"Middle-aged" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... front door, and a middle-aged man entered, accompanying and partly shoving forward a more diffident and younger one. Neither appeared to be a sailor, although both were dressed in that dingy respectability and remoteness of fashion affected by second and third mates when ashore. They were already well ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Prince replied, "how naive you are. It is true that he is middle-aged, but he has not a ray of romance in him. Don't trust him! Maltese Knights and Maltese cats do their ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... to be there; after a series of random movements it is found that this result is to be caused by going to the City in the morning and coming back in the evening. No one would have guessed a priori that this movement of a middle-aged man's body would cause fish to come out of the sea into his larder, but experience shows that it does, and the middle-aged man therefore continues to go to the City, just as the cat in the cage continues to lift the latch when it has once found it. Of course, in actual fact, ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... the carriage emerged into full view. Beside the driver it contained three passengers—Beaton on the front seat, his face turned backward toward the two behind, a man and a woman. Westcott and Miss Donovan, peering through the screen of leaves, caught only a swift glimpse of their faces—the man middle-aged, inclined to stoutness, with an unusually red face, smoking viciously at a cigar, the woman young and decidedly blonde, with stray locks of hair blowing about her face, and a vivacious manner. The carriage rolled on to ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... middle-aged, commonplace, and very cautious general, who faithfully plodded through the war without defeat or victory. He looked so long before he leaped that he never leaped at all—not even on retreating enemies. Good for the regular office-work routine, he was like a hen with ducklings for ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... he called in a loud voice for the Senora Gomez. Come forth from the chamber beyond, a middle-aged dame, apparelled in black. ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... accustomed to manual labor. It would seem that it would be nothing more than right to give him an easier task at first and let him gradually become hardened to his work at coal digging. Nothing of this kind is done. The young, the old, the middle-aged are indiscriminately and unceremoniously thrust into the mine. Down there are nearly five hundred prisoners. Among them are boys from seventeen to twenty years of age, many of whom are in delicate health. Here are to be found old men, in some ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... requires more food than indoor, and physical labor more than mental. It has been estimated "that a child of ten years requires half as much food as a grown woman, and one of fourteen an equal amount. The rapidly growing active boy often eats as much as a man, and the middle-aged man requires more than the aged. A man of seventy years may preserve health on a quantity which ...
— Public School Domestic Science • Mrs. J. Hoodless
... M. Didot, a middle-aged man with a precise and commercial air, whose speech was brief and plain as that of a man who knows the value of minutes. He desired to know what I had to say to him. I stammered for some time, and became embarrassed ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... over there on the hill," directed the sergeant-major. "It's a long way to Frederick, but Lord! with that horse—" He hesitated for a moment, then spoke up in a courageous, middle-aged, weather-beaten fashion, "I hope you'll have a pleasant ride, lieutenant! I guess I was a little stiffer'n good manners calls for, just at first. You see there's been so much talk of—of—of masquerading—and your voice is Southern, if your politics ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... mirror caught and held his attention. He looked at it, at first casually, then with growing interest. In the glass, directly facing him, was a wide studio window. It was open, notwithstanding the cold January weather, and a comfortable, middle-aged, plump woman, evidently a superior type of caretaker, was sitting on the sill, polishing an inner pane. The scene was as vivid as a mirage, and it was like the mirage in that it was projected from some point which itself ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... his father directed a glance at him in a certain mildly anxious way. Joe did not see these glances, but Bessie saw them, every one. Mr. Bronson was a middle-aged man, well developed and of heavy build, though not fat. His was a rugged face, square-jawed and stern-featured, though his eyes were kindly and there were lines about the mouth that betokened laughter rather than ...
— The Cruise of the Dazzler • Jack London
... fact the first person we beheld upon the pier platform; raw-boned, stiff-jointed, and more than middle-aged, he must nevertheless have jumped out once again before the train stopped, and that almost on top of a diminutive telegraph boy, who was waiting while the old hound read his telegram with one eye and watched emerging passengers with both. Whether we should have passed him ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... this visit, when I happened one evening to stroll into a box in one of the principal theatres of the city. A small party sat on the seats before me: a middle-aged gentleman and his lady, in front, and directly behind them my young doctor and the same very handsome young lady I had seen him walking with on the side-walk before the swell-fronts and south-exposures. As Professor Langdon seemed to be very much taken up with his companion, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... the philosophy of middle-aged youth, while the man beside him sat with clenched hands and faced the hateful vision of Dinah, the fairy-footed and gay of heart, writhing under that ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... insert myself into a pair of middle-aged pantaloons. It is needless to say that girls who may have a literary tendency will find little to interest ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... could easily have distanced his middle-aged pursuer under ordinary circumstances, but the position in which Wicksteed's body was found suggests that he had the ill luck to drive his quarry into a corner between a drift of stinging nettles and the gravel ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... went to her middle-aged repose, I sat up and went through imaginary scenes, and reviewed the situation a hundred times, and tried to convince myself of what I wanted to believe, ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris
... fifteen!" "O true believers, here is a Syrian steed which will give renown to the purchaser!" Strolling loosely about were dealers in sugar-cane and pea-nuts, which are called gooba in Africa as in America, pipe peddlers and venders of rosaries, jugglers and minstrels. At last we came to a middle-aged woman seated on the ground behind a basket containing beads, glass armlets, and such trinkets. She was dressed like any Arab-woman of the lower class, but was not veiled, and on her chin blue lines were tattooed. Her features ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... friends within. I was very thankful when Mark, looking out of the wagon, told us that we were approaching his father's house. Our cavalcade must have been seen, for in a short time two horsemen came galloping up to us: the elder, a fine-looking, middle-aged man, Mark saluted as his father; the other as brother Peter. A few words explained what had happened. Mr Praeger immediately invited us all to his house, while Peter started off as fast as he could go to summon ...
— Adventures in the Far West • W.H.G. Kingston
... too good to be true. In addition, the gods loved him, and so he had to die young. Some people think that a man of fifty-two is middle-aged. But if R. H. D. had lived to be a hundred, he would never have grown old. It is not generally known that the name of his ...
— Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis • Various
... and the sky appeared to have met in true Waterloo fashion, and the dark branches of the pines seemed writhing and tossing in a sea of flame, a loud knock came at the hall-door (bells are not the fashion in Dixie), and a servant soon ushered into the room a middle-aged, unassuming gentleman, whom my host received with a respect and cordiality which indicated that he was no ordinary guest. There was in his appearance and manner that indefinable something which denotes the man of mark; but my curiosity was soon gratified by an introduction. It was "Colonel" A——. ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... and whom it was therefore difficult to replace in a foreign country. The very same day the prince's banker, whom he had commissioned to provide him with another servant, was announced at the moment we were going out. He presented to the prince a middle-aged man, well-dressed, and of good appearance, who had been for a long time secretary to a procurator, spoke French and a little German, and was besides furnished with the best recommendations. The prince was pleased ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... a rather kindred-looking girl with darker hair on the right of Mr. Direck who impressed him at the very outset as being still prettier, and—he didn't quite place her at first—somehow familiar to him; there was a large irrelevant middle-aged lady in black with a gold chain and a large nose, between Teddy and the tutor; there was a tall middle-aged man with an intelligent face, who might be a casual guest; there was an Indian young gentleman faultlessly dressed up to his brown soft linen collar ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... them. They seem a race without a single beauty, possessing neither stature, nor colour, nor length of hair, nor even plump shapeliness. Undersized, leather-skinned, small-eyed, thin, and wizened, they never seem to be young. They seem to start middle-aged and go ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... by the French labels on the soiled linings? She could have made a better hat in two hours than any one of those she sold at the reduced price of ten dollars; yet even the dingiest of them at last found a purchaser, and she saw the green velvet toque, which had been rejected by the sensible middle-aged woman in the morning, finally pass into the possession of a hard-featured spinster. What amazed her, for she had a natural talent for dress, was the infallible instinct which guided the vast majority of ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... the test for the conjurer's knowledge—the sharp and unexpected trial of his skill and sagacity. After the old maid had taken her leave, possessed of the two bottles, a middle-aged, large-sized woman walked in, and, after making a low courtesy, sat down as she had been desired. The conjurer glanced keenly at her, and something like a smile might be seen to settle upon his features; it was so slight, however, that the good ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... serious thoughts of wiring for Miss Drewitt, who was spending a few days with friends in town. Thinking better of this, he walked down to a servants' registry office, and, after being shut up for a quarter of an hour in a small room with a middle-aged lady of Irish extraction, who was sent in to be catechized, resolved to let matters ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... which, somehow or other, our American girls often fail to adorn themselves during an appreciable moment. It is a pity that the English violet should grow into such an outrageously developed peony as I have attempted to describe. I wonder whether a middle-aged husband ought to be considered as legally married to all the accretions that have overgrown the slenderness of his bride, since he led her to the altar, and which make her so much more than he ever bargained for! ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... small fat man. His face was smooth and had the peculiar boylike appearance that chubbiness gives even to the middle-aged; he had bright black eyes, and before he spoke he ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... reached. George Osborne, who is the beautiful lover in Vanity Fair, is killed almost before our eyes, on the field of battle, and we feel that Nemesis has with justice taken hold of him. Poor old Dobbin does marry the widow, after fifteen years of further service, when we know him to be a middle-aged man and her a middle-aged woman. That glorious Paradise of which I have spoken requires a freshness which can hardly be attributed to the second marriage of a widow who has been fifteen years mourning for her first husband. Clive Newcome, "the first young man," if we may so call him, of the ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... open, will you, can you, as a husband, father or brother, ever permit the females under your care to even take the chance of being RECRUITING OFFICERS for these sinks of perdition, THESE ANTE-CHAMBERS OF HELL. These places, dripping with the blood of hundreds and thousands of young and middle-aged men, who, but for their enchantment, might have been good and true men, and have filled honorable graves. These places have broken the hearts of thousands of wives, mothers and: sisters, when they have seen their loved ones bound in the fetters and chains of eternal ...
— There is No Harm in Dancing • W. E. Penn
... music?" said Raskolnikov, addressing a middle-aged man standing idly by him. The man looked at him, ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... in the homely style of middle-aged ladies, and Mrs. Veal proses concerning the conversations they had formerly held, and the books they had read together. Her very recent experience probably led Mrs. Veal to talk of death, and the books written on the ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... her embrace]. How can you be Ariadne? You are a middle-aged woman: well preserved, madam, ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... middle-aged men were old friends. They had been school-fellows, and when they were hardly out of their boyhood the war came on, and they enlisted in the same company, on the same day, and happened to march away elbow to elbow. Then came the great experience of a great war, and the ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... I had been more or less conscious for some time of my degeneration in this respect, but it is no easy matter to escape from a rut when one is middle-aged. Josephine's stricture concerning the lack of joyousness in my apparel, however, brought me up standing, as the phrase is, and served not merely to spur me to action, but to crystallize a tissue of reflections which had been churning in my brain ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... sight of his fellow travelers, noted with some apprehension that they were being pretty closely watched by an alert-looking, middle-aged man. Receiving a covert nod from Josef, the latter had disappeared at once into the human medley. With all expedition, therefore, the American rejoined them. He read a question in Josef's eyes which changed into a defiance as the ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... the parade in front of the Fort. Some of the aristocracy of the place were out also, staid middle-aged men with powdered queues and velvet coats, elegant ladies in crimson silk petticoats and skirts drawn back, the train fastened up with a ribbon or chain which they carried on their arms as they minced along on their high heeled slippers, carrying ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... least, we know that nothing like discipline and organization, in the modern sense of the terms, were introduced into the management of fire apparatus until a time quite within the recollection of the middle-aged men of our own day. If there be anything apparently improbable in this fact, we need only recollect that many of the grandest triumphs of human genius, with which we are already so familiar, are not yet forty ...
— Fire Prevention and Fire Extinction • James Braidwood
... flying about me, and would fain coax them into my foot. I have almost tried to make them drunk, and inveigle them thither in their cups; but as they are not at all familiar chez moi, they formalize at wine, as much as a middle-aged woman who is beginning to just drink ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... of the —th was playing the "Merry Widow" waltz, still a favourite at the fort, and only one of the officers was not dancing. All the others—young, middle-aged, and even elderly—were gliding more or less gracefully, more or less happily, over the waxed floor of the big, white-walled, flag-draped hall where Fort Ellsworth had its concerts, theatricals, small hops, and big balls. Encircled by their ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... sister was a small and withered lady, who had been something of a beauty, and was now the pink of gentle and middle-aged decorum. She was one of those women it is so easy to ignore till you live with them. Then you perceive that in their relations to their own world, the world they make and govern, they are of the stuff which holds a country together, without which a country can not ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... should we graft the Persian walnut high, here in Michigan? It certainly saves time, because a middle-aged walnut tree produces, in terms of pecks and bushels, in eight to 15 years. Being well established it saves patience and disappointment. And I know it ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... for the sake of argument, that gratitude, respect, friendliness, a sense of being unprotected and alone in the world, have led to her engagement with the wealthy, middle-aged banker, and that through it all her woman's heart was never awakened: such a thing at least is possible. If this were true, she would be no more to blame than I, and we might become the happy victims of circumstances. I'm not worthy of her, and never shall be, ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... as we all change, with the passing of the years. I first remember her as a woman middle-aged, sweet-faced, hardly like a widow, nor yet like an old maid. She was rather like a young girl in love, with her lover absent on a long journey. She lived more with the memory of her husband, she clung to him more, than if she had had a child. She never ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... more sober counsels seems to be confined unhappily to the older generation, and the older generation, even if we include in it the middle-aged, must before long pass away. What we have to reckon with, especially in Bengal, is the revolt of the younger generation, and this revolt draws its inspiration from religious and philosophical sources which no measures merely political, either of repression or of conciliation, ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... literal truth; but it was impossible that I should participate in such a campaign as the one I had just passed through without making many stanch friends, both Boers and English: and some of these, middle-aged men who knew perfectly well what they were talking about, strongly advised me to raise money, either by selling a portion of my farm, or by means of a mortgage upon it. But my father had instilled into me a perfect horror of anything that savoured of getting into debt, ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... overlook the halbert for the novelty of a well-turned figure and of a pretty, winning face; and by the end of the first two or three days she had admirers even among the gentlemen. The Quartermaster, in particular, a middle-aged soldier, who had more than once tried the blessings of matrimony already, but was now a widower, was evidently disposed to increase his intimacy with the Sergeant, though their duties often brought them together; and the youngsters among his messmates did not fail ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... was middle-aged, bald, and somewhat stout—and Harleston recognized one of his visitors of the early morning. The woman was sinuous, with raven hair, dead white complexion, a perfectly lovely face, and a superb figure. Harleston would have ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... and imaginary, to bring things up to date. A rather unconvincing plot, with a dash of Great Expectations in it, yet offers a situation which has plenty of amusing possibilities. Honor and Evie Nutting, two middle-aged spinsters, find themselves the possessors of eight thousand a year, on condition that they spend it all. That sounds, of course, a very pleasant arrangement; but they have been struggling for years to make ends meet and economy has become a habit. The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 15, 1920 • Various
... horse-dealers and basket-makers, as one could see from the drove of lean horses and heap of wicker-work near the waggon. Several children were playing about among the huts. Some women were at their basket-making by the waggon. A middle-aged man, smoking a pipe, stood by the hedge, mending what looked like an enormous butterfly net. In spite of my adventure on the road, I was not at all frightened by these gipsies, because I liked their looks, and I knew now that I had only my shilling to ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... got up betimes to shoot, Or hunt; the young, because they liked the sport The first thing boys like, after play and fruit; The middle-aged, to make the day more short; For ennui is a growth of English root, Though nameless in our language-we retort The fact for words, and let the French translate That awful yawn which ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... start a League to be called Anti-Holiday? Bet half the middle-aged men-folk will join! Then we might get an occasional jolly day, Free from the pests who perplex and purloin. "Health-Resort" quackery, portmanteau-packery, Cheat-brigade charges and chills I might miss. Dear-bought ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 8, 1892 • Various
... General Orphan Asylum, up on Twenty-third street. Well, it happens that this institution is the Beaubien's sole charity—in fact, it is her particular hobby. I presume that she feels she is now a middle-aged woman, and that the time is not far distant when she will have to close up her earthly accounts and hand them over to the heavenly auditor. Anyway, this last year or two she has suddenly become philanthropic, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... middle-aged man whose curly hair made him the idol of all flappers. He was lazy, uncultivated, and ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... of Middleton, a very worthy man, who, though differing from his kinsmen upon some religious points, and not altogether approving of the conduct of one of them, was on good terms with both. The Rector of Middleton was portly and middle-aged, fond of ease and reading, and by no means indifferent to the good things of life. He was unmarried, and passed much of his time at Middleton Hall, the seat of his near relative Sir Richard Assheton, to whose family he was greatly attached, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Lady of Stahrenburg, and Kepler writes of her: "Her person and manners are suitable to mine; no pride, no extravagance; she can bear to work; she has a tolerable knowledge of how to manage a family; middle-aged and of a disposition and capability to acquire ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... people being middle-aged, and steady, John, and pretend that we are a humdrum couple, going on in a jog-trot sort of way, it's only because I'm such a silly little thing, John, that I like, sometimes, to act a kind of Play with Baby, and ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... There was a middle-aged lady among the passengers, of whom the least I can say was, that she had a great many little winning ways of making herself disagreeable. She imposed frightfully on me while on board, getting me to mark her trunks for her, and carry them into ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... Bradshaw arrived—a stout, bald-headed, middle-aged gentleman, with ruddy countenance, dressed in nankin trousers, white jacket, and broad-brimmed straw hat, which he doffed as he approached the strangers, glancing from one to the other; and then, having settled in his mind that Jack Rogers was Alick Murray, shook his hand, which ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... power, and with the intelligent brightness of eye and face which generally distinguishes men of the consummate skill and extensive knowledge which I was told he possessed. I was, however, greatly surprised to see only a heavy-looking, middle-aged, rather bulky man, with a miser-like expression of face. There was no fire in the room, and, for a cold morning, he seemed to be rather thinly clad, his only attire being a pair of trousers, without ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... the power of attorney, by which the Infanta authorised the middle-aged ecclesiastic whom she was about to espouse to take possession in her name of the very desirable property which she ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... been about a year and a half after the marriage of his daughter—Felix Millsap was on his way home from work, a middle-aged figure, moving with the clunking gait of a tired laborer who wears cheap, heavy shoes, his broad splayed hands dangling at the ends of his arms as though in either of them he carried an invisible weight. It had been ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... flickered to life. A man's face appeared—the middle-aged, soft-fleshed, almost stickily innocent face of one of the Solar Systems greatest crusaders ...
— A World is Born • Leigh Douglass Brackett
... very unsympathetic study of whom James afterward contributed to the "English Men of Letters" series. But in the name-story of the collection he was already in the line of his future development. This is the story of a middle-aged invalid American who comes to England in search of health, and finds, too late, in the mellow atmosphere of the mother-country, the repose and the congenial surroundings which he has all his life been longing for in his raw America. The pathos ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... man, middle-aged, bald, bland, and with a heavy moustache, had been sitting opposite to us during dinner, and had attracted my attention by the way he looked at my partner from time to time. It was a difficult look to describe, because ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... introduced by Mrs. Goudie as the higgler, or itinerant poulterer and greengrocer, who served the house in Mr. Bates' time. He was a thin middle-aged man, with light watery eyes, a straggling beard, and an astoundingly dilatory manner. He used to pull his pony and cart into the hedge or bank by the roadside, and leave them there an unconscionable time, while he pottered about the back doors of his ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... in the morning she wore the high look she had been wont to wear in the years gone by, when she ruled in her father's house, and rode to the hunt with a following of gay middle-aged and elderly rioters. Her eye was brilliant, and her colour matched it. She held her head with the old dauntless carriage, and there was that in her voice before which her women quaked, and her lacqueys hurried ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... novelists, she finds 'a pleasant little rondelette of a woman, something of my own style. We talked and laughed together, as good-natured women do, and agreed upon many points.' The learned Mrs. Somerville is described as 'a simple, little, middle-aged woman. Had she not been presented to me by name and reputation, I should have said she was one of the respectable twaddling matrons one meets at every ball, dressed in a snug mulberry velvet gown, and a little cap with a red flower. I asked her how she ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... common with all middle-aged gentlewomen, was to put her hand to her head and reflect that she had not on her best cap; and Mary looked down at her dimpled hands, which were blue from the contact with mixed yarn ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... The Dancing Master? He is a middle-aged gentleman, of reprobate and romantic tendencies, and tries to be a friend ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... middle-aged men and matrons, youth and vigour bloomed from every countenance, and as they looked up, I thought I could see in their ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... the walls. One by Ricard represented Philippe Dechartre, very pale, with rumpled hair, and eyes lost in a romantic dream. The other showed a middle-aged woman, almost beautiful in her ardent slightness. It was Madame ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the introduction. Elias M. Pierce, receding a yard or so into perspective, revealed himself as a spare, middle-aged man who looked as if he had been hewn out of a block, square, and glued into a permanent black suit. Under his palely sardonic eye Hal felt that he was being appraised, and in none too ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... in his earlier poems. Byron's senior by twenty years, he was destined to outlive him by more than a quarter of a century; but when 'English Bards, etc.', was in progress, he was little more than middle-aged, and the "three score years" must have been written in the spirit of prophecy. As it chanced, the last word rested with him, and it was a generous one. Addressing Moore, in 1824, he says ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... long black coat and a crepe veil to her heels, rode a bicycle back and forth to church, the long veil floating out behind. One evening she was struck by an automobile and killed instantly. The niece to whom she had left her little house had made an arrangement with a middle-aged woman living there that if she took care of "Aunt Martha" she could have the house tax free all her days. Her days are still continuing—and with all the advance in prices of houses, the niece can't do a thing about ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... generations been kept gloriously in the little peninsula, though no case was known of any earl's attaining his majority as being already Earl of Cairnforth. The Montgomeries were usually a long-lived race, and their heirs rarely came to their titles till middle-aged fathers of families. ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... and for the rest of the day Mr. Hurst saw him no more. At one o'clock a savoury smell passed the door on its way upstairs, and at five o'clock a middle-aged woman with an inane smile looked into the room on her way aloft with a loaded tea-tray. By supper- time he was suffering considerably from ...
— Deep Waters, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... of lighter complexion than the young brave; this one lighter than the middle-aged man, and the middle-aged man lighter than the superannuated homo, who, by smoke, paint, dirt, and a drying up of the vital juices, appears to be the true copper-colored Dakota. The color of the Dakotas varies with the ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... I don't care what Mr. Jerry said," she told Aunt Kate as they went up the steps and into the principal's office where a pleasant-faced middle-aged lady looked questioningly at Mary Rose and ...
— Mary Rose of Mifflin • Frances R. Sterrett
... creature he had become as a hound on the scent, the keenest on earth—that of self-interest. He was changed, while yet living, from a being outside the world to one with the world before him. He felt young, although he was a middle-aged, almost elderly man. He had in his pocket only a few dollars. He might have had more had he not purchased the checked suit and had he not given much away. There was another man whose term would be up in a week, and ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... yards away to a shady spot, where he sat down on the green slope of the foss to cool himself. He had been riding many hours in a burning sun, and wanted cooling. He attracted everybody's attention on his arrival by his appearance: middle-aged, with good features and curly brown hair and beard, but huge—one of the biggest men I had ever seen; his weight could not have been under about seventeen stone. Sitting or reclining on the grass, he fell asleep, and rolling down the slope fell with a tremendous ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... aware of Mr. Greeley's early obligation to Mr. Jones, by the volley of oaths and vituperation which he heaped upon him because he did not go West instead of hanging around there seeking office. No wonder the gentleman, who was a reputable middle-aged man, fled from the presence of this famous expounder of 'Moral Ideas.' However, when all this has been said we cannot help but admit that a great and good man died on December 29th, 1872. Certain it is that Journalism lost one of its ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... in England what you are up against. You have no idea what it means to be in a country where everybody, the women, the elderly people, the steady middle-aged men, are taking war as seriously as business. They haven't the slightest compunction. I don't know what Germany was like before the war, I had hardly gotten out of my train before the war began; but Germany to-day is one big ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... had broken out in a blaze of patriotic display. In all the windows of the stores there were signs: "Wake up, America!" Across the broad Main Street there were banners: "America Prepare!" Down in the square at one end of the street a small army was gathering—old veterans of the Civil War, and middle-aged veterans of the Spanish War, and regiments of the state militia, and brigades of marines and sailors from the ships in the harbor, and members of fraternal lodges with their Lord High Chief Grand Marshals on horseback with gold sashes and waving white plumes, ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... one in the loft and came out very boldly. When Bobbie sneezed, the rat was quite shocked and hurried away, for he saw that a hay-loft where such things could happen was no place for a respectable middle-aged rat that liked ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit
... sensations when he discovered the law of planetary motion. He could not keep still. He forgot that he was a sober, middle-aged person, and acted as if he were a small boy who had just got the answer to his sum in vulgar fractions. Nobody had helped him; he had found it out for himself; and now he could go out and play. ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... and sweetness void of pride." Of that admired world likewise are the lovers that Matthew Prior creates, who woo neither with stormy passion nor with mawkish whining, but in a courtly manner; lovers who deem an epigram a finer tribute than a sigh. So the tender fondness of a middle-aged man for an infant is elevated above the commonplace by assuming ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... amusement lasted so long that Owen grew weary, and was thinking of retreating from his post by the door, when some little bustle was occasioned, on the opposite side of the room, by the entrance of a middle-aged man, and a young girl, apparently his daughter. The man advanced to the bench occupied by the seniors of the party, who welcomed him with the usual pretty Welsh greeting, "Pa sut mae dy galon?" ("How is thy heart?") and drinking his health passed on to him the cup of excellent ...
— The Doom of the Griffiths • Elizabeth Gaskell
... of the Revolution! He was the old, the middle-aged, and the young. He was Capt. Miles, of Concord, who said that he went to battle as he went to church. He was Capt. Davis, of Acton, who reproved his men for jesting on the march. He was Deacon Josiah Haynes, of Sudbury, 80 years old, who marched with his company to the South ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... eyes.' And he said, 'You wouldn't make it a handsome face, would you?' and she says, 'A very handsome face.' And says he, 'Middle-aged?' and says she, 'Twenty-nine.' And I mind him saying, 'A little bald on the top?' and she says, says she, 'Not ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... A stoutish middle-aged man, good-looking and breezily genial, dressed in a silk smock, stockings, handsomely ornamented sandals, and a gold fillet round his brows, comes in. He is like Joyce Burge, yet also like Lubin, as if Nature had made a composite photograph of the two men. He takes ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... middle-aged man, of medium stature, great personal strength, and no very marked pretensions to beauty; but he was as thorough an old sea-dog as ever looked upon salt water. His visage was burnt to a deep brick-red by years of exposure to all sorts of weather; and ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... before the crime she offered him three thousand roubles, on condition that he would elope with her to the gold mines. But the criminal, counting on escaping punishment, had preferred to murder his father to get the three thousand rather than go off to Siberia with the middle-aged charms of his pining lady. This playful paragraph finished, of course, with an outburst of generous indignation at the wickedness of parricide and at the lately abolished institution of serfdom. Reading it with curiosity, Alyosha folded up the paper and ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... us a very stout, middle-aged man, apoplectic with the heat, was elephantinely jolly for the benefit of a bored-looking girl across the table from him, and at the next table a newspaper woman ate alone, the last edition propped against the water-bottle before her, her hat, for coolness, on ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... student remained. On the campus, not far from the dormitory, stood a building of a single story, of several rooms. In one of these rooms there lived, with his family, that tall, gaunt, shaggy, middle-aged man, in his shiny black coat and paper collars, without any cravats, who had been the lad's gentle monitor on the morning of his entering college. He, too, was to spend the summer there, having no means of getting ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... The former was known most of them personally; and to all, by repute, as a grave, clever, promising young man, rather prudent than lavish, and never suspected to have got into a scrape. What the deuce did he do there? Mr. Avenel puzzled them yet more. A middle-aged man, said to be in business, whom they had observed "about town" (for he had a noticeable face and figure)—that is, seen riding in the park, or lounging in the pit at the opera, but never set eyes on at a recognized club, or in the coteries of their 'set';—a man ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... would we miss the Letters. It is quite true that he is chary of petticoats in his earlier work: but when he reached "David Balfour" he drew an entrancing heroine; and the contrasted types of young girl and middle-aged woman in "Weir of Hermiston" offer eloquent testimonial to his increasing power in depicting the Eternal Feminine. At the same time, it may be acknowledged that the gallery of female portraits is not like Scott's for number and variety, nor like Thackeray's for distinction and ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... the superiority of the English Nation. For foreigners he had a magnificent contempt and distinguished between them and monkeys only by a certain mental effort. Art he thought nasty, literature womanish; he was a Tory, middle-aged and well-to-do. ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... a large room, in which blazed a brisk fire. Before the fire sat two stout lads, who turned upon me their heavy eyes, with no very welcome greeting. A middle-aged woman was standing at a table, and two children were amusing themselves with a kitten ...
— Finger Posts on the Way of Life • T. S. Arthur
... the cases of this disease, which have hitherto fallen under my own immediate observation, the subjects have been middle-aged men, of thin and spare habit, with a sort of hollow-eyed anxiety of expression in their countenance, free from gout and constitutional disease in general, and, as far as could be ascertained, from any organic defect in the urinary organs. In every instance they had been induced to apply for medical ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... Bay neighbourhood, four modes of disposing of the dead obtain, according to Mr. Meyer:—old persons are buried; middle-aged persons are placed in a tree, the hands and knees being brought nearly to the chin, all the openings of the body, as mouth, nose, ears, etc. being previously sewn up, and the corpse covered with mats, pieces of old cloth, nets, etc. ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... the more than middle-aged German professor (he must be fifty-seven or so) but with a heart full of newly wakened yearnings for human life with all its joys and passions, Faust wanders, trying to feel sympathy with all these multitudinous human beings, attracted perhaps here and there, but evidently for ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... remarked Staniford, "than being younger than you look. I am twenty-eight, and people take me for thirty-four. I'm a prematurely middle-aged man. I wish you would tell me, Miss Blood, a little about South Bradfield. I've been trying to make out whether I was ever there. I tramped nearly everywhere when I was a student. What sort of people are ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... life, spending the greater part of every day in solitude. Grief was not sufficient to account for the heaviness and muteness which had fallen upon him, or for the sudden change by which his youthful-looking countenance had become that of a middle-aged man. He seemed to shrink before eyes that regarded him, however kind their expression; one might have thought that some secret shame was harassing his mind. He himself, indeed, would have used no other word to describe the ill under which ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... received from Wurzburg had informed her that the present holder of the bill was "a middle-aged man." If he had been very young, or very old, she would have trusted in the autumn of her beauty, backed by her ready wit. But experience had taught her that the fascinations of a middle-aged woman are, in the vast majority of cases, fascinations ...
— Jezebel • Wilkie Collins
... middle-aged man, with sallow complexion, black hair and beard, of obviously Hebrew extraction. He spoke with a marked foreign accent, but very courteously, to the two officials, who, he begged, would excuse him if he went on with ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... closer. Many were the means shouted out in mouthfuls, of the best possible ways of ending it. "Water!" but there was none near, and many cried for it who might have got it from the well at Blackfriars Wynd. "Bite the tail!" and a large, vague, benevolent, middle-aged man, more desirous than wise, with some struggle got the bushy end of Yarrow's tail into his ample mouth, and bit it with all his might. This was more than enough for the much-enduring, much-perspiring shepherd, who, with a gleam of joy over his broad visage, delivered a terrific ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... weeds, but evidently lookin' through 'em. Anon a few single men with good-lookin' tanned faces, enjoyin' themselves round a table of their own, and talkin' and laughin' more'n considerable. Respectable, middle-aged couples, takin' their comfort with kinder pensive faces, and once in awhile a young girl as adorably sweet and pretty as only American girls can be at ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... whole town knew how Agnes had gone to the minister with her domestic troubles and how in some mysterious fashion this young man had worked a miracle. For both Agnes and Hen were as suddenly and happily in love with one another as though they were newly married instead of being a middle-aged and childless couple. ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... The carvers were middle-aged full-ported men, with fine ruddy complexions, and moustaches of the Japanese weeping mulberry or mammoth droop variety. On signal one of them would come promptly to you where you sat, he shoving ahead of ...
— Eating in Two or Three Languages • Irvin S. Cobb
... honeycombed—that was her word—with conventionality and false standards, and she made confessions like these to Laura, sitting in the girl's bedroom in the twilight. They were very soothing, these confessions. Laura would take Mrs. Simpson's thin, veined, middle-aged hand in hers and seem to charge herself for the moment with the responsibility of the elder lady's case. She did not attempt to conceal her pity or even her contempt for Mrs. Simpson's state of grace, ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... sat eating the remainder of his bread, the entry was darkened a little, and he saw a couple of women peer in—one a middle-aged, comely body, the other a ...
— Nic Revel - A White Slave's Adventures in Alligator Land • George Manville Fenn
... women and children brought him gusts of emotion. In one evening hour, he followed a middle-aged woman who was leading a child through the faintly-lit streets; trailed the pair for a square or two through the soft snow, a sort of miracle in the picture to him, a heaven of gentleness and order. This was his first grand reaction from the field of strife—at least, from this ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... our idea had gone abroad. I could hear the word "opium" passed from mouth to mouth, and by the looks directed at us I could see we were supposed to have some private information. And here an incident occurred highly typical of San Francisco. Close at my back there had stood for some time a stout middle-aged gentleman, with pleasant eyes, hair pleasantly grizzled, and a ruddy, pleasing face. All of a sudden he appeared as a third competitor, skied the Flying Scud with four fat bids of a thousand dollars each, and then as suddenly fled the field, remaining ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the conservative merely the creature of habit? I suppose the older generation always looks disapprovingly at the younger, and, in spite of our youth, we really belong to the past generation. We see things through the eyes of our parents. We are mentally middle-aged—for middle age is a state of mind, after all. You and I were broken in by tradition—at least I know I was, and even the war couldn't free me. It only made me restless and dissatisfied. It destroyed ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... wondering what "golden fruits" were to be found on these shores at this time, oranges and nespoli being out of season, when some boatmen in a small fishing smack began to sing the "Santa Lucia" beloved by the Neapolitans. A handsome, middle-aged woman seated near us, touched to tears by the penetrating sweetness of the song, as it reached us across the waters, and with the camaraderie induced by the common hap of travel, has just whispered in my ear that her husband proposed to her at Bellagio. I fancied the happy ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... that unseen eminence a strident, persistent voice flowed steadily, expounding the necessity and uses of "a baptism of fire," with a monotonous variety of application. Fire was needful for the young, for the middle-aged, for the old, and for those, if any, who occupied the intermediate positions. It was needful for the rich and for the poor, for the ignorant and for the learned, for church-members, for those who were "well-wishers" but not "professors," and for hardened ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... three miles at a pretty steady trot, and at the end of the third,—at the very gates of the Haviland Park, in fact,—fortune came to her rescue. A good-humored middle-aged gentleman on a brown horse came cantering down the avenue and, passing through the gates, approached her. Seeing her, he raised his hat courteously; seeing him, she stopped her pony, ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... "till she was seventeen. At that time something happened at the school which I find mildly described in these papers as 'something unpleasant.' The plain fact was that the music-master attached to the establishment fell in love with Miss Gwilt. He was a respectable middle-aged man, with a wife and family; and, finding the circumstances entirely hopeless, he took a pistol, and, rashly assuming that he had brains in his head, tried to blow them out. The doctor saved his life, but not his reason; he ended, where he had better have begun, in an asylum. Miss Gwilt's ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... conduct of the naughty little flirt. Suddenly Kate received a summons home—and right glad I was to hear of it. She announced it to us one evening, saying she expected her father the next day. The following afternoon she came over to our cottage, accompanied with two middle-aged gentlemen. The elder of the two was Mr. Barclay, her father, who had known Mrs. Morris in early life; the other she introduced as Col. Paulding, a friend. Col. Paulding's manner struck us with surprise. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... first stanza was finished a carriage appeared in the rear of the group. From it descended a middle-aged man and a stout woman, and they together helped a young girl to alight. She was clad all in white. For a moment her thin, delicate figure shrank from the cutting wind. Timid, nervous, she glanced an instant at the crowd and the dark ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... less, in casts of brains, skulls, charts, and other matters that would make the most show for the money. That would do to begin with. I would then advertise myself as the celebrated Professor Brainey, or whatever name I might choose, and wait for my first customer. My first customer is a middle-aged man. I look at him,—ask him a question or two, so as to hear him talk. When I have got the hang of him, I ask him to sit down, and proceed to fumble his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... tucked themselves in a corner from which through a hole where the tiles had fallen off the roof, they could see down into the barnyard, where white and speckled chickens pecked about with jerky movements. A middle-aged woman stood in the doorway of the house looking suspiciously at the files of khaki-clad soldiers that shuffled slowly into the barns ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... A certain landowner, middle-aged but foppish, in a tunic of fine cloth and patent leather high boots, sold her a horse, and was so carried away by talking to her that he knocked down the price to meet her wishes. He held her hand a long time and, looking into her merry, sly, ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... to a low cottage on the road side, and there we knocked. A mulatto serving-man came round cautiously to reconnoitre from the back of the house, when having ascertained that we really were English travellers benighted and wet, the front door was opened, and we found within a middle-aged very kind-looking woman, and her little daughter; her name is Maria Rosa d'Acunha. Her husband and son were absent on business, and she and the little girl were alone. As soon as we had changed our wet clothes, and had provided for the ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham |
