barnes of Burgh cum ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... been a long time, for family curiosity never concerned itself with Raymond Mortimer unless he was annoyingly obtrusive or disobedient. But the first domestic records of her arrival, kept naturally enough by Miss Greene, whose lonely spinster heart was the boy's domestic refuge, went back to a day in June when he was five. He was in his nursery and she in an adjoining room, the communicating door of which was open. She had heard him in ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... dear, it represents the truth. The arrival of a fresh lady from England, especially of a 'spin,' which is short for spinster or unmarried woman, is an event of some importance in an Indian station. Not, of course, so much in a place like this, because this is the center of a large district, but in a small station it is ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty
... racing wires, and an account from a bookmaker showing a small debit balance. There were other miscellaneous bills, a plaintive epistle from a lady signing herself Flora, and begging for the loan of a fiver for a week, and an invitation to tea from a spinster who called herself Poppy. Amongst all this mass of miscellaneous documents there were only three which Wrayson laid on one side for further consideration. One of these was a note, dated from the Adelphi a few days before the tragedy, and ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... rightly is. He claims cousinship. But it has not dawned on him that Colland was to have been The McTavish, that he is The McTavish, that I am merely Miss Ellen Alice Douglas Cameron Dundee Campbell McGregor Breadalbane Blair McTavish, houseless, homeless spinster, wi' but a drap o' gude blood to her heritage. I have not told him, Mr. Traquair. He does not know. What's to be done? What would you do—if you knew that he was he, and that you ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... to go to the house for instructions, and guided by the under-butler found Lady Homartyn hiding away in the walled Dutch garden behind the dairy. She had been giving away the prizes of the flower-show, and she was resting in a deck chair while a spinster relation presided over the tea. Mrs. Britling had fled the outer festival earlier, and was sitting by the tea-things. Lady Meade and two or three visitors had motored out from Hartleytree to assist, and Manning had come in with his ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... there is a very strict law intended to eliminate the spinster from the social horizon. It is a law born of craft and inspired by foresight. The daughters of a household must be married off in the order of their nativity. The younger sister dare not contemplate matrimony ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... lack for the most part the final imaginative touch; the kind of inbreathing of life which afterwards gave such individual charm to Dickens' word-painting. The humour is more obvious, less delicate, turns too readily on the claim of the elderly spinster to be considered young, and the desire of all spinsters to get married. The pathos is often spoilt by over-emphasis and declamation. It ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... she returned, "but if you were a lone spinster without a bank account you might have ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... to chew the bit, as if vainly trying to pick its teeth, a lively jerk of the rope and a "You old beast! come on," started the animal on its travels. Finally, when the creature stopped to deliberate upon the propriety of going forward at all, the vials of the wrath of the Japanese spinster exploded, and I was tempted to believe her affections had been blighted. But when we met any of her friends on the road, or passed the wayside shops or farm-houses, the scolder of horses was the lady who wished all Ohaio ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... marry. I don't know as I do at my time of life," responded the spinster. "I rather guess my day for chances is ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... know by practice what will hit some contemporary tastes; we know the measure of smartness, say, or the delicate flippancy, or the sentence with "a dying fall." But one should also know that these are fancies of the hour—these and the touch of archaism, and the spinster-like and artificial precision, which seem to be points in some styles of the moment. Such reflections as our author bids us make, with a little self-respect added, may render our work less popular and effective, ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... said the Forest Ranger, "that is a well known, game old elderly spinster lady commonly called the Moon; and that other on the branch chittering swear words is nothing in the world but a Douglas squirrel hunting—I think he is really hunting—a flea to mix in his spruce ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... come to the motor by this time—the rich, the noble motor, as Mr Pepys would have described it—and there was poor Miss Lyall hung with parcels, and wearing a faint sycophantic smile. This miserable spinster, of age so obvious as to be called not the least uncertain, was Lady Ambermere's companion, and shared with her the glories of The Hall, which had been left to Lady Ambermere for life. She was provided with food and lodging and the use of the cart like a ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... was a fancy store, kept by two prim but pleasant spinster sisters. Besides newspapers, stationery, thread and needles, and so forth, they kept a stock of toys, candies, and pickled limes, which insured them a run of custom among the young folk, who always spoke of them as the Little ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... volume in Ireland. We fall in love, we marry and are given in marriage, we promote and take part in international alliances, but when the curtain goes up again, our accumulations, acquisitions—whatever you choose to call them—have disappeared. We are not to the superficial eye the spinster-philanthropist, the bride to be, the wife of a year; we are the same old Salemina, Francesca and Penelope. It is so dramatic that my husband should be called to America; as a woman I miss him and need him; as a character I am much better single. I don't suppose publishers ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... MANCHESTER there is a shortage of curates. A spinster writes to say that she is not surprised, considering how quickly they get ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 9, 1919 • Various
... dream she marries a vicar, foretells that she will fail to awake reciprocal affection in the man she desires, and will live a spinster, or marry to keep from ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... not an existence about us but at first seems colorless, dreary, lethargic: what can our soul have in common with that of an elderly spinster, a slow-witted plowman, a miser who worships his gold?... But ... the emotion that lived and died in an old-fashioned country parlor shall as mightily stir our heart, shall as unerringly find its way to the deepest sources of life as the majestic ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... be always wrong about everything, combined with determination to act and speak fearlessly in such belief, might have found their uses. In picturesque little Wychwood-on-the-Heath, among the Kentish hills, retreat beloved of the retired tradesman, the spinster of moderate means, the reformed Bohemian developing latent instincts towards respectability, these qualities made only ...
— The Cost of Kindness - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... looked down at her fat hands and smiled a little, seeming to see things in the matrimonial philosophy that no spinster was likely to understand. Then after opening the door they both turned again, from force of long habit, to look across the garden, and saw the square board more plainly now than they had done when close under the hedge. It stood there in the midst of the grass field—as if it were leading on—while ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... dolls and absurd toys in his working-room meant little more than an idiosyncratic passion for the anomalous, but those who were near to him knew what a connecting link they were between him and the little children of whom he wrote, and how each trumpet and drum, each "spinster doll," each little toy dog, each little tin soldier, played its part in the poems he sent out into the world. No writer ever made more persistent and consistent use of the material by which he was surrounded, or put a higher literary value on the little things which go to make up the sum ...
— A Little Book of Western Verse • Eugene Field
... thought that maiden was a term that implied virgin innocence and purity, whether addressed to the blithe lass of sixteen, or the antiquated spinster of forty," returned the provoking sailor, with a ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... art. Nay, we can go further and say that nobody has reproduced life with a more faithful accuracy, that yet was not photography because it gave the pleasure proper to art, than this same Jane Austen, spinster, well-born and well-bred: in her own phrase, an "elegant female" of the English past. Scott's famous remark can not be too often quoted: "That young lady had a talent for describing the movements and feelings of characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... detained some days at Holyhead by stress of weather, and in the private journal which he kept during that time he speaks of the suspense he was in about his "dearest friend."(11) In December Stella made a will—signed "Esther Johnson, spinster"—disposing of her property in the manner Swift had suggested. Her allusions to Swift are incompatible with any such feeling of resentment as is suggested by Sheridan. She died on January 28, 1728. Swift could ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... and applause.] Why, you will get so nauseated before the trip is over at the very sight of the white caps that you can't look at the heads of the French nurses in Paris without feeling seasick. There are the usual "characters" about. There is the customary foreign spinster of uncertain age that has been visiting here, who regales you with stories of how in New York she had twelve men at her feet. Subsequent inquiry proves that they ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... of diabolical leap-frog with Australian kangaroos. In one illustration he introduces us to a cheerful assembly of ancestral ghosts: there is the ghostly saucer-eyed head of the family, with a ghostly hound peeping beneath his chair, a ghostly grandmother, half a dozen ghostly spinster aunts, a ghostly butler, a ghostly cook, a ghostly small boy, two ghostly candles; and lastly, a ghostly cat. Small wonder that under the influence of such ghostly surroundings the hair of the affrighted ghost-seer stands erect in the ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... a woman to go on so," returned the spinster, shaking her head in vehement agitation; "you may just tell her it's no use, my pa isn't likely to be caught with chaff ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... party: John and I, bachelor and spinster; my uncle, a silent, moody man, who did whatever we asked him; and the still, open-eyed Martha Moon, who, I sometimes think, understood more about it all than any of us. I could talk a little French, John a good deal of German. When we ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... once, of an estimable plain spinster who had passed away, "did more for her than ever nature had done." He repeated it, too. "She was far more indebted, I say, to grace, than to nature," and before his sharp earnestness none were seen to smile. Nor could you forget the note in his voice ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... uncontrollable desire to laugh possessed him; but, restraining himself, he took the first chance he had to make his presence known, at which Aunt Eliza groaned, "Oh, my!" and Mary Jane instinctively grasped her yelling children, and the prim spinster curtsied and asked if he used tobacco. At Job's surprised look and negative reply, she said, "Very well. I never employ a male being who permeates his environment with the noxious weed. As you do not, ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... on the heights above the town. I looked over the water to the white line of shore and batteries where this wonder stood, who was what poets dream of, deep-hearted men hope for, none quite believe in. Hardly could I; and though my relenting spinster friend at my elbow kept assuring me it was true that she was there, my sceptical sight fixed on the stale prominences visible in the same features which they had worn day after empty day of late. This deed of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... he published a pamphlet called the Spinster, and a Letter to the Earl of Oxford, concerning the Bill of Peerage, which bill he opposed in the House of Commons. Some time after, he wrote against the South-Sea-Scheme; his Crisis of posterity; ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... must the bridescake hold: A silver shilling and a ring of gold, A crystal charm good luck to symbol, And for the spinster's hand ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... do, my dear?' said the spinster heartily, as Ida alighted; 'I am very glad to see you. Why, how bright and blooming you look—not a bit like a ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... worst is about to happen If you were as good a churchgoer as one could wish, you would have been in your pew yesterday morning, when the banns were read out (for the first time of asking) "between George Goodman, bachelor, and Emily Parsons, spinster, both of this parish," though this would not have conveyed to you the appalling fact that your man is marrying my entire staff all at once. I doubt, however, if you will be able to find cause or ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152. January 17, 1917 • Various
... when I first made application to the landlord, a solid yeoman inhabiting a farm at the foot of the coombe, on a cliff overlooking the beach. To him I presented myself fearlessly as a spinster of decent family and small but assured income, intending a rural life of combined seemliness and economy. He met my advances politely enough, but with an air of suspicion which offended me. I began by disliking ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... rattling about in many activities, she was able to ridicule her blazing nights of darkness. With spurious cheerfulness she announced everywhere, "I guess I'm a born spinster," and "No one will ever marry a plain schoolma'am like me," and "You men, great big noisy bothersome creatures, we women wouldn't have you round the place, dirtying up nice clean rooms, if it wasn't that you have ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... beating like a lizard caught by a herdsman, sat heroically still on her sofa, beside the fire in the salon. Josette opened the door; and the Vicomte de Troisville, followed by the Abbe de Sponde, presented himself to the eyes of the spinster. ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... was glad to have her back. That indomitable spinster had actually missed her lodger. She was surprised at her own pleasure in seeing the boxes carried upstairs again, in hearing the soft voice talking to Mawson, in sniffing the faint sweet scent that seemed to hang about the house when Miss Reston was ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... had rested. The spinster received Reuben with much warmth, in which her stately proprieties of manner, however, were never ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... planting arrows in a rival's breast, would utter this peculiarly deadly form of insult, which, strangely enough, is always intended as a high compliment by the masculine blunderer. The fact that the unfortunate spinster thus assailed may have had a dozen offers, and yet, for reasons of her own, prefer to remain single, seems entirely beyond their range ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... old cats who go there to slander each other in—in the name of religion.' That's what she'd have said. It's all different now. Gone is her love of adventure; gone is her defiance of convention; gone is—is her independence. What is she now? A mere farmer, a drudging female, spinster farmer, growing cabbages and things, and getting her manicured hands all mussed up, and freckles on her otherwise ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... a lonely, harsh-featured spinster, who eked out a precarious living by teaching music. Ethel knew her slightly, as a gaunt woman who usually toiled up the stairs with a sort of scornful weariness of ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... was standing with his back to the obese woman. He was busily engaged, endeavouring to count the stars, when that most worthy spinster backed against him and sent him sprawling. She did not even feel the rencontre; it was like an iron-clad coming in ...
— The Silver Lining - A Guernsey Story • John Roussel
... is not this he, or she, this one born of ourselves, of the weird places we have seen, the strange stories we have heard—this one, and not the aunt of Miss Jemima Jackson? For what use, I entreat you to tell me, is that respectable spinster's vision? Was she worth seeing, that aunt of hers, or would she, if followed, have led the way to any interesting brimstone ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... enough, till we were interrupted by a miserable-looking crowd, assembled round a dull, dingy, melancholy shop, from which gleamed a solitary candle, whose long, spinster-like wick was flirting away with an east wind, at a most unconscionable rate. Upon the haggard and worn countenances of the by-standers, was depicted one general and sympathizing expression of eager, ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... miscarried. I'd never have married that Osborne man; I'd have snubbed Balderstone the moment he spoke to me; and if Stuart Harley had got a book out of my trip to Europe at all, it would have been a series of papers on some such topic as 'The Spinster Abroad, or How to be Happy though Single.' No more shall I take the part he intends me to in this Newport romance, unless he removes Count Bonetti from the scene entirely, and provides me with a different style of hero from his Professor, the original of whom, ...
— A Rebellious Heroine • John Kendrick Bangs
... of Castilla and the ricefields of Valencia, and the villages of the northern provinces, had gone into strange hands,—all the princely possessions of the ancient counts of Sagreda, plus the inheritances from various pious spinster aunts, and the considerable legacies of other relatives who had died of old age in ...
— Luna Benamor • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... in the wind, and the "something" would doubtless bear fruit; for this elderly spinster aunt, with a mania for psychical research, had brains as well as will power, and by hook or by crook she usually managed to accomplish her ends. The revelation was made soon after tea, when she sidled close up to him as they paced slowly along ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... like a lock of my hair?" asked the gallant old bachelor of the spinster who had been a belle ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... Willis. 'I thought so,' said the lady at No. 19; 'I always said it was Miss Willis!'—'Well, I never!' ejaculated the young lady at No. 18 to the young lady at No. 17.—'Did you ever, dear!' responded the young lady at No. 17 to the young lady at No. 18. 'It's too ridiculous!' exclaimed a spinster of an uncertain age, at No. 16, joining in the conversation. But who shall portray the astonishment of Gordon-place, when Mr. Robinson handed in all the Miss Willises, one after the other, and then squeezed himself ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... alone together—Mary, commonly styled Miss Walkingshaw, and she. The exemplary spinster was likewise distressed, but in a calmer manner, as became a lady who had ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... have seen a man I would be that hard on. But it would be the only way she could be made to see some things, and maybe it might make her feel young again. Jess says there's nothing so kittenish as a spinster who's caught an unexpected beau. He is the most rejuvenating thing on earth to a woman who wants one. All don't want them. There are a great many more sensible women in this world than people realize, but in certain small places matrimony is still the chief ...
— Kitty Canary • Kate Langley Bosher
... of the promontory of Sunium, where the Greek Muse, in an awful vision, came to me, and said in a patronising way, "Why, my dear" (she always, the old spinster, adopts this high and mighty tone)—"Why, my dear, are you not charmed to be in this famous neighbourhood, in this land of poets and heroes, of whose history your classical education ought to have made you a master? if it did not, you have ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... girl did not heed him. "Last of all, there's another reason," she went on. "I don't know why I shouldn't speak it, as well as think it, for it's the greatest of all. I'm a young woman. I won't remain such long. I don't want to be a spinster. I know I'm not supposed to say these things, but why not? I want to meet men, men of my own class, my parents' class, men who know something besides the weight of a steer and the value of a bronco,—some man I could respect and care for." Again she turned directly to her companion. "Do you ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... out her hand to him, but the child drew back and held to his protectress's skirt. A hurt expression came into the spinster's face. It was as if the great sacrifice she was making was being belittled and rejected by a child. Mrs. Warren ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com
|
|
|
