"Spinster" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... expanded at whatever cost into something truly national and all embracing. The ancient grudging selfishness that would not feed other people's children should be cast out. In the war time the wealthy bachelor and the spinster of advancing years took it for granted that other people's children should fight for them. The ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... must be a wedding or a funeral," I whispered, feeling more in the mood of the latter, but never dreaming how much those carriages meant to me. As I went timidly into the room I found nearly every seat full, and was greeted with cordial applause. My sister took a seat beside me. My subject was "Spinster Authors of England." My hands trembled so visibly that I laid my manuscript on the table, but after getting in magnetic touch with those before me, I did ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... with his spinster sister, Anna Ivanovna, to whom Tatiana Markovna was much attached. Tatiana Markovna was delighted when she came to town. There was no one with whom she liked more to drink coffee, no one to whom she gave her confidence in the same degree; they shared the same liking ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... Newton bounded at this intelligence, as he knew that it must be Isabel who was still a spinster. This was shortly after corroborated by an English gentleman who came on board. Their stay at Madras was intended to be short, and Newton resolved to ask immediate leave on shore. Apologising to Captain Oughton for ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... not at all complimentary to the gentlemen," rejoined a thin, elderly-looking spinster of an uncertain age, dressed in an old-fashioned style, who I should have thought would have been the last person to come to the defence of a sex that had ...
— Major Frank • A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint
... moved thoughtfully towards the far end of the room, where the sunshine still slanted in through the open casements of the bay window, and where the delicate, little spinster lady stood awaiting her. Amorous pigeons cooed below on the string-course. Bees droned ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... Shargar's attentions would be disagreeable: they must always be simple and manly. What was more to the point, she had given him her address in London, and he was going to call upon her the next day. She was on a visit to Lady Janet Gordon, an elderly spinster, who ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... than the male; therefore, in these days is fulfilled the scriptural prophecy that seven women shall lay hold of one man and entreat to be called by his name. Miss Daisy Norsham, a veteran Belgravian spinster, decided, after some disappointing seasons, that this text was particularly applicable to London. Doubtful, therefore, of securing a husband at the rate of one chance in seven, or dissatisfied at the prospect of a seventh share in a man, she resolved ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... I'm e'en a'most struck dumb with astonishment to hear you think of such things. Go, get your doll-baby, or your sampler, and look on that. Saints of Mercy! It seems only yesterday you were a baby in long clothes," answered Miss Henrietta Mayfield, a spinster of uncertain age; but the folks in the village, who always knew everything, declared she had not owned to a day over thirty-five for the last ten years. This, if true, was quite excusable, for Miss Henrietta's little toilette ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... thought whether he was worthy of being loved. He was indeed more worthy of love than many to whom it is freely given; but he knew no more about it, I say, than a chicken in the shell knows of the blue sky. The shabby spinster, living with her cousin the baker in the house opposite, knew a hundred times better than he what the word love meant: she had ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... time she was near forty; a thin, hard-featured spinster, dwelling alone with her mother the Lady Balgarnock. Her two younger sisters had married early—the one to Captain Luce, of Dunragit in Wigtownshire, the other to a Mr. Forbes, of whom I know nothing save that his house was in Edinburgh: and as they had no great love for Miss ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... can not be attributed to sectional prejudice may be proved by this extract from a column of vituperation in the Grand Rapids, Mich., Times, during this same trip, headed "Spinster Susan's Suffrage Show:" ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... not very unusual type of spinster who is in a condition of retarded development (and you will find this kind of woman even on County Council's), is completely unconscious of the sexual element in herself and in human nature generally. Nay, though one went ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... marrying three beautiful wives in succession and clinging to each with a certain desperate, even if unsympathetic, affection. As a father he was, naturally, a failure,—hard, domineering, unyielding. His four children reacted characteristically: one was until past middle life a thin spinster, the mental image of her father; one died; one passed over into the white world and her children's children are now white, with no knowledge of their Negro blood; the fourth, my father, bent before grandfather, but did not break—better ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... somebody better than themselves; and under such circumstances, naturally enough, Miss Alice Somebody—though a pretty girl—talented, as the world goes, highly educated, too, as many hundreds beside her, was still a spinster at twenty-three. The fact was, Mrs. Somebody was a woman of experience in the world—indeed, a dozen years' experience in life at Washington, had given her very definite ideas of expediency and diplomacy; and hence, as ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... the compass, the chicken pox, whooping cough, measles, and scarlet fever. All these unhappy incidents of childhood left but little impression on my mind. I have, however, most pleasant memories of the good spinster, Maria Yost, who patiently taught three generations of children the rudiments of the English language, and introduced us to the pictures in "Murray's Spelling-book," where Old Father Time, with his scythe, and the farmer stoning the boys in his apple ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... now for that; but she winced, and bit her lip severely, as the irate spinster "gave Miss Maverick to understand that an intercourse which might possibly be agreeable to her French associations could never be tolerated at the home of Dr. Johns. For herself, she had a reputation for propriety to sustain; and while Miss Maverick made a portion of her ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... dear captain," retorted the irresistible spinster, spreading her skirts the wider, both arms akimbo—her thin fingers acting as clothespins, "that Sue is to take her dancing lesson next door, and as I can't fly in the second-story window, having mislaid my wings, I must use ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... day, at any of these houses, without a sitting-room for herself. The ladies' drawing-room is a desolate wilderness. The American women themselves do not use it. It is generally empty, or occupied by some forlorn spinster, eliciting harsh sounds from the wretched piano ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... answered gaily—'Oh! he made up to an elderly spinster, and married her, not long since; weighing her heavy purse against her faded charms, and expecting to find that solace in gold which was denied ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... a most devout abhorrence, mingled with awe, for this ancient spinster. He told me the other day, in a whisper, that she was a cursed brimstone—in fact, he added another epithet, which I would not repeat for the world. I have remarked, however, that he is always extremely civil to her when ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... flecks of sunlight filtered through the branches of the tall trees to caress it. In the hair, too, was a single red rose, caught into place with a natural grace that it seemed a pity to waste on three spinster aunts and two dogs, and the same note of color was repeated in another rebellious blossom at the throat. The young face was plump and oval, and the cheeks were pink, the brown eyes were wide and sparkling and—Oh, well, the young man in the pool stopped cataloguing her ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... he only believed that they were grateful for good advice, and went about among them, easy, good-natured, and utterly unconscious that for him sparkled Mrs. Ledwich's bugles, and for him waved every spinster's ribbon, from Miss Rich down ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... sigh of relief that Sara, in obedience to the warning raucously intoned by a hurrying porter, vacated her seat in the railway compartment in which she had travelled from Fallowdene. Her companions on the journey had been an elderly spinster and her maid, and as the former had insisted upon the exclusion of every breath of outside air, Sara felt half-suffocated by the time they ran into Oldhampton Junction. The Monkshaven train was already standing in the station, and, commissioning a porter to transfer ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... fat, good-natured man, is presented with a woollen night-cap on New Year's morning by his housekeeper, "a typical spinster not overburdened with fat." This so rejoices the Deacon that he is possessed to make others happy, goes to call upon his pastor, and makes him leave his books and spend the day skating, sleighing, and driving with ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... gradually in quantity and in quality, the first visible symptom of comfortable circumstances, of wealth in a house. Again, that woman always had the distaff in her hand from morning till night, and if the house-keeper was indignant, the spinster could have wept as at a profanation. Finally, unable to endure it longer, she rose, abandoned her patient, watchful attitude, and stooping over, her little green shawl displaced by every movement, began actively to pick up, smooth and fold ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... all, a little parable which Waldo Gillespie read to a certain doubting Thomas, on the very evening of the day which changed Gladys Edgecombe, spinster, into Mrs. Bruno Gillespie, may better serve in ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... make comments on big brothers," I smiled back at her. Win was nineteen and I had attained the mature age of twenty-seven. We were orphans and spinster Aunt Lucy did her best to be a parent to us; and we got on smoothly enough, for none of us had the temperament that rouses ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... us. My father took her over the bridge to the summerhouse looking on the Down. After a little while he said: "Miss L—, my son says I am to read to you," and added, "I will read whatever you like." He read some of "Maud," "The Spinster's Sweet-Arts," ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... Mr. and Mrs. Chadwick and their three daughters. The burly chancellor and his wife and clerical son from Oxford. The meagre little doctor without incumbrance. Mr. Harding with Eleanor and Miss Bold. The dean leaning on a gaunt spinster, his only child now living with him, a lady very learned in stones, ferns, plants, and vermin, and who had written a book about petals. A wonderful woman in her way was Miss Trefoil. Mr. Finnie, the attorney, with his wife, was to be seen, much ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... pressure, all the converging traditional influences he had so often ridiculed, yet, as she knew, had never completely thrown off.... Yes, those quiet invisible women at Altringham-his uncle's widow, his mother, the spinster sisters—it was not impossible that, with tact and patience—and the stupidest women could be tactful and patient on such occasions—they might eventually persuade him that it was his duty, they might put just the right ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... stronger because her father was supposed—by his unfortunate wife at least—to have been the scion of a proud and aristocratic family, who had not been too proud, however, to leave her to starve. Altogether, Miss Husted was an exceedingly romantic, high-strung, middle-aged spinster, miles and miles above her station in life, whose heart and purse were open to any foreigner who had discernment enough to see her weakness and tact enough to pander to it by hinting at his noble lineage. This love of things and beings ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... was a boat—named for the unyielding spinster whom the captain hoped to marry. Through the two Betsy's a delightful ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... the long wooden veranda that he had invoked did not unify the trinity. But one didn't want it to. The wrongness had a character all its own. The wrongness was right—at any rate after Mary had hit on it for William. As a spinster, she would, I think, have been happiest in a trim modern villa. But it was a belief of hers that she had married a man of strange genius. She had married him for himself, not for his genius; but this added grace in him was a thing to be reckoned with, ever so much; a thing she must ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... scene showed the same room in which the first act had been given. In a low rocker sat a spinster of uncertain age, very prim as to attitude and attire, her face partially concealed by a profusion of corkscrew curls that dangled from her temples. She appeared to be absorbed in reading, while there were piles of books on the table at her side, ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... bodies, I mean, hopping and "todillating"—as Bel expressed the little spinster's gait—along together; their souls walked in a sweet and gracious reality before ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... bickerings were incessant. They only had to meet for hot disagreement to break out. Mrs. Plume, already bent with age, would strike the floor with the ebony stick she always carried, and glare at the erect, defiant spinster—'That horrud, dirrty cat; its always in the room!' Then Miss Waghorn: 'It's a very nice cat, Madame'—she always called her Madame—'and when I was a young girl I was taught to be kind to animals.'—'The ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... own conduct must be irreproachable and her knowledge of the world such as can only be gained by personal experience; but she need not be an old lady! She can perfectly well be reasonably young, and a spinster. ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... heard of her through Adelaide Painter—;" and in reply to his glance of interrogation she explained that the lady in question was a spinster of South Braintree, Massachusetts, who, having come to Paris some thirty years earlier, to nurse a brother through an illness, had ever since protestingly and provisionally camped there in a state of contemptuous protestation oddly manifested by her never taking the ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... They 'm a fact, same as the sun in heaven 's a fact. God A'mighty's Self couldn't undo it wi'out some violent invention; an' for that matter I doan't see tu clear how even Him be gwaine to magic a married woman into a spinster again; any more than He could turn a spinster into a married woman, onless some ordinary human man came forrard. You must faace it braave an' strong. But that imp o' Satan—that damn Blanchard bwoy! Theer! I caan't say what I think 'bout him. Arter all that's ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... sat down between two pairs of candles to the piano in the decaying drawing-room, which like a spinster strove to conceal its age. A generous fire flamed in the wide grate behind me: warmth has always been to me the first necessary of life. I turned round on the revolving stool and faced the fire, and felt it on my cheeks, ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... it. Here I am, and here I shall stay. I take comfort in the fact that no one connects Ian Verity with an elderly and unattractive spinster hidden in a hermitage on Bessmoor. You will not betray me, I know, and it is good of you to come and visit me in my solitude. I am growing old and you have all your life before you. I have crossed to the shady side of the road while ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... future in the sunny garden of the old chateau. I tried it again last year, but the charm was gone, for I missed my boy with his fun, his music, and the frank, fresh affection he gave his 'little mamma,' as he insisted on calling the lofty spinster who loved him like ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... mere shame-faced, sister-hating, commonplace creature that the collective boy thinks it due to himself to be in society,' said Ethel, 'and me from an enjoying sister, into an elderly, care-taking, despised spinster—a burden to ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... but a young suitor, it was said, and the city a spinster not so lightly to be won. A longer courtship and more trouble ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... writes, "was eager to accompany her mamma upon this errand of charity; but I thought Aunt Lambert's visit would be best under the circumstances, and without the attendance of her little spinster aide-de-camp. Cousin Hagan was out when we called; we found her ladyship in a loose undress, and with her hair in not the neatest papers, playing at cribbage with a neighbour from the second floor, while good Mrs. Hagan sate on the ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Charley's love of a practical joke in our younger days, and I did not wish to interpose between him and the venerable spinster. I thought that he would not do anything really to ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... undecided weeks the lure seemed to attract Churchill, coupled though it was with the death of his romance. He dallied with the temptation as far as the stage of marriage-settlements; and rumour had it that the match was as good as made. Handsome Jack Churchill was to marry an elderly and gilded spinster, and to mount on ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... the house is plain now. It was once the residence of a country squire, whose family, probably dwindling down to mere spinster-hood, got merged in the more territorial name of Donnithorne. It was once the Hall; it is now the Hall Farm. Like the life in some coast town that was once a watering-place, and is now a port, where the genteel streets are silent and grass-grown, and the docks ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... and on the table where Miss Prudence did work in water colors, after the fashion of the impressionists, lay a prim and impossible composition representing a moss-rose and a number of heartsease, colored with that caution which modest spinster artists instinctively exercise. ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... my hat. I visit Crosby regularly, where I am well known, so that I was not surprised to be thus accosted by one who was a stranger to me. She was about forty, obviously a spinster, and clad in a costume not merely out-of-date, but so far out-of-date as to possess a false air of theatricalism. I can best describe her (I am not clever in matters of dress) by saying that, with the exception that she ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... called, Lyra Hybernica, for which no doubt The Groves of Blarney was his model. There have been many imitations since, of which perhaps Barham's ballad on the coronation was the best, "When to Westminster the Royal Spinster and the Duke of Leinster all in order did repair!" Thackeray in some of his attempts has been equally droll and equally graphic. That on The Cristal Palace,—not that at Sydenham, but its forerunner, the palace of the Great Exhibition,—is very good, as ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... uncle, you were employed, according to the formula, "in virtue of these and subsequent engagements," and among the "subsequent engagements" you are kind enough to reckon one between Mademoiselle Berthe Lorinet, spinster, of no occupation, and M. Fabien Mouillard, lawyer. "Fabien Mouillard, lawyer"—that I may perhaps endure, but "Fabien Mouillard, son-in-law of Lorinet," never! One pays too dear for these rich wives. ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... Mary and Mr. Ashforth so suited to one another. Well, well, the heart's an unaccountable thing—to an old spinster, anyhow." ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... be, at this very moment, Mrs. William Beresford, a highly respectable young matron who painted rather good pictures in her spinster days, when she was Penelope Hamilton of the great American working-class, Unlimited; but first Mrs. Beresford's dangerous illness and then her death, have kept my dear boy a willing prisoner in Cannes, his heart sadly torn betwixt his love and duty to his mother and his desire to be with ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... voice that asked the question, and Judith looked up with a smile. Her mother's cousin stood in the doorway—a prim little old spinster, who had been their guest for several days. Like Marguerite, she, too, had come back to her native village after an absence of four years, but not to her father's house. She was all alone in the world, save for a few distant relatives ...
— Mildred's Inheritance - Just Her Way; Ann's Own Way • Annie Fellows Johnston
... love—not within man's or woman's memory. No male or female remembers his or her first inclination any more than his or her own christening. What? You fancy that your sweet mistress, your spotless spinster, your blank maiden just out of the schoolroom, never cared for any but you? And she tells you so? Oh, you idiot! When she was four years old she had a tender feeling towards the Buttons who brought the coals up ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... full of marbles, tops, 'scholars' companions,' air-guns, sheets of paper soldiers, valentines, fire-crackers before the Fourth, elastic for slingshots, spools, needles and yards of blue calico with white dots, which hung over strings above the counters. Emily was a dark, heavy-browed spinster with a booming bass voice and a stern manner, and when you crept, awed and timid, into the store she glared at you and boomed out, 'Which side, young man?' Yet her store was a kid's paradise. I have often wondered since whether she didn't, in her heart, really love us youngsters, for ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... the affections of a sweet Italian girl, and then leaving her to pine in discontent! Yet in the face of this, an old companion of mine in Rome, with whom I accidentally met the other day, wondered how on earth I could have made so tempting a story out of the matronly and black-haired spinster with whom I happened to be ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... rebound in it which told on the Mclntosh sisters; for they, many years older than she, were already living on tolerance in their father's house, where their oldest brother and his wife ruled things with an iron hand. All hopes of a husband and a home of their own had quite died out of their spinster bosoms, and they would not have been human had they not secretly and grievously envied the comely, blooming Isabella ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... Elizabeth—the patroness of their calling, the protectress of learning and learned men. Tell them of Joan of Arc, the conqueror of even English chivalry. Tell them of all the tender mercies of the Soeurs de Charite! Tell them that, from the throne to the hospital, the spinster, unharassed by the cares of private life, has been found most ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... who has felt it to be his duty to call on his ward regularly every week, has learned to know and (I regret to say) to loathe that estimable spinster ...
— A Little Rebel - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... stay where you belonged, Clara, for quite apart from the pleasure of your company, which under sane conditions I find very delightful, I don't seem to see you in the role of a middle-aged spinster. Still, you might easily have been one. I know some charming girls in Boston who have gone ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... observe his going or his coming, otherwise than as it might affect her friend's need of him as a physician; this woman who seemed all mother while she was holding the baby, and all boy while she was trying, under old Captain Mayhew's guidance to learn to sail a boat; this woman who was a spinster in years, and a child in simplicity and directness; who was beautiful, and never once thought of her beauty; who was alone, and never seemed lonely: she was a perpetual problem and fascination to him. Dr. Eben was not ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... was once heard to remark that one of the difficulties of his social life lay in the fact that all women of forty were exactly alike, and it was impossible to recall their individual label, to which archdeacon, or canon, or form of spinster good works, they belonged. It would be dangerous, irreverent, to pry further into the recesses of the episcopal, or even of the suffragan, mind. There are snowy peaks where we lay helpers should fear ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... lawyer reading a will aloud is sure of the interest of his audience, and, on this occasion, it was evident that each member of the little group listened with strained attention, but with very different feelings. What they gathered was that Miss Victoria Bench, spinster, being of sound mind, did will and bequeath everything of which she might die possessed to her beloved great-niece, Elizabeth Caldwell, commonly called Beth. Should Beth marry, the money was to be settled upon her for her exclusive use. The present ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... Manner in Which Mr. Edward Middleton Encounters the Emir Achmed Ben Daoud The Adventure of the Virtuous Spinster What Befell Mr. Middleton Because of the Second Gift of the Emir The Adventure of William Hicks What Befell Mr. Middleton Because of the Third Gift of the Emir The Adventure of Norah Sullivan and the Student of Heredity What Befell Mr. Middleton Because of the Fourth Gift of the Emir ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... testify to a magnificent family red silk umbrella, under which a gentle little spinster, left alone of many brothers and sisters, used to patter to church on rainy days. Have you any red silk umbrellas in London? We had a tradition of the first that had ever been seen in Cranford; and the little ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... in all, daughters of the superior families of Bunkers and the surrounding district. Miss Arnott, their teacher, was a tall, bony spinster, with austere glasses and sharp elbows that ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... comic epithet—[Greek: hadou mageiros]—cook of the Inferno. And just as we are told that in Charon's boat we shall not be allowed to pick our society, so here we must accept what fellowship the fates provide. An English spinster retailing paradoxes culled to-day from Ruskin's handbooks; an American citizen describing his jaunt in a gondola from the railway station; a German shopkeeper descanting in one breath on Baur's Bock and the beauties of the Marcusplatz; an intelligent ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... latter knew that her income was very welcome to her aunt and, with a spirit of self-sacrifice not usual in the young, gave up a gay, fashionable life for the dull existence of a paying drudge in the house of an ungrateful, embittered elderly spinster. Yet her heart rejoiced when she conscientiously felt that her brother needed her more and had a greater claim upon her; and gladly she went to keep house for ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... 14, late of Burgh cum Girsby, spinster, com. Nov. 22, 1817, charged with twice administering a quantity of vitrol or verdigrease powder, or other deadly poison, with intent to murder Susanna, the infant daughter of George Barnes of Burgh cum ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... been a long time, for family curiosity never concerned itself with Raymond Mortimer unless he was annoyingly obtrusive or disobedient. But the first domestic records of her arrival, kept naturally enough by Miss Greene, whose lonely spinster heart was the boy's domestic refuge, went back to a day in June when he was five. He was in his nursery and she in an adjoining room, the communicating door of which was open. She had heard him in ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... dear, it represents the truth. The arrival of a fresh lady from England, especially of a 'spin,' which is short for spinster or unmarried woman, is an event of some importance in an Indian station. Not, of course, so much in a place like this, because this is the center of a large district, but in a small station it is ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty
... racing wires, and an account from a bookmaker showing a small debit balance. There were other miscellaneous bills, a plaintive epistle from a lady signing herself Flora, and begging for the loan of a fiver for a week, and an invitation to tea from a spinster who called herself Poppy. Amongst all this mass of miscellaneous documents there were only three which Wrayson laid on one side for further consideration. One of these was a note, dated from the Adelphi a few days before the tragedy, and ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... rightly is. He claims cousinship. But it has not dawned on him that Colland was to have been The McTavish, that he is The McTavish, that I am merely Miss Ellen Alice Douglas Cameron Dundee Campbell McGregor Breadalbane Blair McTavish, houseless, homeless spinster, wi' but a drap o' gude blood to her heritage. I have not told him, Mr. Traquair. He does not know. What's to be done? What would you do—if you knew that he was he, and that you ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... to go to the house for instructions, and guided by the under-butler found Lady Homartyn hiding away in the walled Dutch garden behind the dairy. She had been giving away the prizes of the flower-show, and she was resting in a deck chair while a spinster relation presided over the tea. Mrs. Britling had fled the outer festival earlier, and was sitting by the tea-things. Lady Meade and two or three visitors had motored out from Hartleytree to assist, and Manning had come in with his ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... there is a very strict law intended to eliminate the spinster from the social horizon. It is a law born of craft and inspired by foresight. The daughters of a household must be married off in the order of their nativity. The younger sister dare not contemplate matrimony ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... lack for the most part the final imaginative touch; the kind of inbreathing of life which afterwards gave such individual charm to Dickens' word-painting. The humour is more obvious, less delicate, turns too readily on the claim of the elderly spinster to be considered young, and the desire of all spinsters to get married. The pathos is often spoilt by over-emphasis and declamation. It ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... she returned, "but if you were a lone spinster without a bank account you might have ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... to chew the bit, as if vainly trying to pick its teeth, a lively jerk of the rope and a "You old beast! come on," started the animal on its travels. Finally, when the creature stopped to deliberate upon the propriety of going forward at all, the vials of the wrath of the Japanese spinster exploded, and I was tempted to believe her affections had been blighted. But when we met any of her friends on the road, or passed the wayside shops or farm-houses, the scolder of horses was the lady who wished all Ohaio ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... marry. I don't know as I do at my time of life," responded the spinster. "I rather guess my day for chances is ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... know by practice what will hit some contemporary tastes; we know the measure of smartness, say, or the delicate flippancy, or the sentence with "a dying fall." But one should also know that these are fancies of the hour—these and the touch of archaism, and the spinster-like and artificial precision, which seem to be points in some styles of the moment. Such reflections as our author bids us make, with a little self-respect added, may render our work less popular and effective, ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... said the Forest Ranger, "that is a well known, game old elderly spinster lady commonly called the Moon; and that other on the branch chittering swear words is nothing in the world but a Douglas squirrel hunting—I think he is really hunting—a flea to mix in his spruce ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... come to the motor by this time—the rich, the noble motor, as Mr Pepys would have described it—and there was poor Miss Lyall hung with parcels, and wearing a faint sycophantic smile. This miserable spinster, of age so obvious as to be called not the least uncertain, was Lady Ambermere's companion, and shared with her the glories of The Hall, which had been left to Lady Ambermere for life. She was provided with food and lodging and the use of the cart like a ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... was a fancy store, kept by two prim but pleasant spinster sisters. Besides newspapers, stationery, thread and needles, and so forth, they kept a stock of toys, candies, and pickled limes, which insured them a run of custom among the young folk, who always spoke of them as the Little ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... volume in Ireland. We fall in love, we marry and are given in marriage, we promote and take part in international alliances, but when the curtain goes up again, our accumulations, acquisitions—whatever you choose to call them—have disappeared. We are not to the superficial eye the spinster-philanthropist, the bride to be, the wife of a year; we are the same old Salemina, Francesca and Penelope. It is so dramatic that my husband should be called to America; as a woman I miss him and need him; as a character I am much better single. I don't suppose publishers ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... MANCHESTER there is a shortage of curates. A spinster writes to say that she is not surprised, considering how quickly they get ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 9, 1919 • Various
... dream she marries a vicar, foretells that she will fail to awake reciprocal affection in the man she desires, and will live a spinster, or marry to keep from ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... England spinster turned deprecating eyes to him. "My," she whispered shrilly, "he was just terrible, wasn't he? But so handsome! I can't help but think it was more seasickness with him than an ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... not an existence about us but at first seems colorless, dreary, lethargic: what can our soul have in common with that of an elderly spinster, a slow-witted plowman, a miser who worships his gold?... But ... the emotion that lived and died in an old-fashioned country parlor shall as mightily stir our heart, shall as unerringly find its way to the deepest sources of life as the majestic ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... be always wrong about everything, combined with determination to act and speak fearlessly in such belief, might have found their uses. In picturesque little Wychwood-on-the-Heath, among the Kentish hills, retreat beloved of the retired tradesman, the spinster of moderate means, the reformed Bohemian developing latent instincts towards respectability, these qualities made only ...
— The Cost of Kindness - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... looked down at her fat hands and smiled a little, seeming to see things in the matrimonial philosophy that no spinster was likely to understand. Then after opening the door they both turned again, from force of long habit, to look across the garden, and saw the square board more plainly now than they had done when close under the hedge. It stood there in the midst of the grass field—as if it were leading on—while ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... dolls and absurd toys in his working-room meant little more than an idiosyncratic passion for the anomalous, but those who were near to him knew what a connecting link they were between him and the little children of whom he wrote, and how each trumpet and drum, each "spinster doll," each little toy dog, each little tin soldier, played its part in the poems he sent out into the world. No writer ever made more persistent and consistent use of the material by which he was surrounded, or put a higher literary value on the little things which go to make up the sum ...
— A Little Book of Western Verse • Eugene Field
... thought that maiden was a term that implied virgin innocence and purity, whether addressed to the blithe lass of sixteen, or the antiquated spinster of forty," returned the provoking sailor, with a ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... art. Nay, we can go further and say that nobody has reproduced life with a more faithful accuracy, that yet was not photography because it gave the pleasure proper to art, than this same Jane Austen, spinster, well-born and well-bred: in her own phrase, an "elegant female" of the English past. Scott's famous remark can not be too often quoted: "That young lady had a talent for describing the movements and feelings of characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... detained some days at Holyhead by stress of weather, and in the private journal which he kept during that time he speaks of the suspense he was in about his "dearest friend."(11) In December Stella made a will—signed "Esther Johnson, spinster"—disposing of her property in the manner Swift had suggested. Her allusions to Swift are incompatible with any such feeling of resentment as is suggested by Sheridan. She died on January 28, 1728. Swift could ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... and applause.] Why, you will get so nauseated before the trip is over at the very sight of the white caps that you can't look at the heads of the French nurses in Paris without feeling seasick. There are the usual "characters" about. There is the customary foreign spinster of uncertain age that has been visiting here, who regales you with stories of how in New York she had twelve men at her feet. Subsequent inquiry proves that they ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... of diabolical leap-frog with Australian kangaroos. In one illustration he introduces us to a cheerful assembly of ancestral ghosts: there is the ghostly saucer-eyed head of the family, with a ghostly hound peeping beneath his chair, a ghostly grandmother, half a dozen ghostly spinster aunts, a ghostly butler, a ghostly cook, a ghostly small boy, two ghostly candles; and lastly, a ghostly cat. Small wonder that under the influence of such ghostly surroundings the hair of the affrighted ghost-seer stands erect in the ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... a woman to go on so," returned the spinster, shaking her head in vehement agitation; "you may just tell her it's no use, my pa isn't likely to be caught with chaff ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... party: John and I, bachelor and spinster; my uncle, a silent, moody man, who did whatever we asked him; and the still, open-eyed Martha Moon, who, I sometimes think, understood more about it all than any of us. I could talk a little French, John a good deal of German. When we ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... once, of an estimable plain spinster who had passed away, "did more for her than ever nature had done." He repeated it, too. "She was far more indebted, I say, to grace, than to nature," and before his sharp earnestness none were seen to smile. Nor could you forget the note in his voice ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... uncontrollable desire to laugh possessed him; but, restraining himself, he took the first chance he had to make his presence known, at which Aunt Eliza groaned, "Oh, my!" and Mary Jane instinctively grasped her yelling children, and the prim spinster curtsied and asked if he used tobacco. At Job's surprised look and negative reply, she said, "Very well. I never employ a male being who permeates his environment with the noxious weed. As you do not, ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... on the heights above the town. I looked over the water to the white line of shore and batteries where this wonder stood, who was what poets dream of, deep-hearted men hope for, none quite believe in. Hardly could I; and though my relenting spinster friend at my elbow kept assuring me it was true that she was there, my sceptical sight fixed on the stale prominences visible in the same features which they had worn day after empty day of late. This deed of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... he published a pamphlet called the Spinster, and a Letter to the Earl of Oxford, concerning the Bill of Peerage, which bill he opposed in the House of Commons. Some time after, he wrote against the South-Sea-Scheme; his Crisis of posterity; ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... must the bridescake hold: A silver shilling and a ring of gold, A crystal charm good luck to symbol, And for the spinster's hand ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... do, my dear?' said the spinster heartily, as Ida alighted; 'I am very glad to see you. Why, how bright and blooming you look—not a bit like a ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... worst is about to happen If you were as good a churchgoer as one could wish, you would have been in your pew yesterday morning, when the banns were read out (for the first time of asking) "between George Goodman, bachelor, and Emily Parsons, spinster, both of this parish," though this would not have conveyed to you the appalling fact that your man is marrying my entire staff all at once. I doubt, however, if you will be able to find cause or ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152. January 17, 1917 • Various
... when I first made application to the landlord, a solid yeoman inhabiting a farm at the foot of the coombe, on a cliff overlooking the beach. To him I presented myself fearlessly as a spinster of decent family and small but assured income, intending a rural life of combined seemliness and economy. He met my advances politely enough, but with an air of suspicion which offended me. I began by disliking ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... rattling about in many activities, she was able to ridicule her blazing nights of darkness. With spurious cheerfulness she announced everywhere, "I guess I'm a born spinster," and "No one will ever marry a plain schoolma'am like me," and "You men, great big noisy bothersome creatures, we women wouldn't have you round the place, dirtying up nice clean rooms, if it wasn't that you have ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... beating like a lizard caught by a herdsman, sat heroically still on her sofa, beside the fire in the salon. Josette opened the door; and the Vicomte de Troisville, followed by the Abbe de Sponde, presented himself to the eyes of the spinster. ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... was glad to have her back. That indomitable spinster had actually missed her lodger. She was surprised at her own pleasure in seeing the boxes carried upstairs again, in hearing the soft voice talking to Mawson, in sniffing the faint sweet scent that seemed to hang about the house when Miss Reston was ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... had rested. The spinster received Reuben with much warmth, in which her stately proprieties of manner, however, were never ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... planting arrows in a rival's breast, would utter this peculiarly deadly form of insult, which, strangely enough, is always intended as a high compliment by the masculine blunderer. The fact that the unfortunate spinster thus assailed may have had a dozen offers, and yet, for reasons of her own, prefer to remain single, seems entirely beyond their range ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... old cats who go there to slander each other in—in the name of religion.' That's what she'd have said. It's all different now. Gone is her love of adventure; gone is her defiance of convention; gone is—is her independence. What is she now? A mere farmer, a drudging female, spinster farmer, growing cabbages and things, and getting her manicured hands all mussed up, and freckles on her otherwise ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... a lonely, harsh-featured spinster, who eked out a precarious living by teaching music. Ethel knew her slightly, as a gaunt woman who usually toiled up the stairs with a sort of scornful weariness of ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... was standing with his back to the obese woman. He was busily engaged, endeavouring to count the stars, when that most worthy spinster backed against him and sent him sprawling. She did not even feel the rencontre; it was like an iron-clad coming in ...
— The Silver Lining - A Guernsey Story • John Roussel
... is not this he, or she, this one born of ourselves, of the weird places we have seen, the strange stories we have heard—this one, and not the aunt of Miss Jemima Jackson? For what use, I entreat you to tell me, is that respectable spinster's vision? Was she worth seeing, that aunt of hers, or would she, if followed, have led the way to any interesting brimstone ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... enough, till we were interrupted by a miserable-looking crowd, assembled round a dull, dingy, melancholy shop, from which gleamed a solitary candle, whose long, spinster-like wick was flirting away with an east wind, at a most unconscionable rate. Upon the haggard and worn countenances of the by-standers, was depicted one general and sympathizing expression of eager, ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... miscarried. I'd never have married that Osborne man; I'd have snubbed Balderstone the moment he spoke to me; and if Stuart Harley had got a book out of my trip to Europe at all, it would have been a series of papers on some such topic as 'The Spinster Abroad, or How to be Happy though Single.' No more shall I take the part he intends me to in this Newport romance, unless he removes Count Bonetti from the scene entirely, and provides me with a different style of hero from his Professor, the original of whom, ...
— A Rebellious Heroine • John Kendrick Bangs
... of Castilla and the ricefields of Valencia, and the villages of the northern provinces, had gone into strange hands,—all the princely possessions of the ancient counts of Sagreda, plus the inheritances from various pious spinster aunts, and the considerable legacies of other relatives who had died of old age in ...
— Luna Benamor • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... in the wind, and the "something" would doubtless bear fruit; for this elderly spinster aunt, with a mania for psychical research, had brains as well as will power, and by hook or by crook she usually managed to accomplish her ends. The revelation was made soon after tea, when she sidled close up to him as they paced slowly along ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... like a lock of my hair?" asked the gallant old bachelor of the spinster who had been a belle ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... Willis. 'I thought so,' said the lady at No. 19; 'I always said it was Miss Willis!'—'Well, I never!' ejaculated the young lady at No. 18 to the young lady at No. 17.—'Did you ever, dear!' responded the young lady at No. 17 to the young lady at No. 18. 'It's too ridiculous!' exclaimed a spinster of an uncertain age, at No. 16, joining in the conversation. But who shall portray the astonishment of Gordon-place, when Mr. Robinson handed in all the Miss Willises, one after the other, and then squeezed himself ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... alone together—Mary, commonly styled Miss Walkingshaw, and she. The exemplary spinster was likewise distressed, but in a calmer manner, as became a lady who had ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... have seen a man I would be that hard on. But it would be the only way she could be made to see some things, and maybe it might make her feel young again. Jess says there's nothing so kittenish as a spinster who's caught an unexpected beau. He is the most rejuvenating thing on earth to a woman who wants one. All don't want them. There are a great many more sensible women in this world than people realize, but in certain small places matrimony is still the chief ...
— Kitty Canary • Kate Langley Bosher
... of the promontory of Sunium, where the Greek Muse, in an awful vision, came to me, and said in a patronising way, "Why, my dear" (she always, the old spinster, adopts this high and mighty tone)—"Why, my dear, are you not charmed to be in this famous neighbourhood, in this land of poets and heroes, of whose history your classical education ought to have made you a master? if it did not, you have ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... girl did not heed him. "Last of all, there's another reason," she went on. "I don't know why I shouldn't speak it, as well as think it, for it's the greatest of all. I'm a young woman. I won't remain such long. I don't want to be a spinster. I know I'm not supposed to say these things, but why not? I want to meet men, men of my own class, my parents' class, men who know something besides the weight of a steer and the value of a bronco,—some man I could respect and care for." Again she turned directly to her companion. "Do you ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... out her hand to him, but the child drew back and held to his protectress's skirt. A hurt expression came into the spinster's face. It was as if the great sacrifice she was making was being belittled and rejected by a child. Mrs. Warren ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar |
