"Charwoman" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Herne Hill days I used to wonder what was going on in her mind, and I find that old speculative curiosity return as I write this. She took a considerable interest in the housework that our generally servantless condition put upon her—she used to have a charwoman in two or three times a week—but she did not do it with any great skill. She covered most of our furniture with flouncey ill-fitting covers, and she cooked plainly and without very much judgment. The Penge house, as it contained nearly all our Bromstead things, was ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... into the bedroom. It, too, was empty. The bed was made, and the flat generally had a superficial air of tidiness. Evidently the charwoman had been and departed; and doubtless Diaz had gone out, to return immediately. I sat down in the chair in which I had spent most of the night. I took off my hat and put it by the side of a tiny satchel which I had brought, and began to wait ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... out," said Louis, indicating the tray which Rachel had drawn from concealment under the Chesterfield, and which was now loaded. Mrs. Maldon employed an old and valued charwoman in the mornings. Rachel accomplished all the rest of the housework herself, including cookery, and she accomplished it with the stylistic ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... to remain standing in an attitude of respectful and grave anxiety. He thought he ought to depart; yet would it not be ungallant to desert her under the circumstances? She was alone. She had no servant, only an occasional charwoman. ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... despondently. In that house there was no messenger to be procured. The landlady was elderly, and kept no servant—employing only a mysterious female of the charwoman species, who came at daybreak, dyed herself to the elbows with blacking or blacklead before breakfast, and so remained till the afternoon, when she departed to "do for" a husband and children—the husband and children passing all the earlier ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... interested in what she has often heard, begins to collect in a basin various tributary streams of tea, from the bottoms of cups and saucers and from the bottom of the tea-pot for the little charwoman's evening meal. In like manner she gets together, in the iron bread-basket, as many outside fragments and worn-down heels of loaves as the rigid economy of the house ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... and was clearing away when there came a knock at the door. His charwoman, whose duty it was to clean his brushes every week, came in with ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... was reasonable. In theory, perhaps, the women should have been refined by their housekeeping work; in practice that work necessitated their being very tough. Cook, scullery-maid, bed-maker, charwoman, laundress, children's nurse—it fell to every mother of a family to play all the parts in turn every day, and if that were all, there was opportunity enough for her to excel. But the conveniences which make such work tolerable ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... could finish. Churchwarden Joliffe, with pauses of expectation, muttered about a "judgment in our midst." The Rector, in Joliffe's pauses, seemed trying to confute him by some reference to "those thirteen upon whom the tower of Siloam fell and slew them." An old charwoman whom Miss Joliffe sometimes employed wrung her hands with an "Ah! poor dear—poor dear!" The Catholic priest was reciting something in a low tone, and crossing himself at intervals. Lord Blandamer, ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... coddles me like an invalid. I am getting back my colour and am very well, physically ... so much so, in fact, that I no longer ever think of interesting myself in other people's business. Never again! For instance (I am only telling you this because you are incorrigible, as inquisitive as any old charwoman, and always ready to busy yourself with things that don't concern you), yesterday I was present at a rather curious meeting. Antoinette had taken me to the inn at Bassicourt, where we were having tea in the public room, among the peasants (it was market-day), ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... protest, but the words stuck in her throat and she was forced to accept the sturdy charwoman ...
— Miss Pat at Artemis Lodge • Pemberton Ginther
... leaped up Mrs. Barry's spine. That settled it. This exquisite creature must not stay where that charwoman could speak ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... become like a man of stone, standing before them, gaze averted, as a detected criminal. One might have supposed that a bloody secret gnawed at the bosom of Fawkes; but his private life was blameless and his past above reproach. His wife acted as charwoman at the church built by ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... me that 1s. 5d. a day for a charwoman, a messenger and an accountant, to say nothing of a metaphysician, all rolled into one, is low pay. In London you would have to give such a being at least a pound ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... breakfast, which turned out to be abundant and well cooked. Having inquired her direction—a sense of location was not one of her gifts—she set out gaily enough for a whole day of sightseeing. She might never get another position and have eventually to go out as a charwoman—the detail that she would be illy equipped for any such undertaking she humorously dismissed—but a day or two of unalloyed enjoyment she was going ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... which he was generally laden along the hot and dingy street, to make him tea from her little spirit kettle, and then to hear the news of the day in the shade of the little smutty back-garden, while the German charwoman who cooked for them had her way with the dinner—there was not an incident in the whole trivial procession that did not amuse and delight her. She renewed her youth; she escaped from the burdensome "glories of ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... open slowly, and give passage to the form of Grace Poole, in prim cap, white apron, and handkerchief; when I watched her glide along the gallery, her quiet tread muffled in a list slipper; when I saw her look into the bustling, topsy-turvy bedrooms,—just say a word, perhaps, to the charwoman about the proper way to polish a grate, or clean a marble mantelpiece, or take stains from papered walls, and then pass on. She would thus descend to the kitchen once a day, eat her dinner, smoke a moderate pipe on the hearth, and go back, carrying her pot of porter with her, ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... and at last came to scrub out the shop and rooms for Virginie. She came on Saturday morning with a pail and a scrubbing brush, without appearing to suffer in the least at having to perform a dirty, humble duty, a charwoman's work, in the home where she had reigned as the beautiful, fair-haired mistress—for thirty sous. It was a last humiliation, the end of her pride. Virginie must have enjoyed herself, for a yellowish flame darted from her cat's eyes. At last she was revenged ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... up by saying, if it had been said by anyone else but myself, he shouldn't have entered the house again. This rather unpleasantly terminated what might have been a cheerful evening. However, it was as well they went, for the charwoman had finished up the ...
— The Diary of a Nobody • George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith
... thought we should do more wisely to spread the money over making ourselves more comfortable generally. When she came to go into it in detail, I found that on the whole hers was the preferable course. New curtains for the drawing-room are to be put in hand at once. The charwoman is to come regularly once a week. We raised the girl's wages a pound, and she went into hysterics. Eliza has insisted that I am to have a first-class season-ticket in future. There is much can be done ...
— Eliza • Barry Pain
... period no cooks were kept, and we know from Homer that his ancient heroes prepared and dressed their victuals with their own hands. Ulysses, for example, we are told, like a modern charwoman, excelled at lighting a fire, whilst Achilles was an adept at turning a spit. Subsequently, heralds, employed in civil and military affairs, filled the office of cooks, and managed marriage feasts; but this, no doubt, was after mankind had advanced in the art of living, a step further than roasting, ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... that a number of doctors have been disputing over it ever since and picking his parents' histories and genealogies to bits, to find the cause. Their inquiries do not help us much. The father drove a cab; the mother was a charwoman and came of a consumptive family. But these facts will not quite account for a magic shadow. The birth took place on the night of a new moon, down a narrow alley into which neither moon nor sun ever penetrated beyond the third-storey windows—and ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... they were going to do the cooking themselves and employ an old charwoman in the mornings and evenings. It was all very well thought ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... that you have escaped that prospect you are haunted by worse possibilities. No doubt you hear some saddening and deplorable stories, for some of the laws relating to marriage are degrading, and the lot of the married woman in the working class where she is wife, mother, cook, laundress, needlewoman, charwoman, and often many other things combined, is the most heartbreakingly cruel and tortured slavery; but you are escaping the probability of such a purgatorial existence. Take comfort in knowing that a great percentage of ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... chapel of Varvara the Martyr begins, those who are going to confess stand beside the screen, awaiting their turn. And Mitka is there too— a ragged boy with his head hideously cropped, with ears that jut out, and little spiteful eyes. He is the son of Nastasya the charwoman, and is a bully and a ruffian who snatches apples from the women's baskets, and has more than once carried off my knuckle-bones. He looks at me angrily, and I fancy takes a spiteful pleasure in the fact that he, ...
— The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... and obstructive than any other part of Parliamentary business. On the Estimates, as I have often explained, every single penny spent in the public service has to be entered. Whether that sum be large or small makes no difference. For instance, there is a charwoman at the Foreign Office; the charwoman's salary appears in the accounts just as bold and just as plain as the five thousand a year which the country has to pay for Lord Rosebery—who is cheap at the money, I must say, lest I be misunderstood. There is associated with Buckingham Palace ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... on the day when we sought for gold with the divining-rod. It was like a spring-cleaning in the winter-time. All the carpets were up, because Father had told Eliza to make the place decent as there was a gentleman coming to dinner the next day. So she got in a charwoman, and they slopped water about, and left brooms and brushes on the stairs for people to tumble over. H. O. got a big bump on his head in that way, and when he said it was too bad, Eliza said he should keep in the nursery then, ...
— The Story of the Treasure Seekers • E. Nesbit
... cupboard, and she and Therese between them kept the two sitting-rooms spotless. She who had at once made friends and tools of Lady Henry's servants, disdained, so it appeared, to be served beyond what was absolutely necessary in her own house. A charwoman, indeed, came in the morning for the roughest work, but by ten o'clock she was gone, and Julie, Madame Bornier, and the child remained in undisputed possession. Little, flat-nosed, silent Madame Bornier bought and brought ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... painting blue pictures, and that's precious little. They're up on the West Side now, living in four rooms with neighbours who fry onions at nine o'clock in the morning next door to them, and half the time Patty hasn't even a maid, I believe, and has to do her work with the help of a charwoman." ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... bottoms of the legs of that garment were frayed and ragged. He had been out of work for about six weeks previous to having been taken on by Rushton & Co. During most of that time he and his family had been existing in a condition of semi-starvation on the earnings of his wife as a charwoman and on the scraps of food she brought home from the houses where she worked. But all the same, the question of what is the cause of poverty ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... Bibulus the Butler, His calm brows slightly arched; (No mortal wight had ere that night Seen him with shirt unstarched;) And Bob, the shockhaired knifeboy, Wielding two Sheffield blades, And James Plush of the sinewy legs, The love of lady's maids: And charwoman and chaplain Stood mingled in a mass, And "Things," thought he of Houndsditch, "Is come to a ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... termite, white ant; laboring oar, servant of all work, factotum. workman, artisan; craftsman, handicraftsman; mechanic, operative; working man; laboring man; demiurgus, hewers of wood and drawers of water, laborer, navvy[obs3]; hand, man, day laborer, journeyman, charwoman, hack; mere tool &c. 633; beast of burden, drudge, fag; lumper[obs3], roustabout. maker, artificer, artist, wright, manufacturer, architect, builder, mason, bricklayer, smith, forger, Vulcan; carpenter; ganger, platelayer; blacksmith, locksmith, sailmaker, wheelwright. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... have that impression resisting all arguments. My recollections all centre about a gray-haired man of the confidential-servant class. He was my companion and humored my every whim. By and by, though, he left me. I was taken charge of by a charwoman, and only once visited by my infancy's mentor. My new guardian was authority for the statement that, though not appearing wealthy, this M. Petros, as she called him, was always able to obtain money as needed from M. Harjes. There is nothing ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... requisite of the good talker; and he never realised that he was telling people what they knew already. With measured words he told Philip what to think of Rodin, Albert Samain, and Caesar Franck. Philip's charwoman only came in for an hour in the morning, and since Philip was obliged to be at the hospital all day Cronshaw was left much alone. Upjohn told Philip that he thought someone should remain with him, but did not ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... Sussex Superstitions," which happened to a farmer's wife residing in the neighbourhood of Arundel. It appears that she was in the habit of making a large quantity of blackberry jam, and finding that less fruit had been brought to her than she required, she said to the charwoman, "I wish you would send some of your children to gather me three or four pints more." "Ma'am," exclaimed the woman in astonishment, "don't you know this is the 11th October?" "Yes," she replied. "Bless me, ma'am! And you ask me to let my children go out blackberrying! Why, I thought ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... you have been charwoman here now ever since I took up my duties. Have you really never, in your more romantic moments, cast a ...
— Press Cuttings • George Bernard Shaw
... but I saw an old charwoman who attends daily, I understand, and it was from her that I learned ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... Marquis of Clanricarde brought under the notice of the House of Lords, in 1845, that one Charles Guernsey, the son of a charwoman, and a clerk in a broker's office, at 12s. a week, had his name down as a subscriber for shares in the London and York line, for 52,000 pounds. Doubtless he had been made useful for the purpose ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... there was very little to hear. One of the tradesmen to whom I spoke said he had known the dead woman well—she used to buy of him such quantities of grocery as were required for their small household, for they never kept a servant, but had a charwoman in occasionally, and she had not seen Mrs. Black for months before she died. According to this man, Mrs. Black was 'a nice lady,' always kind and considerate, so fond of her husband, and he of her, as everyone thought. And yet, to put the doctor's opinion on one side, I knew what I had seen. ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... all that he could for the patient—a disheveled woman, who had fallen, while drunk, and cut her head. He bound up the wound, gave a prescription; and, leaving directions with the voluble Irish charwoman who filled the place of nurse, left the close, evil-smelling room, glad to breathe even the tainted air outside, and as quickly as he could retraced ...
— A Bachelor's Dream • Mrs. Hungerford
... which were worked by the peasants, in payment of debts which they could never shake off. He was a widower, with four grown-up daughters. One of them was already a widow and lived in the inn with her two children, his grandchildren, and worked for him like a charwoman. Another of his daughters was married to a petty official, and in one of the rooms of the inn, on the wall could be seen, among the family photographs, a miniature photograph of this official in uniform and official epaulettes. The two younger daughters used to wear fashionable blue or ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... at "Tenby"—"Tenby" with the local charwoman already there, throwing up the windows and sweeping away the dust of ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... was dusked with coolness and colour. But Beatrice was angry. She moved rapidly and determinedly about the dining-room, thrusting old newspapers and magazines between the cupboard and the wall, throwing the litter in the grate, which was clear, Friday having been charwoman's day, passing swiftly, lightly over the front of the furniture with the duster. It was Saturday, when she did not spend much time over the work. In the afternoon she was going out with Vera. That was not, however, ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... her face!' Lady John, with her eyeglass up, was staring in the opposite direction. 'She's like an inspired charwoman!' ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... life—men like Ruskin and William Morris and Kropotkin—have enormous social appetites and very fastidious personal ones. They are not content with handsome houses: they want handsome cities. They are not content with bediamonded wives and blooming daughters: they complain because the charwoman is badly dressed, because the laundress smells of gin, because the sempstress is anemic, because every man they meet is not a friend and every woman not a romance. They turn up their noses at their neighbors' drains, and are ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... her husband, who sat opposite and seemed uncomfortable—as low, horrid places, where people smoked and drank, and wore short skirts, and had added an opinion that they ought to be put down by the police—whether the skirts or the halls she did not explain. I also recollected that our charwoman, whose son had lately left London for a protracted stay in Devonshire, had, in conversation with my mother, dated his downfall from the day when he first visited one of these places; and likewise that Mrs. Philcox's nursemaid, upon her confessing that she had spent an evening at one ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... other novel schemes when there was a ring at the bell, and the charwoman, who passed with him for servant, ushered in his private secretary, Mr. Minks. Quickly readjusting the machinery of his mind, Rogers came ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... who had to arrange the rooms and tidy up the shop. Therese at last lost patience at seeing the good old lady incessantly turning round and round before her eyes; she engaged a charwoman, and forced her aunt ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... "Perhaps two feet by two and a half," she said. Castalia made notes while Helen spoke, and when she had done, and we were trying not to meet each other's eyes, rose and said, "At your wish I spent last week at Oxbridge, disguised as a charwoman. I thus had access to the rooms of several Professors and will now attempt to give you some idea—only," she broke off, "I can't think how to do it. It's all so queer. These Professors," she went on, "live in large houses built round grass plots ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... Jane, the most plucky, persistent man, with the eye, and the nerve, and the hand, and the delicacy and steadiness of the surgeon born in him, and confirmed by training. Some of his operations are perfectly beautiful, beautiful! He'll be famous over the whole world yet. His mother was an Irish charwoman, and she and he had a terrible tug to carry ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... donna, looked at the stranger—a quiet, respectably-dressed woman who united a natural shyness with an evident determination to go through with the business that had brought her there. She was just the sort of woman who can be seen by the hundred—laundress, seamstress, charwoman, caretaker, got up in her Sunday best. Odd, indeed, it would be, thought Allerdyke, if this quiet, humble-looking creature should give information which would place fifty thousand pounds at ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... later, on an afternoon of rain, the trio were again together in the same way. Someone knocked, and a charwoman at work on the premises handed in a letter for ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... extravagant amount of time she spent on it. And it was not that Granville demanded from her the downright hard work Mrs. Usher had considered salutary in her case. Ransome had seen to that. He had not agreed with Mrs. Usher. If he couldn't keep a servant, he could, and did, engage a charwoman for all the heavy work. It was not that the light work Violet did was unbecoming to her. On the contrary, Violet bloomed in Granville. She had had to own that the unaccustomed exercise was a good thing, giving a fineness and a firmness to outlines that had been ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... the mouths round the domestic board increase—always simple, it often becomes insufficient. The mother, working hard already, has to work harder still and to do laundry work at home or go out as a charwoman, in order to increase the modest income. In industrial centres women frequently work in the factories as well, though the law does at least protect them against too long hours and premature work ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... writes, "With seven servants, and hiring a charwoman upon occasion of company, we may possibly keep house. With less we should be hooted at as ridiculous, and could not ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... really can't help it, Maryllia! I was a very miserable child—and miserable children age rapidly. Perhaps I shall get younger as I grow older! You must remember that at eleven years old I was scrubbing floors like any charwoman in the Convent for two centimes an hour. I gained a lot of worldly wisdom that way by listening to the talk of the nuns, which is quite as spiteful and scandalous as anything one hears in outside 'wicked' society. ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... heartily congratulate Mr. Jerome Longmore, the well-known bookman and literary curio-collector, on his latest stroke of good luck. It appears that in a recent pilgrimage to Selborne he met the only surviving great-granddaughter of Sarah Timmins (charwoman at Chawton in the years 1810 to 1815), and purchased from her a pair of bedroom slippers, a pink flannel dressing-gown and a boa which had belonged to the great novelist. A full description of these priceless relics will shortly appear in The Penman, together with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, July 25, 1917 • Various
... nights' experience in the castle, threatened to resign in a body if they were placed on duty at Rantremly? They said they heard groans and shrieks, and the measured beat of a club-foot on the oaken floors. Perfectly absurd, of course, but there you are! Why, I cannot even get a charwoman or labourer to clear up the evidences of the tragedy which took place there six weeks ago. The beds are untouched, the broken china and the silver tray lie today at the foot of the stairway, and everything remains just as it was when the inquest ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... years ago looked the same as ever; it might have been kept under a glass case. Gobseck's faithful old portress, with her husband, a pensioner, who sat in the entry while she was upstairs, was still his housekeeper and charwoman, and now in addition his sick-nurse. In spite of his feebleness, Gobseck saw his clients himself as heretofore, and received sums of money; his affairs had been so simplified, that he only needed to send his pensioner out now and again on an errand, and could ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... he stole away into the hall, there was a sound followed him as between a groan and a cry. Hearing which statement, an impressionable charwoman went into hysterics, and had to be recalled to her senses by a dose of gin, suggested and taken ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... like to be, sir," said the old woman, speaking quite in the Gentile manner, and looking like a decent charwoman. "You've a dear wife, as I don't deny, Mr. Lambert, but money is ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... learned everything about her. Lizaveta was younger than the old woman and was her half-sister, being the child of a different mother. She was thirty-five. She worked day and night for her sister, and besides doing the cooking and the washing, she did sewing and worked as a charwoman and gave her sister all she earned. She did not dare to accept an order or job of any kind without her sister's permission. The old woman had already made her will, and Lizaveta knew of it, and by this will she would not get a farthing; nothing but the ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... in the week to buy us a hearty meal; the last served to boil our kettle when we had any food to cook in it. Few rich people know how the poor live; our way was a strange one. My poor mother used to work with her needle, and go out as a charwoman, and to wash, when she could get any one to wash for, but that was seldom; and toil as hard as she might, a difficult matter she had to pay the rent of the little room in which we lived. She felt sorely the struggle she had to endure with poverty, for she had seen ...
— Peter Biddulph - The Story of an Australian Settler • W.H.G. Kingston
... indignant criticism with a patient smile. Mrs. Fitzpatrick, despairing of success in her efforts with Paulina, called in the aid of Anka Kusmuk, who, as domestic in the New West Hotel where Mrs. Fitzpatrick served as charwoman two days in the week, had become more or less expert in the colloquial English of her environment. Together they laboured with Paulina, but with little effect. She was quite unmoved, because quite unconscious, of moral shock. It disturbed ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... thirty-eight, well developed, healthy, and the mother of normal children, who had a double hand. The left arm was abnormal, the flexion of the elbow imperfect, and the forearm terminated in a double hand with only rudimentary thumbs. In working as a charwoman she leaned on the back of the flexed carpus. The double hand could grasp firmly, though the maximum power was not so great as that of the right hand. Sensation was equally acute in all three of the hands. ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... to Y minutes past O! But it's no hardship to get up at five, these glorious mornings. The days get longer, and the weather is perfect. And the prairie looks as though a vacuum cleaner had been at work on it overnight. Positively, there's a charwoman who does this old world over, while we sleep! By morning it's as bright as a new pin. And out here every one is thinking of the day ahead; Dinky-Dunk, of his crop; Olga, of the pair of sky-blue corsets I've written ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... summer I found that a maid was one of the things I could do without, making the discovery in an interregnum not of my original choosing. A charwoman came in for the heavier work, and I took over the cooking. Almost immediately, in spite of my inexperience, the bills dropped. I could not cook rich pastries and fancy desserts, and fell back on simple salads and fruit instead. I ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... Rising and throwing the overcoat over his arm, he waved his hat at her in sardonic courtesy. "I can't say it has been a pleasure to know you but—you have made it interesting, I admit. And I bid you a very good night. The charwoman will let you out when she comes to clean up in the morning. ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... to the subject of this chapter. Mrs. G. Kelly, a lady well known in musical circles in Dublin, sends as her own personal experience the following tale of a most quiet haunting, in which the spectral charwoman (!) does not seem to have entirely laid aside all ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... furnish one of her own, seeing she was only going to stop a year, so she saw Thinton and Tarbet, who had the letting of the place, and took it for a year. The windows were flung open, the furniture brushed and renovated, and the solitary charwoman who had been ruler in the lonely rooms so long, was dismissed, and her place taken by a whole retinue of servants. Madame Midas intended to live in style, so went to work over the setting up of her establishment in such an extravagant manner that Archie remonstrated. She ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... Marie at last. "Look after the house and I will go out and see if I can earn something. I can get work as a charwoman in the new buildings in ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... one may trust him, if he has eaten one's salt, to respect one's daughter as he would his own, but if he happens to be under no such special obligation it may be hazardous to trust him with even one's charwoman or one's mother-in-law. And the man of morals, confronted by a moral situation, is usually wholly without honour. Put him on the stand to testify against a woman, and he will tell all he knows about her, even including what he has learned in the purple ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... a room on the bank of the Adour, overlooking the Promenade des Baignots. A charwoman took care of it for me. She worked also for an old gentleman, a retired Examining Magistrate, President of the Roger-Ducos Society, which was a vague scientific backwater, in which the scholars of the neighborhood applied themselves with prodigious incompetence to the most whimsical subjects. ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... the crackling of the wood in the grate, which the charwoman had at last succeeded in stirring into a blaze, and by the rattling of the fire-irons which she now arranged in the fender. Everybody was watching the suspected man, and nobody as keenly as Brereton. And Brereton ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... had absconded at the time of the murder; she was evidently an accomplice of the murderer. My cook had left on the same day, having conceived a not unnatural horror of the house. Since then I had made shift with a charwoman. But I should want a housemaid and a cook, and if I acted judiciously in the matter of references, I might get the sort of persons who would help my plans. For there are female rats as ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... that these women had the true nurse-calling—the good of their sick first, and second only the consideration what it was their "place" to do—and that women who wait for the housemaid to do this, or for the charwoman to do that, when their patients are suffering, have not the making of ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... this age Beth had her own point of view in social matters, and frequently disconcerted Harriet by a word or look or inflection of the voice which expressed disapproval of her conduct. Harriet had been at home on one occasion for a week's holiday, a charwoman having done her work in her absence, and on her return she had much to relate of Charles Russell, the groom at Fairholm, who continued to be an ardent admirer of hers, but not an honourable one, because he did ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... of his youth is impressively illustrated here. In his own work he has created a new idealism. But let it not be thought that his understanding of tragedy and his sense of human values have changed. The charwoman may, in very truth, be a Muse of tragedy, all grief is of an equal sacredness, and even the incomparable Hassenreuter—wind-bag, chauvinist and consistent Goetheaner—is forced by the essential soundness of his heart to ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... dependence on him, the feeling that he had rescued something, which gave him sense of anchorage. That, and his buried life in the retreat of these two rooms. Just for an hour in the morning, from nine to ten, the charwoman would come, but not another soul all day. They never went out together. He would stay in bed late, while Wanda bought what they needed for the day's meals; lying on his back, hands clasped behind his head, recalling her face, the movements ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... interest till one came to the dessert. What fun there was about it all! The cleaning of the doorstep by night, when from the ill-lit street a gentleman with a piece of sacking round his legs might very well pass for a somewhat tall charwoman. I would keep watch at the gate to give warning should any one looking like a possible late caller turn the corner of the street, coming back now and then in answer to a low whistle to help my father grope about in the dark for the ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... and somebody would be sure to find out. Shall I ask Dick to lend me half a sovereign? He would in a minute. No! I've not sunk to sponging on my boy friends, at any rate. I'd rather do a day's charing than that. A good idea! Why shouldn't I turn charwoman? If Beatrice would let me clean out the schools every Saturday, instead of Mrs. Cass, and pay me the money, I'd work off the bill in time. I wonder if I dare ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... pristine polish. The geraniums and fuchsias with which she had filled the window all the summer before had died into dry blackened stalks; and the dust lay heavy on the room, in spite of the well-meant but wholly ineffective efforts of the charwoman next door. The two old men had avoided the place for months past by common consent, and the door into it ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... had had much to do with poor people. Mrs. Symons had helped the charwoman, and the gardener, and the driver from the livery-stables, when they were in special difficulties, and Henrietta had continued to do so, and had had her hour at the hospital. That was all. There were the servants, of course, but with the exception of Ellen ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... in the day than she had promised, the charwoman had given up expecting her; whereupon Dick could do no less than stay and see her comfortably tided over the disagreeable time of entering and establishing herself in an empty house after an absence of a week. ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... qualification of being able to travel on any road, no matter how rough, without breaking down or turning over; in fact, when travelling by road in Africa, it facilitates matters as much as the employment of a charwoman oils the wheels in an English household, and it is therefore as ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... I won't be one. A woman wears dirty clothes and a check apron and a sun-bonnet. We've had a charwoman like that in our house, and a washerwoman; and in Collingwood there's a fish-woman and an apple-woman. I've seen them with my very own eyes. I don't think it a bit nice of you, Mr. Brown, to ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... In the Stalls are a couple of Stray Critics who leave early, actors and actresses "resting" more friends and relations. In the Pit, the front row is filled by the Author's domestic servants, the landladies of several of the performers, and a theatrical charwoman or two, behind them a sprinkling of the general public, whose time apparently hangs heavily on their hands. In a Stage-box is the Author herself, with a sycophantic Companion. A murky gloom pervades the Auditorium; ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, April 2, 1892 • Various
... the garret, when Trottle first saw him. He was not saying his prayers, and not crouching down in terror at being alone in the dark. He was, odd and unaccountable as it may appear, doing nothing more or less than playing at a charwoman's or housemaid's business of scouring the floor. Both his little hands had tight hold of a mangy old blacking-brush, with hardly any bristles left in it, which he was rubbing backwards and forwards on the boards, as gravely and steadily as if he ...
— A House to Let • Charles Dickens
... people are gradually being left to the laws of Nature. If a workhouse were to catch on fire, no one would speak of those who escaped the flames as providentially saved. God does not look after the welfare of paupers; nor is it likely that he would pluck a charwoman's brat out of the fire if it tumbled in during her absence. Such interpositions are absurd. But with kings, queens, princes, princesses, and big nobs in general, the case is different. God looks after the quality. He stretches forth his hand to save them from danger, from ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... refugee got, she continued: "Once I gave up a place because they let me have just potatoes and onions for dinner. No, hold on to whatever you get—whatever." And after we had night prayers that were so long drawn out that someone moaned: "Do they want to scourge us with praying?", the old charwoman repeated the hopeless words: "Hold on to ...
— What's the Matter with Ireland? • Ruth Russell
... obtained a commission from the Airedales and Collies, who had large mansions in the neighbourhood, for luring maids from the smaller homes. Of course Mrs. Airedale and Mrs. Collie could afford to pay any wages at all. So now the best he could do was to have Mrs. Spaniel, the charwoman, come up from the village to do the washing and ironing, two days a week. The rest of the work he undertook himself. On a clear afternoon, when the neighbours were not looking, he would take his own shirts and ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... out as general drudge or charwoman!" I felt my nostrils quiver and a bitter harshness ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... quite unaffected by this, for in the days when she had lived in the dreadful fear that she and the Lump might be driven by necessity into the workhouse, she had gone shabby herself. She knew that Millicent's mother, who had once been a dancer, was now a charwoman, often out of work, and in feeble health. It was Millicent's perpetual complaint that she herself was so slow growing up to the age at which she would be earning money and supporting her ailing mother. ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... charwoman at the Mansion," she answered. "She said that if you wanted a pleasure, and a pleasure cheap, there was nothing in all the world like a penny boat. You sit in it, and there you are, as snug as snug; plenty of room and plenty of company, and plenty of sights. Mrs. Jones ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... the charwoman species replied to her summons. Upon Mavis saying that she wanted to see Mr Poulter immediately, she was shown into the "Ladies' Waiting Room," from which Mavis gathered that Mr Poulter ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... Sheila found her voice and sang at her work. She gave herself an overwhelming task of cleaning and scrubbing. She was on her knees like a charwoman, sniffing the strong reek of suds, when there came a knocking at her door. She leapt up with pounding heart. But the knocking was more like a scraping and it was followed by a low whine. For a second Sheila's head filled with a fog of terror and ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... islands, or would he sing the Marsellaise of womanhood, emerging in hordes from their underground kitchens to make a still greater revolution? He did neither. He forgot all about the storm of things, and delighted us with his story of Mary, the charwoman's daughter, a tale of Dublin life, so, kindly, so humane, so vivid, so wise, so witty, and so true, that it would not be exaggerating to say that natural humanity in Ireland found its first worthy chronicler ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... trains running simultaneously down all three sides and not colliding. Well, this sort of cantrip was 'common form,' as we say at the Bar, in Hollond's Space, and he was very curious about the why and wherefore of Sleep. He began to haunt psychological laboratories, where they experiment with the charwoman and the odd man, and he used to go up to Cambridge for seances. It was a foreign atmosphere to him, and I don't think he was very happy in it. He found so many charlatans that he used to get angry, and declare he would be better employed ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... of justice that made the justness of his remarks acceptable. After the revolution of July, Fougeres sent about ten pictures a year to the Salon, of which the jury admitted four or five. He lived with the most rigid economy, his household being managed solely by an old charwoman. For all amusement he visited his friends, he went to see works of art, he allowed himself a few little trips about France, and he planned to go to Switzerland in search of inspiration. This detestable artist was an excellent citizen; he mounted guard duly, went to reviews, ...
— Pierre Grassou • Honore de Balzac
... property, and strongly illuminated by the flare of the twenty thousand additional lamps, the captain would relax from his dignity, and give an arm to a lady who was, in fact, little better than a housekeeper or charwoman. ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... wages? to which she answered, she could clean a house, or dress a common family dinner. But cannot you wash, replied my sister, or get up linen? she answered in the negative, and said, she would undertake neither, nor would she go into a family that did not put out their linen to wash, and hire a charwoman to scour. She desired to see the house, and having carefully surveyed it, said, the work was too hard for her, nor could she undertake it. This put my sister beyond all patience, and me into the greatest admiration. Young ...
— Everybody's Business is Nobody's Business • Daniel Defoe
... this praise would have made her glow sweetly, but now it tasted sour in her mouth; she did not particularly wish to be a magnificent cook-general, a magnificent charwoman. All her nerves felt stretched as if they must snap and she must scream. Tremblingly she set a tray on ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... buses have changed, too. All classes travel side by side, the perspiring flower girl, with her heavy basket of roses, the charwoman clutching her morning purchase of fish, the daintily dressed lady going out to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 8, 1917 • Various
... floated around to the music, half supported on the tips of their dainty toes, half by their filmy purple wings, their delicate bodies swaying in time, that they could be anything but fairies. It seemed absurd to imagine that they were Johnny Mullens, the washerwoman's son, and Polly Flinders, the charwoman's little ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... type and tone, they are alike in this, that they do not attempt to present very complex character-studies, or to probe the deeps of human experience. The last play cited, The Silver Box, may perhaps be thought an exception to this rule; but, though the experience of the hapless charwoman is pitiful enough, hers is a simple soul, so inured to suffering that a little more or less is no such great matter. The play is an admirable genre-picture ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... pounds. There were several more cases of the same kind, but he trusted he had stated enough to establish the necessity of referring the matter to a Committee. There were, also, two brothers, sons of a charwoman, living in a garret, one of whom had signed for 12,500 pounds, and the other for 25,000 pounds; these two brothers, excellent persons, no doubt, but who were receiving about a guinea and a half between them, were down for ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... is not enough. That seems so selfish. So many men have done so much for the world, and I have done nothing. Even the old charwoman on her knees scrubbing floors has done more. She has given her best, and her best has ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... stopped coming to see me because her clothes are so shabby," returned Mrs. Trent, with what seemed to him a calmness that was almost cruel, "and the charwoman tells me that she lives on next to nothing—a loaf of baker's bread and a bit of cheese for dinner. It takes all the little money she can rake and scrape together to pay her room rent—for it seems that the papers have ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... situation. It would be a pity to cut short a pleasant visit and risk offending some of my oldest friends on such purely fanciful grounds. Besides, I just remembered that I had given my cook a holiday and that if I went home I should be dependent on the culinary skill of a charwoman. This last consideration determined me. I ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various
... say more a woman, bearing the implements which denote the charwoman's profession, entered the room and immediately cried out at what she saw. Breton ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher
... away, and had a long talk with a charwoman whom he discovered in the desert of the chairs. She thought the office was situated somewhere in a region unknown to Frank, which she called St. George-of-the-Fields; her daughter, who had been shamefully deserted, had been married there. The parson, she thought, would know, and ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... home, not so much from affection, as from habit, and for the sake of economy. But sometimes he was detained by lectures, or he would take advantage of being in the neighborhood of a library to go and work there. Lucile Arnaud would be left alone in the empty flat. Except for the charwoman who came from eight to ten to do the cleaning, and the tradesmen who came to fetch and bring orders, no one ever rang the bell. She knew nobody in the house now. Christophe had removed, and there were newcomers in the lilac ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... him Christmas as it might be spent and incidentally, too, what some people thought of him. The third showed him the "shadows of the things that have not happened, but will happen in the time before us." He saw himself dead, uncared for, unwept, unwatched, his effects plundered by the charwoman, laundress, and undertaker's man and realized the end to which he must come unless he led an altered life. Holding up his hands he prayed to have his fate reversed and saw the Ghost shrink and dwindle down ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... understanding that is so terrible. Take for instance to-day! I spent this morning at Rzhnov's lodging-house, among the outcasts there; and I saw an infant literally die of hunger; a boy suffering from alcoholism; and a consumptive charwoman rinsing clothes outside in the cold. Then I returned home, and a footman with a white tie opens the door for me. I see my son—a mere lad—ordering that footman to fetch him some water; and I see the army ...
— The Light Shines in Darkness • Leo Tolstoy
... sitting room for study and entertaining. "Scouts" are a kind of servant attached to one student or a small number of students. They run errands, bring meals from the kitchen, and take care of clothing. A bootblack called the "boots" takes care of footwear. A charwoman called the "char" cleaned ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... belief that smearing wood with a red- hot sort of poker was a thing worth doing for its own sake. All of them seemed willing enough to work, provided only that it was work of no use to any living soul. With a little sense, and the occasional assistance of a charwoman, they could have led a ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... anything—pins, perhaps, buttons, small tiresomenesses of that kind. It was made of some glistening black material, and at its center there bloomed a fearful red cabbage rose, a rose all vulgarity, ostentation and importance. This monstrosity had been given to Rosamund as a thank-offering by a poor charwoman to whom she had been kind. It had been in constant use now for over three years. The charwoman knew ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... upon destinations made serious by the near sound of firing. An interesting evening, thus far. A stout, red-faced man with a heavily ornamented vest followed the figure of a woman. Dorn smiled. Biology versus politics.... "Excuse me, pretty one, you look lonely...." A charwoman. Black, sagging clothes. Dorn passed and heard her exclaim, "Who, me? You ask me to go with you? Dear God, he asks me! I am an honest workingwoman. Run along with you!" The woman, walking swiftly, drew alongside. She was chuckling and muttering to herself, a curious pride in her ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht |
