"Slatternly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... next minute the upper half of the door was opened, and an oldish woman looked out. A dirty woman, with her hair all in fly-away order, and her dress very slatternly as well as soiled. ...
— What She Could • Susan Warner
... following the convolutions of the valley, until it became a thread; on the right it turned sharply by a clump of trees which marked a farm. In the middle of it all, in the grateful shadow cast by a wayside cafe, sat Paragot and myself, watching with thirsty eyes the buxom but slatternly patronne pour out beer from a bottle. A dirty, long-haired mongrel terrier lapped water from an earthenware bowl, at the foot of the wooden table at which we sat. This was Narcisse, a recent member of our vagabond family, whom my master had ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... meanwhile, in despair of finding a purchaser to deal with them. All the waste paper of the town seemed to float congenially to this neglected spot; and all the fretful children came and cried here, in charge of all the slatternly nurses who disgraced the place. If there was any intention in Thorpe Ambrose of sending a worn-out horse to the knacker's, that horse was sure to be found waiting his doom in a field on this side of the town. No growth flourished in these desert regions but the arid growth of rubbish; and no ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... on the edge of the Taufusi swamp, was a small collection of huts, jumbled together in squalor and dirt, with pigs dozing in the ooze and slatternly women beating out siapo in the shade. It was a dunghill of out-islanders, Nieues, Uveans, Tongans, Tapatueans, banded together in a common poverty; landless people of other archipelagoes, despised of the Samoans, and paying tribute to the lord of the soil—a few men in war; ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... go without you. You wouldn't have her like one of those slatternly women you see standing at the corners, with their fists in their sides and their elbows sticking out, ready to talk to anybody that ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... as far as a protest Alice turned in to the entrance of a building and climbed a flight of stairs. She pushed a button. A woman of rather slatternly appearance came ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... any time and to Julie, who had stared at the rows of slatternly kept backyards until she grew familiar with each battered garbage can, the sight was hateful. The rain had driven even the starved alley cats to cover, and with a sigh forlorn in its wretchedness, she turned from the window ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... was filled with men, both white and black, while a dozen or more slatternly negro women were seated here and there. The Assistant District Attorney's plea for a postponement of the Sylvester case on the ground of the absence of an important witness and the granting of his plea was entirely lost on the majority of those in the court room, their attention ...
— The Red Seal • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... speak of "thumbing" but of "walking up and down" on a volume ([Greek text]). To such fellows it matters not that they make a book dirty and greasy, cutting the pages with their fingers, and holding the boards over the fire till they crack. All these slatternly practices, though they destroy a book as surely as the flames of Caesar's soldiers at Alexandria, seem fine manly acts to the grobians who use them. What says Jules Janin, who has written "Contre l'indifference des Philistins," "il faut a l'homme ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... mundane splendor. And let me urge that impeccable mundane splendor, despite facile arguments to the contrary, is a very real and worthy achievement. It is regrettable, by the way, that the entrances and foyers to these grandiose interiors should be so paltry, slatternly, and inadequate. If the entrances to the great financial establishments reminded me of opera-houses, the entrances to opera-houses ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... the great actors in recent historic events, who was assassinated not far off, outside the Sakaruda gate of the castle. Besides these, barracks, parade-grounds, policemen, kurumas, carts pulled and pushed by coolies, pack-horses in straw sandals, and dwarfish, slatternly-looking soldiers in European dress, made up the Tokiyo that I saw between Shinbashi and ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... that was homelike and comfortable passed from our little house. For three days after the funeral the neglected clothes still hung on the line in the back yard, but on the fourth morning a slatternly girl, with red hair and arms, came from the grocery store at the corner, and gathered them in. My little sister was put to nurse with Mrs. Cudlip next door, and when, at the end of the week, President went off to work somewhere in a mining town in West Virginia, ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... delicacy, and also, of course, from the last words of the dying man. As to her being a person of refinement and well dressed, they are, as you perceive, handsomely mounted in solid gold, and it is inconceivable that anyone who wore such glasses could be slatternly in other respects. You will find that the clips are too wide for your nose, showing that the lady's nose was very broad at the base. This sort of nose is usually a short and coarse one, but there are a sufficient number of exceptions to prevent me from being dogmatic or from insisting ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... only one, and it's not the best—but there are worse—and it's Kavanagh's." I found it easily enough, and was ushered by a civil man, who emerged from the shop which occupies part of it, into a sort of reading-room with a green table. A rather slatternly but very active girl soon converted this into a neat breakfast-table, and gave me an excellent breakfast. The landlord found me a good car, and off I set for the residence of Father Maher, the curate of whom I had heard as one of the most ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... glossy as this bedroom. It had the best of taste, the best of inexpensive rugs, a simple and laudable architecture, and the latest conveniences. Throughout, electricity took the place of candles and slatternly hearth-fires. Along the bedroom baseboard were three plugs for electric lamps, concealed by little brass doors. In the halls were plugs for the vacuum cleaner, and in the living-room plugs for the piano ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... cheeks and a white skin, but no distinctive character, no opinions, no occupation, no amusements, no vigor of mind, no temper; she was a mere female machine." Being a "blonde, she wore draggled sea-green or slatternly sky-blue dresses," went about slip-shod and in curl-papers all day till dinner-time. She died and left Sir Pitt for the second time a widower, "to-morrow to fresh woods and ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... business man who had noticed him in Denny & Carson's office. When the whistle woke him, he clutched quickly at his breast pocket, glancing about him with an uncertain smile. But the little, clay-bespattered Italians were still sleeping, the slatternly women across the aisle were in open-mouthed oblivion, and even the crumby, crying babies were for the nonce stilled. Paul settled back to struggle with his impatience as best ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... take. The doctor went to the window. Logan took a chair. Sam was sitting disconsolately in a corner. It was hard to say to what class of people the house belonged; poor people they were of course; and things looked as if they were simply living there because too poor to live anywhere else. A slatternly woman stared at the intruders; a dirty child crawled over the hearth. Daisy could not endure to touch anything, except with the soles of her shoes. So she stood upright in the middle of the floor; till ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... a debauched complexion, who showed a most unwelcome curiosity in his customer. As a last fatality, he wore a peaked cap like my own, and turned out to be an ex-sailor. I should have fled at the sight of him had I had the chance, but I was attended to first by a slatternly girl who, I am sure, called him up to view me. To explain my muddy boots and trousers I said I had walked from Esens, and from that I found myself involved in a tangle of impromptu lies. Floundering down an old groove, I placed my sister this time on Baltrum Island, and said ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... possible solution, no new way of ordering their lives? No—there was none: he could not picture Susy out of her setting of luxury and leisure, could not picture either of them living such a life as the Nat Fulmers, for instance! He remembered the shabby untidy bungalow in New Hampshire, the slatternly servants, uneatable food and ubiquitous children. How could he ask Susy to share such a life with him? If he did, she would probably have the sense to refuse. Their alliance had been based on a moment's midsummer madness; now ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... like to walk, but if you look at it in that way I won't do it again," she promised, and in the silence which followed stole a look now and then at John Hunter, revelling in his well-groomed appearance. A vision of her father's slatternly, one-suspendered shoulders, and button-less sleeves flapping about his rough brown wrists, set against this well-shirted gentleman produced sharp contrast and made of the future a thing altogether desirable. The useless arguments between her parents ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... where she sat looking curiously, apathetically at him; her gray hair straggling down on her dirty cotton frock open at the neck over shrivelled yellow skin; soiled old hands hanging carelessly over slatternly garments; stockingless feet stuck into a great tattered pair of men's shoes. Nothing seemed changed since he saw her last save that the hair had been black then, and the skin not so wrinkled. Aunt Sally had been good natured ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... on the edge of the 'pike, with its gate-pole ready to be lowered by a rope, looking like any other toll place. But the woman was very brisk and Yankee-like, and different from the many slatternly persons who had before taken toll. She said her people came from "down East," but she herself was born in Ohio. She thought the old lady would like a cup of strong tea, and her dinner was just ready, and it did get lonesome eating by a body's ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... of the Kingfisher; but it also eats various kinds of insects, shrimps, and even small crabs. It rears its young in a hole, which is made in the banks of the stream it frequents. It is a slatternly bird, fouls its own nest and its peerless eggs. The nesting hole is bored rather slowly, and takes from one to two weeks to complete. Six or eight white glossy eggs are laid, sometimes on the bare soil, but often ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph, Volume 1, Number 2, February, 1897 • anonymous
... frankly human! You're just like the chaps at the Front—you laugh when you suffer and give when you're starving; you never know when not to be generous. You wear your heart in your eyes and your lips are always ready for kissing, I think of you as one of your own flower-girls—hoarse of voice, slatternly as to corsets, with a big tumbled fringe over your forehead, and a heart so big that you can chuck away your roses to a wounded Tommy and go away yourself with an empty basket to sleep under an archway. Do you wonder that to us you spell Blighty? ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... florid, dark-eyed woman, well over thirty, somewhat inclined to be down-at-heel and slatternly, though not yet quite destitute of some small share of good looks; a woman solid of step and unattractive to the eye of youth; moreover, as they knew from recent experience, possessed ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... Clearly, he was a superfluous person in Stillwater. A mortar-splashed hod-carrier, who had seated himself on a pile of brick and was eating his noonday rations from a tin can just brought to him by a slatternly girl, gave Richard a spasm of envy. Here was a man who had found his place, and was establishing—what Richard did not seem able to establish in his own case—a right ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... a large figure like mine away into trowsers. I felt as if my legs were in the stocks, and kicked them off in disdain—simply remarking—'what fools men are!' So, you don't like my short petticoats? and I hate your long ones. First, because they are slatternly and inconvenient; secondly, because they make your stockings dirty; and thirdly, because they give you the idea that they are intended to conceal crooked legs. So don't say one word in ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... were passing along the canal the other day when the "eclusier" came out of his house and asked me if I would come and look at his child who was frightfully ill—his wife in despair. Without thinking of my little ones at home, I went into the house, where I found, in a dirty, smelly room, a slatternly woman holding in her arms a child, about two years old, who, I thought, was dead—such a ghastly colour—eyes turned up; however, the poor little thing moaned and moved and the woman was shaken with sobs—the father and two older children ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... man tossed him a half-eagle. His companions proceeded to imbibe a variety of compounds, while he poured out nearly a glass full of raw whiskey, and drank it down at a swallow. As he replaced the glass on the counter, a slatternly negro woman thrust her head in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the civic museum, entrusted, just now, to the care of a quite remarkably ignorant and slatternly woman. It contains two rooms, whose exhibits are smothered in dust and cobwebs; as neglected, in short, as her own brats that sprawl about its floor. I enquired whether she possessed no catalogue to show where the objects, bearing no labels, had been found. A catalogue was unnecessary, she ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... Aurora. Slatternly slavey frock, soiled white apron, cap awry, large slippers tied on with string. (During Act 3: changes to grotesque colored dress: orange blossoms ...
— Oh! Susannah! - A Farcical Comedy in Three Acts • Mark Ambient
... she turned out to be a small, slatternly-looking craft, her hull and spars a dingy black, rigging all slack and bleached nearly white, and everything denoting an ill state of affairs aboard. The four boats hanging from her sides proclaimed her a whaler. Leaning carelessly over the bulwarks were the ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... give them a feast to-day and a famine to-morrow. There is deep satisfaction in cooperating with such families to conquer difficulties. There is a deeper satisfaction, however, in turning a sham home into a real one; in teaching the slatternly, irresponsible mother the pleasure of a cleanly, well-ordered home; in helping a man who has lost his sense of responsibility toward wife and children to regain it. Even at the risk of drawing a too gloomy picture, I dwell in this chapter, therefore, upon the husband ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... the collection was a strip of the identical silver ribbon which had encircled Pepin's throat—I called the dog Pepin—on the night I rescued him from the streets. Without hesitation I entered the shop and questioned a slatternly woman who sat behind the counter munching gruyere cheese and garlic. "Will you tell me, madame," said I with my most agreeable air, "whether you recollect having sold any of that tinsel ribbon lately, and to whom?" She was ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... the slatternly landlady to Madame Laurent and Michel one day, "I no see how she live! Eat? Nothin', nothin', almos', and las' night when it was so cold and foggy, eh? I hav' to mek him build fire. She ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... the hacienda has an owner; and with all their indolence, the lounging leperoa outside, and slatternly wenches within, have a master. He is not often at home, but when he is they address him as "Don Faustino." ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... with her first look at Rose. Rodney's attempts at description of her had been well meaning; but what he had prepared his sister for, unconsciously of course, in his emphasis on one or two phases of their first acquaintance, had been a sort of slatternly Amazon. But the effect of this was, really, very happy; because when a perfectly presentably clad, well-bred, admirably poised young girl came into the room and greeted her neither shyly nor eagerly, ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... seen before. As she looked about her, her mother stopped laughing and watched her face with a painful attention. Sylvia looked at the tall, dingy houses, the frowzy little shops, the swarms of dirty-nosed children, shrill-voiced, with matted hair, running and whooping in the street, at the slatternly women yelling unobeyed orders to them out of half-glimpsed, cheerless interiors, smelling of cabbage and dishwater. It was Sylvia's first sight of the life of city poor, and upon her face of disgust and revulsion her mother bent a stern ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... "And they bain't pretty words, Father—not by no manner of means. She's for ever and the day after interfering with every mortal thing one does. And her own house is just right-down slatternly, and her children are coming up any how. If she'd just spend the time a-scouring as she spends a-chattering, her house 'd be the cleanest place in Oxfordshire. But as for the poor children, I'm that sorry! Whatever they do, ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... A young woman, somewhat slatternly in herself and her belongings, and dragged by care and poverty already into wrinkles. She generally began her sentences with, "Well, not to deceive you." Thus: "Is Mr. Plornish at home?" "Well, sir, not to deceive you, he's gone to look for a job." "Well, not to deceive ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... canal or harbour, which runs parallel with the sea. A black stain was the hull of a great steamer lying on her side in the mud, but the tapering masts of yachts were beautiful on the sky, and at the end of a row of slatternly houses there were sometimes spars and rigging so strange and bygone that they suggested Drake ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... personal appearance. Allow plenty of time for bathing, caring for your hair, nails, teeth, and clothing. Wear plain clothes if need be, but DON'T wear soiled or ragged ones. And don't ever put a pin where a hook or button ought to be. No man can continue to love a woman who is slatternly. ...
— Happiness and Marriage • Elizabeth (Jones) Towne
... A slatternly full-blown girl who seemed to be bursting out at the rents in her gown and the cracks in her shoes like an over-ripe berry answered our knock by opening the door a very little way and stopping up the gap with her figure. As she knew Mr. Jarndyce (indeed Ada and I both thought that she ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... to argue. He perceived, beneath the slatternly use of words, the man, buttoned up in them, just as his body was buttoned up in a shoddy suit,—and he wondered more than ever that such a man should know the Elliots. He looked at the face, which was frank, proud, and beautiful, ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... exchanged pummelings, and fell together by the ears in unintelligible animosity. Meanwhile, this man, in his short evening snatches at his fireside, saw the demon Ignorance arise there, and take his children to itself. He saw his daughter perverted into a heavy, slatternly drudge; he saw his son go moping down the ways of low sensuality, to brutality and crime; he saw the dawning light of intelligence in the eyes of his babies so changing into cunning and suspicion, that he could have rather wished ...
— Some Christmas Stories • Charles Dickens
... chiefly about its tramway terminus, its smudgy station, its three or four moving-picture theatres, and its fetid pubs. On the pavements, in the roadways and at every crossing, corduroyed men yawned and spat, and slatternly women, most of them with whimpering infants in their arms, talked of shop or household cares and the frailties of their neighbors. Some, more alive to the big events of a clashing world, repeated the meagre news of the ha'penny press and dwelt with ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... recommend the house. It was a rambling, dilapidated, two-story structure, sadly in need of paint and repairs, and bespeaking occupancy by a family none too well blessed with the better things of existence. They proceeded to the door and rang the bell. A slatternly woman answered their summons, and Leverage ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... have interested the citizens but it was too many on one to amount to anything as a fight, and so they commanded the peace and the foreign dog coiled his tail and took sanctuary under the wagon. Slatternly negro girls and women slouched along with pails deftly balanced on their heads, and joined the group and stared. Little half dressed white boys, and little negro boys with nothing whatever on but tow-linen ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... nothing of the tenderest parts in your own little volume, at the end of such a slatternly scribble as this, but indeed they cost us some tears. I scrawl away because of interruptions every moment. You guess how it is in a busy office—papers thrust into your hand when your hand ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Mellor over matters which, according to her, had been settled generations ago by "the Lord and natur'," Marcella certainly was in no mood to contradict her. She walked through the village on her return scanning everything about her—the slatternly girls plaiting on the doorsteps, the children in the lane, the loungers round the various "publics," the labourers, old and young, who touched their caps to her—with a ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... were still clinging to her hanging udders, and left her only that she might prepare herself for the fight. The old animal merely yawned loudly,—in a man it would be called a laugh,—a yawn that declared her delight in robbery, and with her slatternly tail beat her lean, hollow sides. The mare, seeing that her foe was in no hurry for the combat, came nearer, bowed her head to the earth, and in this manner stepped slowly forward, sniffing at the enemy; when the wolf seemed in the ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... awakening to an appreciation of it. It impressed him agreeably that Alida should be trim and neat while about her work, and that all her actions were entirely free from the coarse, slovenly manner, the limp carriage, and slatternly aspect of the whole tribe which had come and gone during the past year. They had all been so much alike in possessing disagreeable traits that he felt that Alida was the only peculiar one among them. He never thought of instituting comparisons between her and his former ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... to Malcolm's knock by a slatternly charwoman, who, unable to understand a word he said, would, but for its fine frank expression, have shut the door in his face. From the expression of hers, however, Malcolm suddenly remembered that he must speak ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... during which the public-house was closed; and other hours. Small wonder, looking at the fine, capable figure of the woman, now bustling about with teapot and cups, he should esteem Mrs Brome personally above the slatternly skeleton ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... led the way homeward. Ah, what a way it was! down one dirty street and up another,—through vile courts and alleys reeking with filth, swarming with idle, loud-voiced men, wretched-looking women, slatternly girls, and forlorn children. Bessie's heart grew sick and her courage failed her. If she had known the way back, she would gladly have ...
— Stories of Many Lands • Grace Greenwood
... right. We now proceeded stealthily along to the lane where Mother McCleary's whisky-shop was situated. I had no difficulty in recognising the old woman, as she had been well described to me. Her stout slatternly figure, her bleared eyes, her grog-blossomed nose,—anything but a beauty to look at. Her proceedings were not beautiful either. Going to the end of the counter where she was standing, I tipped ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... as to climate, the chef-lieu of the Bouches du Rhne must be called a slatternly beauty; whilst embellishing herself, putting on her jewels and splendid attire, she has forgotten to wash her face and trim her hair! Not in Horatian phrase, dainty in her neatness, Marseilles does herself injustice. Lyons is clean swept, spick and span as a ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... were passing in his mind, a drowsy, slatternly charwoman, in an old black straw bonnet and grey bed-gown, opened one of the shutters, and throwing up the sash of the window by where Mr. Sponge sat, disclosed the contents of the apartment. The last waxlight was just dying out in the centre of a splendid candelabra ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... was—how fierce the assault—what garbage hurled at opponents—what foul blows were hit—what language of Billingsgate flung! Fancy a party in a country-house now looking over Woodward's facetiae or some of the Gilray comicalities, or the slatternly Saturnalia of Rowlandson! Whilst we live we must laugh, and have folks to make us laugh. We cannot afford to lose Satyr with his pipe and dances and gambols. But we have washed, combed, clothed, and taught ...
— John Leech's Pictures of Life and Character • William Makepeace Thackeray
... peculiar impression created upon her was that some evil charm was over the place, that in the sweet sunlight it lay drugged, that in those rows of slatternly shacks where the sunlight did not enter men either hid in dark secrecy or lay in some unnatural stupour. The whole settlement seemed preternaturally quiet; the fancy came to her that the town had died long ago and that she merely looked on ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... be for you to conceive, even if I could describe, the careless desolation which pervaded the whole place; the shaggy unkempt grounds we passed through to approach the house; the ruinous, rackrent, tumble-down house itself, the untidy, slatternly all but beggarly appearance of the mistress of the mansion herself. The smallest Yankee farmer has a tidier estate, a tidier house, and a tidier wife than this member of the proud southern chivalry, who, however, inasmuch as he has slaves, is undoubtedly ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... stairs, which groaned and creaked beneath their weight, and found Mother Guttersnipe lying on the bed in the corner. The elfish black-haired child was playing cards with a slatternly-looking girl at a deal table by the faint light ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... a woman of pretty good sense, but of slatternly habits. She had been so long without a lady to guide her that her original training was either forgotten or entirely disregarded. Once, when starting to Conacanarra for Christmas, I charged her to take advantage of ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... may be the centre of attraction? She is a short, stout woman, whose cheeks as she walks wobble with fat, whose face is ever dirty, and dress (at home) slatternly. But mayhap her heart is in the right place, and when Hodge is missed from his accustomed seat by the fire of an evening, when it is bruited abroad that he is down with illness, hurriedly slips on her bonnet, and saying nothing, carries a basket of good things to cheer ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... just paid her for the straw we thought this was going a little too far, and F——, who had a fine taste for sarcasm, waved his coffee-cup eloquently in the direction of the two slatternly girls that were peddling the coffee to the soldiers through the window, and said "What? With all these beautiful daughters," and then continued with a graphic description ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry
... De Vac paced the length of this black alley in search of the little doorway of the building he sought. At length he came upon it, and, after repeated pounding with the pommel of his sword, it was opened by a slatternly old hag. ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... chance; here at last was regular employment. It was one step forward. Would he be able to hold it? This seemed doubtful on the morrow after he had realized the nature of his surroundings. He was set to work in a large room full of men, boys, and slatternly-dressed girls. He was both scolded and laughed at for the inevitable awkwardness of a new beginner, and soon his name and history began to be whispered about. During the noon recess a rude fellow flung the epithet of "jail-bird" at him, ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... the next morning and dressed in the room without fire, shivering now as they drew on their stockings, frozen stiff. They had their morning coffee in a chilly room downstairs, where sometimes their slatternly landlady appeared, lugubriously voluble. This morning they ate alone, in silence, and none too happily. Even Annie's buoyant spirits seemed inadequate. A trace of bitterness was in ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... let up once throughout the conversation. Undoubtedly she was a busy woman. "Up at half-past five," "to bed the last thing at night," "workin' fit ter drop," thirteen years of it, and for reward, grey hairs, frowzy clothes, stooped shoulders, slatternly figure, unending toil in a foul and noisome coffee-house that faced on an alley ten feet between the walls, and a waterside environment that was ugly and ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... crone. Her hair was a matted gray mass, her teeth were gone, and her face was pinched, and so seamed with wrinkles, that she looked as though she might be over a hundred years old. The other woman was very dirty and slatternly. She had a dirty baby in her arms; her hair was in disorder, her face was greasy and smouched, and a filthy cloth, which might once have been white, was on her head. The women and children were all barefoot. As Bob approached, they all stared at him with the most ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... of violets and narcissi, which flower-girls clamoured for him to purchase. He bought a bunch and smiled faintly, contrasting the beautiful significance of the name of the vendor's profession with the slatternly person to whom it was applied. Then onwards he went to Leicester Square where the dazzling lights of music-halls flared and quickened, and scarlet-lipped Folly smiled out upon him from street corners, and beckoned through the dusk. In the old days it had always been when he had attained ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... her low, Tolstoy tracks and renders from end to end. And in War and Peace his hand is not less delicate and firm. The progress of time is never broken; inexorably it does what it must, carrying an enthusiastic young student forward into a slatternly philosopher of middle life, linking an over-blown matron with the memory of a girl dancing into a crowded room. The years move on and on, there is no missing the ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... inhabitants, of whom a good share were broken-down beggars and nondescript fishermen, varied their discouraged existences by drinking, wood sawing and doing odd jobs for the surrounding farmers, while their slatternly women idled at the doors and the children grew up wild, trooping over the surrounding waste. Politically, the place was noted for its unreliability. It was well known that every suffrage in it was open to corruption. In ordinary times the Rouges troubled themselves little ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... good fortune brought to his door at a time when the forlornness of his changed position was continually accentuated by the untidy irregularity of his life and surroundings. He was only able to afford to engage the shiftless services of a slatternly negro girl, rendered insubordinate by her newly acquired freedom, and he had begun to feel that he should never again find himself encompassed by the decorous ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... could leave the dock early, he made another effort. He stopped before one in a dingy row of small houses, uniformly depressing, in a street that ran into the Commercial Road, and rang the bell, which tinkled aggressively. A slatternly woman, with a bandage round her head and an air of drunken servility, responded to his inquiry for "Mrs. Crichton" by ushering him into a small back parlour, in which a pale girl in black sat with her head ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... feeling of relief when the older woman had gone away included the delight of being free to go where she wished—at his side. The barns were a source of great interest to Elizabeth. The pride of the girl, accustomed to straw stables and slatternly yards and unhoused machinery, in the well-kept barnyard of her husband was natural and commendatory. John had order well developed in his scheme of things. John's cribs did not stand open to the weather. ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... citizens in a disreputable mob. Stray dogs sniffing at heaps of refuse, a group of tethered horses shivering under thin blankets in the hotel shed, a battered jitney or two stalled before shop and saloon. A Chinaman with a huge bundle upon his head, a slatternly woman brushing the dry, powdered snow from the path, a tawdry one pattering along, her rouged face pitiful in the clear merciless light; red-shirted miners crawling like ants to the yawning shaft-mouths half way up the mountainside.—This was Topaz ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... shift to afford better quarters, perhaps, but it was to my original lodging in Bloomsbury that I drove from Waterloo. Some few belongings of mine were there, and I entertained a friendly sort of feeling for my good-hearted but slatternly landlady, and for poor, overworked Bessie, with her broad, generally smutty face, and lingering remains of a Dorset accent. The part of London with which I was familiar had resumed its normal aspect now, and people were going ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... suggestive of lazily industrious Jewry than this short, thick-set clothier, with the curved nose, and spiral, oily hair, who sits out on the sidewalk and blows clouds from his meerschaum pipe. The women who lounge here are generally stoutish and slatternly, with few clothes on, but plenty of frowzy hair. Here and there one may see a pretty face among the younger girls; and it is sad to reflect that these little Hebrew maids will become stout and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... remained two more years on probation, and all the time her expenses were not light. As the final reward of her exertions, she is offered six shillings per week, out of which she must dress neatly—for a slatternly schoolmistress would be a dreadful object—buy sufficient food, and hold her own in rural society! The reverend man who advertises this delectable situation must have a peculiar idea regarding the ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... cool freshness of her cheek. Breakfast over and the bill settled, we speedily shook off as much of the dust of Mrs. Duddy's hotel as could be shaken off, and departed on the most decrepit sidecar that ever rolled on two wheels, being wished a safe journey by a slatternly maid who stood in the doorway, by the wide Mrs. Duddy herself, who realised in her capacious person the picturesque Irish phrase, 'the full-of-the-door of a woman,' and by our friend the head waiter, ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Round the fire, slatternly and dirty, with hair uncombed, dress disordered, shoes down at heel, lolling, lounging, stooping in various attitudes, were some half-dozen women, Alice being nearest the fire on one side. Most of them had pipes in their mouths. ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... directed. A slatternly maid-servant opened the door, and, in answer to his interrogatory, said that Mr. Compton was at home, but ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the road which led toward Ashfield. The frosted pools crackled under the wheels of the old chaise; the heaving horse wheezed as the stern parson gave his loins a thwack with the slackened reins and urged him down the turnpike which led away through the ill-kept fields, from the rambling, slatternly town. Stone walls that had borne the upheaval of twenty winters reeled beside the way. Broad scars of ochreous earth, from which the turnpike-menders had dug material to patch the wheel-track, showed ooze of yellow mud with honeycombs of ice rimming their edges, and supporting a thin film of sod ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... it disappeared from view, then plunging into the woods, presently found a narrow foot-path, pursuing which for an hour or so he came out into a small clearing. At the farther side, built just on the edge of the forest, was a rude log cabin. A slatternly woman ...
— Elsie's Womanhood • Martha Finley
... a sad-faced dull-eyed slatternly woman who had closed the door, and then at the boy, who still crouched close up under the window, whimpering like a whipped dog, but keenly watching all that was going on with his sharp restless dark eyes; then, making ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... Street or Twenty-sixth. Always the same rows of red-brick or brownstone houses, all alike, the monotony broken only by infrequent warehouses or loft-buildings; always the same doubtful mounting of stone steps, the same searching for a bell, the same waiting, the same slatternly, suspicious landlady, the same evil hallway with a brown hat-rack, a steel-engraving with one corner stained with yellow, a carpet worn through to the flooring in a large oval hole just in front of the stairs, a smell of cabbage, a lack of ventilation. Always the same desire to escape, ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... miners off shift, drawn hither by curiosity, and of gamblers of all grades from the professional expert to the "tin-horn," Houston found his way around the corner of the building, down into an alley, dark, dismal and reeking with filth. Here were groups of slatternly, unkempt women, some of whom stared at him with brazen faces, while others slunk away, not ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... style. Master Jeffreys whipped out his blade and ran, and Morgan went with him stride for stride. But the mob of ruffians disappeared as quickly as it had come forth; the cutpurse had been rescued, and the plunder he desired snatched by a slatternly wench. ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... small and very, very helpless—she was utterly spent. But there was something in her wide gray eyes—a dignity and a command—that completely dominated the shrewish wife of the hump- shouldered tailor, something that made the slatternly creature back out of the room, for Felicia Day, with her hand on the battered iron railing of the bed, had said ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... and after looking at the man's face, changed his tone, quickly enough. The early bird, who had picked up this fine worm, was sent off for a doctor, and the policeman rang and knocked at the door till a slatternly servant girl came down looking more than half asleep. The constable pointed out the contents of the area to the maid, who screamed loudly enough to wake up the street, but she knew nothing of the man; had never seen him at the house, and ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... apparatus of London life was there. And as he raised his eyes to the drawing-room and bedroom stories he found no relief. His eyes could discover nothing that was not mean, ugly, frowzy, and unimaginative. He pictured the heavy, gloomy, lethargic life within. The slatternly servants pottering about the bases of the sooty buildings sickened and saddened him. A solitary Earl's Court omnibus that lumbered past with its sinister, sparse cargo seemed to be a spectacle absolutely tragic—he did not know why. The few wayfarers ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... to Mistress Waynflete that a woman who broke her arm at the church door was a housewifely maiden who became a slatternly housewife after marriage. "There's no fear of Jane doing that," she replied; "she's as good as the guineas she ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... that the landlord saw his house given over to the destructive caprices of a drunken and uncontrollable mob. He had no means of freeing himself of his guests. When his slatternly wife had complained: "Them miners an' loggers jest louzes up a body's house," he had wagged his head dejectedly and spread his great black-nailed hands. "If that's ther wu'st thing they does hit'll be a plum ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... misty but warm October day, and a pleasant veiled light lay on the pillared front of Chetworth House, designed in the best taste of a fastidious school. The surroundings of the house, too, were as perfect as those of Mannering were slatternly and neglected. All the young men had long since gone from the gardens, but the old labourers and the girls in overalls who had taken their places, under the eye of a white-haired gardener, had been wonderfully efficient so far. Sir Henry ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the—to them—great event which was to take place so soon. Noll overheard one old fish-wife say, "We ben't slick 'nough for new housen; ther'll hev to be great scrubbin' an' scourin' that day, eh, Janet?" to her slatternly daughter-in-law; and the boy mentally prayed that this opinion would gain ground among all the fish-folk. If there was only some one to teach the children, and save them from the utter ignorance which was their parents', there would be great ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... lustiness. You have seen a big man with square shoulders and a small head, pushing about in a crowd, he shouts and works his arms, he seems to be doing a great deal, in reality he is doing nothing; so Mr Meredith appears to me, and yet I can only think of him as an artist; his habit is not slatternly, like those of such literary hodmen as Mr David Christie Murray, Mr Besant, Mr Buchanan. There is no trace of the crowd about him. I do not question his right of place, I am out of sympathy with him, that is all; and I regret that it should be so, for he is one whose love of art is pure and untainted ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... not used to the bustle of London streets or to crossing them alone. She did it, however, after a few false starts, and so turned down a quiet side street and rang at the bell of a house in it. A slatternly girl ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... pride, one would suppose they would desire to see their children able to support themselves. But it is just the reverse; the poorer folk are, the less they seem to care to try to do something. 'You come home if you don't like it;' and stay about the hovel in slatternly idleness, tails bedraggled and torn, thin boots out at the toes and down at the heels, half starved on potatoes and weak tea—stay till you fall into disgrace, and lose the only thing you possess in the world—your ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... anything he wished to break the will of his prospective patroness. Cassandra had been taken away from Cornelia—she could not learn so much as whether the woman had been scourged to death for arranging the interview with Drusus, or no. Two ill-favoured slatternly Gallic maids, the scourings of the Puteoli slave-market, had been forced upon Cornelia as her attendants—creatures who stood in abject fear of the whip of Phaon, and who obeyed his mandates to the letter. Cornelia was never ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis |
