"Girlhood" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of her years until that first great crisis in her life—her going away to school—this world into which she was born had been to Kitty an all-sufficient world. The days of her childhood had been as carefree and joyous, almost, as the days of the young things of her father's roaming herds. As her girlhood years advanced, under her mother's wise companionship and careful teaching, she had grown into her share of the household duties and into a knowledge of woman's part in the life to which she belonged, as naturally as her girlish form had put on the graces of young womanhood. The things that filled ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... is room yet for great improvement. You, my young friends, in your happy childhood and girlhood, cannot conceive the miseries of these poor little creatures. Thank God your lot is cast in a Christian land, and oh! do all you can to send the gospel light into these dark ...
— A Missionary Twig • Emma L. Burnett
... looked at him with affectionate, kindly interest. She had gone before him through the solitary road of young romance. She remembered her dreamy, dangerous girlhood, when she, too, had yearned ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... comes a girl, tall and graceful, but with a touch of something nobler and stiller that does not come to girlhood. It is the seal of the diviner Eden grace which only comes with the ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... off; and my girlhood was surrounded by all the comforts of life. Every wish of my heart was gratified, and ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... sacrificed herself for his advantage. All had been taken out of her hands! Yet with characteristic fatalism she did not feel rebellious. If it were ordained that she should, for fifty, perhaps sixty years, repent in sterility and ashes that first error of her girlhood, rebellion was, none the less, too far-fetched. If she rebelled, it would not be in spirit, but in action. General principles were nothing to her; she lost no force brooding over the justice or injustice of her situation, but merely ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the hearty sleep of tired girlhood till about four o'clock in the morning. Then Amy, in the room next to Betty and Mollie, rubbed her eyes, coughed a little, then sat up with a ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Army Service - Doing Their Bit for the Soldier Boys • Laura Lee Hope
... through which they may look across the green meadows and into the sunlit gardens of childhood. The result is not theories of child life but appreciation of children. How one who has read understandingly Sonva Kovalevsky's story of her girlhood could ever leave unanswered a child starving for love I cannot see. Mills' account of his early life is worth more than many theories in showing the deforming effect of an education that is formal discipline without an awakening ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... hard to remember which of the women Gertie knew as a result of her girlhood visit to New York, which from their membership in St. Orgul's Church, which from their relation to Minnesota. They all sat in rows on couches and chairs and called him "You wicked man!" for reasons ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... face shows new wrinkles of shadow; and new and unexpected clumping of colors in monotone and halftone appear. From the massed-up bulk of things small detached bits stand vividly out: a flower girl whose flowers and whose girlhood are alike in the sere and yellow leaf; a soldier swaggering by, his red coat lighting up the grayish mass about him like a livecoal in an ashheap; a policeman escorting a drunk to quarters for the night—not, mind you, escorting him in a clanging, ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... such persons, meeting in a far corner of the world, would honestly care for each other. My respect for Uncle Bash grew; he had married the most attractive girl in the world, and here she was with the bloom of her girlhood upon her, tripping alone through a world that might have been created merely that she might confer light ...
— Lady Larkspur • Meredith Nicholson
... the mazy crush, Ingenuous youth, half timid, and half proud, By girlhood's pity had its claims allow'd, And worshipp'd ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 27, 1893 • Various
... having a confidential talk with his old comrade upon future plans and prospects, to the accompaniment of the roaring sea, and a third party was destructive of such intention. Besides, poor May, although exceedingly unselfish and sweet and good, was at that transition period of life when girlhood is least attractive—at least to young men: when bones are obtrusive, and angles too conspicuous, and the form generally is too suggestive of flatness and longitude; while shyness marks the manners, ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... a tall, gilded harp that her grandmother had played in her girlhood. The heavy cover had kept it fair and untarnished through all the years it had stood unused. To the child's beauty-loving eyes it seemed the loveliest thing she had ...
— The Little Colonel • Annie Fellows Johnston
... gracious, deferential. Always she had felt strangely shamed when he stood bareheaded before her. Beauty Stanton had foregone respect. Yet respect was what she yearned for. The instincts of her girlhood, surviving, made a whited sepulcher of her present life. She could not bear Neale's indifference and she had failed to change it. Her infatuation, born of that hot-bed of Benton life, had beaten and burned ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... conversation, though there was a charm about a tete-a-tete with her that earnest persons, men and women, felt without being able to define it. For the change, without doubt, was there. It was as if a quiet hand had been passed over her exuberant, happy girlhood and left a serious, thoughtful woman in its stead. A subtile change like this is not speedily noticed by outsiders; it requires usage before an acquaintance will account it a characteristic instead of a mood. But her family knew it. ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... Roll of Honour came in, week by week, that Roll of Honour with its photographs of splendid types of young manhood that no Anglo-Saxon can look at without a clutch at his throat? What did she think when, one by one, the friends of her girlhood put on the black of bereavement and went uncomplainingly about the good works in which hers was the guiding hand? What thoughts were hers during those anxious days before the Prince of Wales went to the front, when, like any other mother, she took every possible moment to ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... college years if they wish to keep as well and strong as they ought to be. The story of motherhood is told in a very interesting manner, and valuable advice is given regarding the physical preparation for it, which the author believes should begin in early girlhood. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... into what department of her life you inquire, she is still found the same active, energetic, and strong-minded woman. Nothing weak or puerile is found in her character. From girlhood to maturity, from maturity to gray hairs, she pursues the same steady, uniform course. Her life is consistent with the principles which she had laid down for her own self-government, and which she believed were deduced from ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... Mr. Upton. The portrait had been painted in Paris, where, orphaned, lovely, but not largely dowered, she had, under the wing of an aunt domiciled in France for many years and bearing one of its oldest names, failed to make the brilliant match that had been hoped for her. This touch of France in girlhood echoed an earlier impress. Imogen had told him that her mother had been educated for some years in a French convent, deposited there by pleasure-loving parents during European wanderings, and Imogen had intimated that her mother's ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... Leslie had got letters from the Josselyns and Dakie Thayne. There was news in them such as thrills always the half-comprehending sympathies of girlhood. Leslie's vague suggestion of romance had become fulfilment. Dakie Thayne was wild with rejoicing that dear old Noll was to marry Sue. "She had always made him think of Noll, and his ways and likings, ever since that day of the game of chess that by ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... feeling in his middle-aged heart as he scampered along the deck. The girl had wonderful dark auburn hair and brown eyes, with a milk-white skin that sun and wind had sought in vain to blemish. And for all her girlhood she was a woman—bred from a race (his own people) to whom danger and despair merely furnished a tonic for their courage. What a mate for a man! And she had looked at ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... maxim once expressed by Emerson, "Every brave heart must treat society as a child, and never allow it to dictate." Emerson greatly admired Bettina, and Louisa M. Alcott relates that she first made acquaintance with the famous 'Correspondence' when in her girlhood she was left to browse in Emerson's library. Bettina's influence was most keenly felt by the young, and she had the youth of Germany at her feet. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... to bring before young people who have read her books some qualities of her mind and character which made her the rare woman, teacher, and writer that she was. I knew her from early girlhood. We went to the same schools, in more and more intimate companionship, from the time we were twelve until we were twenty years of age; and our lives and hearts were "grappled" to each other "with links of steel" ever after. She was a precocious child, ...
— The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball - That Floats in the Air • Jane Andrews
... all he has done for me. I have promised my hand to one I do not love; even he forsakes me. But love is not the portion of princesses. Love to them is a fairy story. To secure my father's throne I have sacrificed my girlhood dreams. Ah! and they were ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... presents a very interesting development. The subject has at one time or other—probably the critical period of girlhood—sustained a severe physical and ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... suddenly he stopped. Upon a bench sat a sweet-faced mother holding a sleeping babe in her arms, while a curly-pated boy nestled his head in her lap and slept through the magic lanes and fairy woods of dreamland. The woman's face was one of those that blend the confidence of girlhood with the uncertainty of womanhood. 'Twas a pretty face, which had been plainly tagged by its Maker for a light-hearted trip through this world, but it had been seared by the iron of ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson
... McVey. She was born two years, six months after freedom in Corinth, Mississippi. My father was born in slavery. Grandma lived with us at her death. Her name was Emily McVey. She was sold in her girlhood days. Uncle George was sold to a man in the settlement named Lee. His name was Joe Lee (Lea?). Another of my uncles was sold to a man named Washington. His name was George Washington. They were sold at different times. Being sold was their biggest ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... had never been handsome, even in her days of early girlhood, and now she was middle-aged, distorted with work and child-bearing, and looking faded and worn as one of the boulders that lay beside the pasture fence near where she sat ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... angel visitant. My mother, why did you leave your hapless babe? Oh! why? my mother! I was left much to myself, and followed unrestrained my own inclinations. You know my fondness for books; that fondness was imbibed in girlhood, as I wandered in my own sunny home—my lost home. My father taught me to conceal my emotions—to keep down the rising sob, to force back the glittering tear; and when I smiled over some childish grief, applauded ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... Dangler's prosy platitudes, which some deemed wit—Horner, par exemple—sank into nothingness, and Baby Blake, one of the "gushing" order of girlhood, appeared as a stick, or, rather, a too pliant sapling—her inane "yes's" and lisping "no's" having an opportunity of being "weighed in the balance," and consequently, in my opinion, "found wanting." All were mediocre beside her. Perhaps ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... friendship of Mr. Wallace, and had been a constant visitor at his house from the first days of that gentleman's married life. He himself was alone in the world, a confirmed bachelor. He had seen Mildred creep from babyhood into childhood, and bud from girlhood to womanhood. To Mildred he was one of that numerous army of brevet relations known as "gran-pop," "pop," or "uncle." To ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... be said that Ann Lee had married previously to these manifestations, her husband being Abraham Stanley, like her father, a blacksmith. By him she had four children, all of whom died in infancy. It is related that she showed from girlhood a decided repugnance to the married state, and married only on the long-continued and urgent persuasion of her friends; and after 1770 she seems to ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... would be pleasant to know how each has reached the same platform, through the tangled labyrinths of human life." Soon all was silence and one after another related the special incidents in childhood, girlhood and mature years that had turned her thoughts to the consideration of woman's position. The stories were as varied as they were pathetic and amusing, and were listened to amidst smiles and tears with the deepest interest. And when all[89] had finished the tender ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... knows. But she was glad to be rid of them, and when they had gone, she got her sacred "Commonplace Book," and glanced through it dreamily. Then, rousing herself a little, she went to her writing table, and sat down and wrote: "This is the close of the happiest girlhood that girl ever had. I cannot recall a single thing that ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... sleeper, stretched at length, A spectre stripped of charm and shorn of strength, In yon dismantled chamber. Dreams she of girlhood's couch, the lavender Of country sheets, a roof where pigeons ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... hollow—pathetic remains of dolls. But a doll is seldom given to Kojin during the lifetime of its possessor. When you see one thus exposed, you may be almost certain that it was found among the effects of some poor dead woman—the innocent memento of her girlhood, perhaps even also of the girlhood of her mother and of ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... these poor beasts of burden to be decent in their toil. Out of protection of womanhood as the central thought, she must build ramparts against cruelty, poverty, and crime. All this in turn—but now and first, the innocent girlhood of this daughter of shame must be rescued from the devil. It was her duty, her heritage. She must offer this unsullied soul up unto God in mighty atonement—but how? Here now was no protection. Already lustful eyes were in wait, and the child was ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... in the beer-house or the gin-shop, and then carry you on to the catastrophe in his ruined home or in his penal death. Hood, in his "Bridge of Sighs," brings you into the presence of death, and you gaze, weeping, over the lifeless form of beauty that had once been innocent and blooming girlhood, but from which the spirit, early soiled and saddened, took violent flight in its despair; Crabbe would give us the record of her sins, and connect her end retributively with her conduct. Much is in Crabbe that is repulsive and austere; but he is, notwithstanding, an earnest moral teacher ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... in her girlhood Her life was given away, The solemn promise spoken She kept so well to-day; How to her brother Herbert She had been help and guide, And how his artist nature On ...
— Legends and Lyrics: Second Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... murmurs by), And sadly into the clear blue tide The salt tear fell from her clear blue eye. "'Tis fixed for better, for worse," she cried, "And to-morrow the bridegroom claims the bride. Oh! wealth and power and rank and pride Can surely peace and happiness buy. I was merry, nathless, in my girlhood's hours, 'Mid the waving grass when the bright sun shone, Shall I be as merry in Marmaduke's towers?" (The rippling ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... Javanese parents of exalted rank treat their daughters with disdain, the approved discipline of family life consisting in stamping an impression of abject insignificance deeply on the plastic mind of girlhood. Fertile plain and wooded slopes are alike destitute of domestic animals. The sheep was unknown to native races in this pastureless land, and, though introduced by the earliest colonists, is still spoken of as "the Dutch goat," no other term ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... a white, seamless face, sad, prayerful blue eyes too large for the sockets, a little piquant nose that she had somehow managed to bring along with her unchanged from a frivolous girlhood, and a quaint old hymnal mouth. Looking up from the rug she took on an expression of pure and undefiled piety and began in the strident, cackling tones of ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... up the next morning in the chamber where her girlhood had passed. The birds of spring were singing under her windows in the old ancestral gardens. As she recognized these friendly voices, so familiar to her infancy, her heart melted; but several hours' sleep had restored to her her natural courage. She banished ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... to girlhood, Jeanne had heard continually of the woes of the war, and had herself witnessed some of the wretchedness that it caused. A feeling of intense patriotism grew in her with her growth. The deliverance of France from the English was ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... once been a family servant—an indoor domestic, and handmaiden to a white mistress. This in the days of youth—the halcyon days of her girlhood, in "Ole Varginny"—before she was transported west, sold to Ephraim Darke, and by him degraded to the lot of an ordinary outdoor slave. But her original owner taught her to read, and her memory still retains a trace of this early education—sufficient for her to decipher ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... square miles of ranch while her father guarded the other. She could handle firearms with speed and accuracy equal to any man on the range, where she had been bearing a man's burden since her early girlhood. ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... rich in stories adapted to the juvenile mind, among which the most prominent are Mrs. Whitney's "Faith Gartney's Girlhood," Miss Alcott's "Little Women," and Mr. T.B. Aldrich's "Story of a Bad Boy." Edgar Allan Poe's "Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque," are remarkable for intensity and vividness of conception, combined with a circumstantial invention almost equal to that of Defoe. ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... look down when our great galleon sails Close over earth, and see them always here Dancing upon the moonlit shores of night. But how to choose!—and though they are young and fair Their every grace foretells the fatal change, The swift short bloom of girlhood, like a flower Passing away, for ever passing away. Have you not one with petals tenderer yet, More deeply folded, further from the hour When the bud dies into ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... as fair as a rose, but a trifle too weak. When a maid she had suitors as proud as Ulysses, But she ne'er bent her neck to their arms or their kisses, Till McNair he came in With a brush on his chin— It was love at first sight—but a trifle too thin; For, married, the dreams of her girlhood fell short all, And she found that her husband was ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... twenty-three and singularly free from ties. Her mother had died when she was a child. Her father, the physician of the surrounding country, a man of engaging energy with an empirical education and a speculative habit of mind, had been the companion of her girlhood. During the last few years since his return from the war an invalid from a wound, her care for him had left her time for ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... turned out the light and crawled in beside Mary. Of a sudden, he had seen Judith through his father's eyes and he found himself very unwilling to permit John to see her so. Her loneliness had assumed an entirely new aspect to him. It was the loneliness of girlhood, of girlhood without father, mother, or brother. That was what it amounted to, he told himself. He never had been a real brother to Judith, never had looked out for her as if she had been his sister. And Jude's mother! Just tired and sweet and ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... fire. Hitty rested her weary head against the window-frame and sent her wearier thoughts upward to the stars; there were the points of light that the Chaldeans watched upon their plains by night, and named with mystic syllables of their weird Oriental tongue,—names that in her girlhood she had delighted to learn, charmed by that nameless spell that language holds, wherewith it plants itself ineradicably in the human mind, and binds it with fetters of vague association that time and chance are all-powerless to break,—Zubeneschamali and Zubenelgunebi, Bellatrix ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... made the Jew the pariah of the civilized world. Oh, father, dear father, do not barter me for gold! Let me remain your child, your darling; living and dying in the home which your love has made like Eden to my girlhood!" ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... could see herself trapping Esther in a still place and cutting her dusky hair off so that she'd betray no more men. For she began to suspect that Alston Choate, too, was caught in the lure of Esther's inexplicable charm. Lydia was at the moment of girlhood nearly done where her accumulated experience, half of it not understood, was prepared to spring to life and crystallise into clearest knowledge. She was a child still, but she was ready to be a woman. Alston Choate now was gazing at ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... rich, heavy house at Lancaster Gate, on the other side of the Park and the long South Kensington stretches, had figured to her, through childhood, through girlhood, as the remotest limit of her vague young world. It was further off and more occasional than anything else in the comparatively compact circle in which she revolved, and seemed, by a rigour early marked, to be reached through long, straight, discouraging vistas, which ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... been called as a Jewess, Hannah, had spent her girlhood under the rule of a stepmother. Peter was a young man earning a fair salary as a clerk at the Town Hall. He was a frequent visitor at Bendet's wine-shop. And Peter was an expert judge of the comeliness of Jewish maidens in ...
— In Those Days - The Story of an Old Man • Jehudah Steinberg
... long received her. There Ethembria ruled, Green Erin's earliest nun. Of princely race, She in past years before the font of Christ Had knelt at Patrick's feet. Once more she sought him: Over the lovely, lovelier change had passed, As when on childish girlhood, 'mid a shower Of lilies earthward wafted, maidenhood In peacefuller state assumes her spotless throne; So, from that maiden, vestal now had risen: - Lowlier she seemed, more tender, soft, and grave, Yet loftier; hushed in quiet more divine, Yet wonder-awed. Again she knelt, and ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... shared her girlhood's happier day, And forms now mingling with the dust arise, The early loved recalled with pensive tears, Though once in pride half scorned and lightly prized; Fair pictured scenes long vanished from her sight, Soft tones of songs and voices loved of yore. And words of tenderness and ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... as a buxom bright-haired lassie: but oaks had now grown old that she had planted acorns; and grandmothers had died palsied, whom she remembered born; still, around the mountains and the lakes, those changeless features of her girlhood's rugged home, the old woman's memory wandered; they were pictured in her mind's eye hard, and clear, and definite as if she looked upon them now. And her soul's deep hope was to see them ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... very easy to accuse a young person for suffering herself to be deceived, in the desire to escape, at any price, from the condition of girlhood; but such an accusation is only just in the present condition of our manners. At the present day, a young person knows nothing about seduction and its snares, she relies altogether upon her weakness, and ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... sufficient to show that a change had come over these two young women, since the giddy days of their girlhood. Jane was pale, but beautiful as ever; she was holding on her knees a sick child, about two months old, which apparently engrossed all her attention. What would be her system as a mother, might be foretold ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... a New England atmosphere, is rarely carried forward into womanhood. The lips grow pinched and bloodless; the skin blanched against all proof of blushes; the eyes sunken, and the blithe sparkle that was so full of infectious joy is lost forever in that exhausting blaze of girlhood. But we make no prophecy in regard to the future of our little friend Rose. Adele thinks her very charming; Reuben is disposed to rank her—whatever Phil may think or say—far above Suke Boody. And in his reading ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... people in a strange land, and in difficult circumstances who had for the time lost their grip of things, and needed special assistance. It all came upon her in a flash, transforming her from a follower to a leader; from dependent girlhood to ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... ‘The Girlhood of the Virgin’ in the so-called Free Exhibition or Portland Gallery. The artist who had perhaps the strongest influence upon Rossetti’s early tastes was Ford Madox Brown, who, however, refused from the first to join the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood on the ground that ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... of the oleander blossoms and the sunset over the garden made a harmony with her dream. To the widow who had been no wife, the girl who had seen no girlhood, the child who had never had a home, the lady who was losing her life in gilded servitude, that dream ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... that now left behind a dull pang, made her forget Stewart, her surroundings, everything except to search her heart. Maybe here was the secret that had eluded her. She trembled on the brink of something unknown. In some strange way the emotion brought back her girlhood. Her mind revolved swift queries and replies; she was living, feeling, learning; happiness mocked at her from behind a barred door, and the bar of that door seemed to be an inexplicable pain. Then like lightning strokes shot ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... succumbed to overwork, dying in Boston on the 6th of March 1888, two days after the death of her father in the same city. Miss Alcott's early education had partly been given by the naturalist Thoreau, but had chiefly been in the hands of her father; and in her girlhood and early womanhood she had fully shared the trials and poverty incident to the life of a peripatetic idealist. In a newspaper sketch entitled "Transcendental Wild Oats,'' afterwards reprinted in the volume Silver Pitchers (1876), she narrated, with a delicate humour, which showed what ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... changed. She was once more free to indulge in those dreams which had gladdened the days and nights of her lonely girlhood out in far-off England: dreams which somehow had not even found their culmination when St. Genis first told her of his love for her. They had always been golden dreams which had haunted her in those distant days, dreams of future happiness ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... eyes and drew the baby closer. It looked like a rose dipped in milk, she thought, this pink and white blossom of girlhood, or like a pink cherub, with its halo of pale yellow hair, ...
— The Bird's Christmas Carol • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Ville Marie! Spread wide thine ample robes of state; The heralds cry that thou art great, And proud are thy young sons of thee. Mistress of half a continent, Thou risest from thy girlhood's rest; We see thee conscious heave thy breast And feel thy rank and ...
— Thoughts, Moods and Ideals: Crimes of Leisure • W.D. Lighthall
... right up to the top. There was a want of bold action; he didn't see what they were waiting for. He didn't suppose they were waiting till she was fifty years old; there were old ones enough in the field. He knew that Miss Chancellor appreciated the advantage of her girlhood, because Miss Verena had told him so. Her father was dreadfully slack, and the winter was ebbing away. Mr. Pardon went so far as to say that if Dr. Tarrant didn't see his way to do something, he should feel as if he should ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... was brushing and coiling up her thick black hair—a favourite task, because it seemed to renew the days of her daughter's girlhood—Janet told how she came to send for Mr. Tryan, how she had remembered their meeting at Sally Martin's in the autumn, and had felt an irresistible desire to see him, and tell him her ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... back at their few days together he saw that their intercourse had been marked, on her part, by the same hesitations and reserves which had chilled their earlier intimacy. Once more they had had their hour together and she had wasted it. As in her girlhood, her eyes had made promises which her lips were afraid to keep. She was still afraid of life, of its ruthlessness, its danger and mystery. She was still the petted little girl who cannot be left alone in the dark...His memory flew back to their youthful story, ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... clung to her illusion, finding comfort therein, wholly blind to those failings in her protector which to the woman who had loved him from her earliest girlhood were as obvious and well-nigh as ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... America. It is a moving record of the conquest of self-consciousness and fear through mastery of manners and customs. It has been written by one who has not sacrificed the strength and honesty of her pioneer girlhood, but who added to these qualities that graciousness and charm which have given her ...
— The Log-Cabin Lady, An Anonymous Autobiography • Unknown
... divine of genius-souls, Their wasting cares and agonizing throes! I had a friend, a sweet and precious friend, One passing rich in all the strange and rare, And fearful gifts of song. On one great work, A poem in twelve cantos, she had toiled From early girlhood, e'en till she became An olden maid. Worn with intensest thought, She sunk at last, just at the "finis" sunk! And closed her eyes forever! The soul-gem Had fretted through its casket! As I stood Beside her tomb, I made a solemn vow To take in charge that poor, lone orphan work, ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... spent much of her girlhood at Kingthorpe, and had always been made welcome at The Knoll; but although she saw the Wendovers established upon their native soil, the rulers of the land, and revered by all the parish, she had grown up with the firm conviction that Dr. ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... not knowing why, she would look into the glass. It seemed to her that the girlhood she had somehow missed was awakening in her, taking possession of her, changing her. The lips she had always seen pressed close and firm were growing curved, leaving a little parting, as though they were not quite so satisfied with one another. The level brows were becoming slightly ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... talked about her father's Mississippi plantation and her girlhood home in the old Kentucky bluegrass country. She was an American woman, with a small infusion of French which seemed to have been lost in dilution. She read a letter from her sister, who was away in the East, and who had engaged herself to be married. ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... "Such happy girlhood hours as I have passed here! After all there is nothing like the home feeling, is there, for us women at any rate! We're the natural conservatives, who cling to the simple, elemental satisfactions, and there's a heart-hunger ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... at the mention of girlhood days, but said nothing, and Silas turned to Elizabeth again with his honest face alight with memories ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... house which had made a point of never marrying below its rank since the reign of Louis XIV. Every daughter of the house must sooner or later take a tabouret at Court. So, Antoinette de Navarreins, at the age of eighteen, came out of the profound solitude in which her girlhood had been spent to marry the Duc de Langeais' eldest son. The two families at that time were living quite out of the world; but after the invasion of France, the return of the Bourbons seemed to every Royalist mind the only possible way of putting ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... The great armies roll along their hideous waves, and leave behind them smoking and depopulated deserts. The pillager is in every house, plucking even the morsel of bread from the lips of the starving child. Gray hairs are dabbled in blood, and innocent girlhood shrieks in vain to Lust for mercy. Laws, Courts, Constitutions, Christianity, Mercy, Pity, disappear. God seems to have abdicated, and Moloch to reign in His stead; while Press and Pulpit alike exult at universal murder, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... in a knot, closer to her head, and that altered her expression a little and made her look much older; but there was more than that, there was something very hard to describe, something one might call conviction—the conviction that the world is real, which comes upon girlhood as suddenly as waking on sleep, or sleep on waking. She had crossed the narrow borderland between play and earnest, and she had crossed it ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... perfectly delightful if our daughters might remain innocent. They should have that privilege. Innocence belongs to childhood and girlhood, but under present conditions, it is as dangerous and foolish as level and unguarded railway crossings, or open and unguarded trap doors. It is no pleasant task to have to tell a joyous, sunny-hearted ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... depends on how the health is cared for in childhood. The foundation for disease is often laid during school years. The making of strong bodies that will live joyous lives for long years must begin in boyhood and girlhood. ...
— Health Lessons - Book 1 • Alvin Davison
... his girl-wife while their child was still tender, down to the amazing iniquity of that child's revolt, in her thirty-first year. Dumbly, dutifully, had she submitted to all his restrictions and severities, stonily watching her girlhood go, through a fading, lining and hardening of her prettiness. Then all at once, with no word of pleading or warning, she had done the monstrous thing. He awoke one day to know that his beloved child had gone away to marry the handsome, swaggering, fiddle-playing good-for-nothing who ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... summer Poppy seemed care enough. A neighbor across the canyon, who had known her in her girlhood, took too vital an interest in her daily life. It was maddening to be called on the telephone at all hours and told that Poppy had had no fresh drinking water since such and such an hour, or to have Donald waylaid and ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... mill-stream, if she were but Leone Noel once again, with her life all unspoiled before her; if she were anything on earth except a woman possessed by a mad love. If she could but exchange these burning ashes of a burning love for the light, bright heart of her girlhood, when the world had been full of beauty which spoke to her in an ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... accustomed to it all. She had been born beside that sea. Etna had looked down upon her as she sucked and cried, toddled and played, grew to a lusty girlhood, and on into young womanhood with its gayety and unreason, its work and hopes and dreams. That Oriental song—she had sung it often on the mountain-sides, as she set her bare, brown feet on the warm stones, and lifted her head with a native ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... her slim but rounded figure in tattered boy's garb—but the woman's lines were unmistakable. And her face, with clustering curls. Gentle girlhood. A face of dark, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... of an overwrought soul. Lord Marshmoreton, whose thoughts had wandered off to the rose garden, pulled himself together and tried to look menacing. Maud went on without waiting for a reply. She was all bubbling gaiety and insouciance, a charming picture of young English girlhood that nearly made her brother foam at ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... through her, of which I should never have had any idea. Even now when we go to the Louvre with papa, or to the exhibition of the 1st of May, that special feeling I have about a beautiful piece of sculpture, a good picture, carries me back immediately to Felicia. In my early girlhood she represented art to me, and it corresponded with her beauty. Her nature was a little vague, but so kind, I always felt she was something superior to myself, that bore me to great heights without frightening ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... woman now: she only tried during her few minutes of solitude to gather up her thoughts, to realize what had happened to her, and who it was that sat in the next room—under her roof—at her very fireside. Then she clasped her hands with a sudden sob, wild as any of the emotions of her girlhood. ...
— The Laurel Bush • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... faintly illumined by the full moon that was rising, incredibly large and white, above the dark line of the spruce tops. For all the regularity of his rather handsome features, his was never an attractive face to her, even in first, susceptible girlhood; and in the moonlight it suddenly filled her with dread. Ray Brent was a dangerous type: imperious willed, slave to his most degenerate instincts, reckless, as free from moral restraint as the most savage creatures that roamed his native ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... had been in her service since girlhood, and was spoken of as "Smither—a good girl—but so slow!"—the maid Smither performed every morning with extreme punctiliousness the crowning ceremony of that ancient toilet. Taking from the recesses of their pure white band-box those flat, grey curls, the insignia of personal dignity, she placed ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... She would have gone anyhow. She is expecting a visitor, an old friend of her girlhood days. I must tell you a story about him later, a love story with a real hero and a real heroine, and ending with resignation. It will make you open your eyes wide with amazement. Moreover, I saw mama's old friend over ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... wholly accept her freedom. Still she was more like the Rose of girlhood, though she no longer climbed or ran races. The Sieur was whiling away the heavy hours of uncertainty by teaching several Indian girls, and Rose found this ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... of his labors lay principally between the years 1774 and 1790, when the evils against which Mrs. Fry had to contend were intensified and a hundred times blacker, it cannot do harm to recall the condition of prisons in England during the last quarter of the eighteenth century; that is, during the girlhood of Elizabeth Fry. Possibly some echoes of the marvellous exertions of Howard in prison reform had reached her Earlham home, and produced, though unconsciously, an interest in the subject which was destined to bear fruit at a later period. At any rate, the fact cannot be gainsaid ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... value to be placed on the very trappings of girlhood which do not in the least interfere with womanliness. At sixteen or eighteen, perhaps at twenty, a girl can toss a jaunty little felt hat upon her head, pin it in a twinkling above her wayward hair, tie on a ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... in the back of his mind; in his subconscious mind, perhaps, but he seemed to have put her away, like his skill with revolver and lasso. Now she burst upon him again with all that beauty and charm which had so magnetised him in those glad, golden days, and the frank cleanness of her girlhood made him disgusted and ashamed. It was to fit himself for her that he had come to town, and what sort of mess was he making of it? He was going down instead of up. He had squandered his little money, and now he was squandering his life. He had ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... extremely, and taking in so little of it that it has appeared to them since as not one of the least of Dickens's glories that he could write a book about the scum of London which children may read and re-read well into their young girlhood without receiving even the shadow of an impression of any evil beyond pocket-picking ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... word she rose and confronted him, smiling into his troubled eyes; grace of girlhood and dignity of womanhood adorably mingled ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... said, bored by the general atmosphere of innocent and bounding girlhood at the Temperance Home Club, and she persuaded Una to join her in taking a flat—three small rooms—which they made attractive with Japanese toweling and Russian, or at least Russian-Jew, brassware. Here Mrs. Lawrence's men came calling, and sometimes Mr. Julius ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... complication. It had begun to rain. Hopelessly lost in the woods and a storm coming on! It was a situation to try the patience of a saint. And the girls were not saints. They were just happy, fun-loving, lovable specimens of young American girlhood who could upon occasion show ...
— Billie Bradley on Lighthouse Island - The Mystery of the Wreck • Janet D. Wheeler
... the soft, white draperies, her face made an attractive picture for the passer-by. Mrs. McAlister's girlhood had passed; a certain girlishness, however, would never pass, and her clear blue eyes had all the life and fire they had shown when, as Bess Holden she had been the leader in most of the pranks of her class at Vassar. The brown hair was still unmarked by grey ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... something to lighten this weary waiting; at least she would show them all that she had still old friends. Yet she did not dream of returning to her Blue Grass home; her parents had died since she left; she shrank from the thought of dragging her ruined life before the hopeful youth of her girlhood's companions. ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... world is so changed since our girlhood!" rejoined the other: "young people have such old heads now. But to return, Monsieur. Madame Pelet will mention the subject of your giving lessons in my daughter's establishment to her son, and he will speak to you; and then to-morrow, you will step over to our house, and ask to see ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... brothers and sisters grew from merry playmates, to loving, trustful friends; from Christmas gatherings and romps, the summer festivals in bower or garden; from the secure backgrounds of her childhood, and girlhood, and maidenhood, looks out into the dark and unilluminated future away from all that, and yet unterrified, undaunted, leans her fair cheek upon her lover's breast, and whispers—"Dear heart! I cannot see, but I believe. The past was beautiful, but ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... gift presents types of the principal phases of human development; from the easy mobility of infancy and childhood,—the ball,—we pass through the half-steady stages of boyhood and girlhood, represented in the cylinder, to the firm character of manhood and womanhood for which the ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... into the room with her swaying, graceful carriage of old days, but with a new dignity and reserve of manner, carrying her lovely head with just a little more pride than in her girlhood, greeting Irving, for all her warm friendliness, like a young queen graciously ready to accept homage from her subjects. She sank into a low chair beside the fire, the flames casting a warm glow over her arms and neck from which her ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... you; the same delicacy of proportion; the same graceful curvature of limb, only less rounded, less womanly. But you must be younger by about two years than she then was. Your age cannot exceed seventeen; and time will supply what your mere girlhood renders you ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... lying in a corner room, close to the stream which rippled through the little orchard, and its gentle murmur had been a comfort to her—it carried her back to her home in Oxford County (State of Maine), where her early girlhood had been spent. At times it seemed that she was in the little, old, gray house in the valley, and that her father's sharp voice might come at any moment to break her ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... doubtless become so when unduly heightened by Christian sentiment, and especially if it leads, as to some extent it has led in my Russian correspondent, to an abnormal feeling of the sexual attraction of girls who have only or scarcely reached the age of puberty. The sexual charm of this period of girlhood is well illustrated in many of the poems of Thomas Ashe, and it is worthy of note, as perhaps supporting the contention that this attraction is based on Christian feeling, that Ashe had been a clergyman. An attentiveness to ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... From early girlhood onwards Cleopatra had cherished very definite ideas about the man of her taste. In this she was by no means exceptional. But perhaps the circumstances that she had abided more steadfastly than most by the ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... in him he remarked a development in her which was a little short of wonderful. She was at that age when the woman is breaking through the beautiful chrysalis of girlhood. In those two months a remarkable change had come over her, a change which he could not for the moment define, for this phenomenon of development had ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... curls over her temples; you saw that the keenest wind of Fall brought the red to her cheeks only in two bright spots, and that no soft Spring air would ever bring her back the rosy, pink flush of girlhood: you saw these things as others saw them—no, indeed, you did not; you saw them as others could not, and they only made her the more dear to you. And you were having one of the best and most valuable ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... through all the weary, chilling years of her girlhood to that hardly remembered morning of her life when the cry she uttered was answered by the light of loving eyes, the kiss of clinging lips, the embrace of ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... good luck; that she had left her parents against their will to go to Neufchateau, and lived in that place among a debauched set of people: that in consequence of all these wicked acts, a youth who intended marrying her had not done so. Then, having left not a stage or an act of her innocent girlhood unblasted, and covered with the slime of the Bishop's reptile-like imagination, her acts when with the King were reviewed. She had promised Charles to slay all the English in France; her cruelty and love of bloodshed were insatiable; ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... tremendous forces of the upper and the nether world which play for the mastery of the soul of a woman during the few years in which she passes from plastic girlhood to the ripe maturity of womanhood, he may well stand in awe before the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and through, with no chance for a supper, forlorn and discouraged. I sat on the bulwark, listening to the falling rain and the swish of the dark tide, and thinking of home. How far it seemed, and how impassable the gulf now between the "castle" with its refined ways, between her in her dainty girlhood and me sitting there, numbed with the cold that was slowly stealing away my senses with my courage. There was warmth and cheer where she was. Here—— An overpowering sense of desolation came upon me. I hitched a little nearer the edge. What if——? Would they miss me or long at home if ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... youngest of the three; she was about forty. But she had forgotten, like Jasmina and Saloma, to erase twenty years from the calendar: all three had preserved the youthful charm of their girlhood. ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... how Peruna did for them. Give this boy and girl of yours a few good books and you're starting them on the double-track, block-signal line to happiness. Now there's 'Little Women'—that girl of yours can learn more about real girlhood and fine womanhood out of that book than from a year's paper dolls in ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... Love's drapeau rouge the truth has told! O' er girlhood's yielding barricade Floats the ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... what the sight roused in him was not so much disapproval as pity, and an immense longing to help and comfort. He loved her; he understood her; he honestly believed he could help her to rise above the weaknesses of girlhood, and become the fine large-hearted woman which Providence had intended her to be; and the time had come when he intended to speak his mind and ask her to be his wife. The silence had lasted so long that at last Joan herself ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... one in a stupor of amazement—so dazed and white that I repeated my words. Then, suddenly, she gathered herself into composure like my own, but her poor lips trembled. I saw in her my girlhood long dead. ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... reaching the sands that now lay before her, warm, sweet-scented from short beach grass, stretching to a dim rocky promontory, and absolutely untrod by any foot but her own. It was this virginity of seclusion that had been charming to her girlhood; fenced in between the impenetrable hedge of scrub-oaks on the one side, and the lifting green walls of breakers tipped with chevaux de frise of white foam on the other, she had known a perfect security for her sports and fancies that had captivated her ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... on, and the girls continued their chatter, and their high-shrieking trebles arose triumphant above all the clatter. It was American girlhood rampant on the shield of their native land. Still there was something about the foolish young faces and the inane chatter and laughter which was sweet and even appealing. They became attractive from their audaciousness and their ignorance that they were troublesome. Their ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... morbid, at any rate, whatever they are," our heroine said to herself; and she deemed this a great charm, for two or three of the friends of her girlhood had been regrettably open to the charge (they would have been so nice without it), to say nothing of Isabel's having occasionally suspected it as a tendency of her own. The Misses Molyneux were not in their first youth, but they had bright, fresh complexions and something of the smile ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... Mlle. Meunier was considerably Ferrer's senior. Having spent her childhood and girlhood with a miserly father and a submissive mother, she could easily appreciate the necessity of love and joy in child life. She must have seen that Francisco Ferrer was a teacher, not college, machine, or diploma-made, but one endowed with ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... easy. A large coloured sketch was shown to old Mawsie as a portrait of the Le Roi who had been married in the old chapel in her girlhood. It was that of his grandson, who shortly after visited the manse ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... she was no hospital matron, but a young and singularly graceful and accomplished gentlewoman of wealth and position, who had, not in a moment of national enthusiasm, but as the set purpose of her life from girlhood up, devoted herself to the studying of God's great and good laws of health, and to trying to apply them to the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... down at her young, questioning face. It was grave, although she spoke gaily, and looked so mere a slip of girlhood with her brown throat and cheek and lifted ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... her with twinkling eyes. They were great pals, these two; had been since they met in Portland, five years ago. He was on his way to Stanford, and had seen her doing a singing and dancing act in a wretched vaudeville company. That vision of a girlhood, beset and embattled, the pitifulness of its acquired hardness, had called to his western chivalry and made him her champion. Ever since he had helped and encouraged, his belief and friendship a spur to the ruthless energy, the driving ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... demanded. "Didn't you come to me squealing for help? Joe, take a back seat and let me try my hand without any advice from you. The girl's name is Doris Kenyon and she's an orphan. Her father used to be the general manager of my redwood mill on Humboldt Bay, and her mother was a girlhood friend of my late wife's; so naturally I've established a sort of protectorate over her. She has to work for a living, and any time there's a potentially fine, two-million-dollar husband like Joey lying round loose I like to see some deserving working ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... attention to the curvature of the spine developed by the exclusively sit-at-a-desk-and-study-a-book type of education bequeathed to the girlhood of the nation by the medieval monastery: It ignores the chorea, otherwise known as St. Vitus' dance developed by overstudy and underexercise; it disregards the malnutrition of hasty breakfasts, and lunches of pickles, ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... call her, but she had passed the days of her girlhood. Few knew it; it was wonderful how young and fresh her heart had kept. That being the case, of course her face had taken the same impress. It was hard for Ruth Erskine to realize that her friend Marion was really thirteen ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... During the girlhood of the Princess (afterwards Queen) Mary, entertainments were given for her amusement, especially at Christmastide; and she gave presents to the King's players, the children of the Chapel, and others. ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... answered Berthe Louison. "God has blasted your life in denying you the love of your own child. You rule her by fear. You, in your selfish passion, once reached out your strong hand and crushed this girl's mother, a poor, fragile flower, in her girlhood. Valerie believed Pierre to be dead or false when she timidly crossed the threshold of the wedded home which you made a prison for her! You only care for this bubble Baronetcy and for your heaped-up hoards. The tribute of the shrieking ryot! Now, here are my terms: I will go down with you to Calcutta, ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... the most beautiful and characteristic, as well as earliest, examples of this subject I have seen, is a picture in the Esterhazy Gallery at Vienna. The Virgin is in the first bloom of girlhood; she looks not more than nine or ten years old, with dark hair, Spanish features, and a charming expression of childlike simplicity and devotion. She stands amid clouds, with her hands joined, and the proper white and blue drapery: there are no accessories. This ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... darkness there an irresistible grief assailed him. He wept as never before in all his life. And he tasted the bitter salt of his own tears. He wept for his mother, aged and bowed by trouble, bewildered, ready to give up the struggle—his little sister now forced into erotic girlhood, blind, wilful, bold, on the wrong path, doomed beyond his power or any earthly power—the men he had met, warped by the war, materialistic, lost in the maze of self-preservation and self-aggrandizement, dead to chivalry and the honor of women—Mel Iden, strangest and saddest ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... as she regarded some of the grizzled women in the room, mere mechanical contrivances sewing seams and grinding out, with heads bended over their work, tales of imagined or real girlhood happiness, past drunks, the baby at home, and unpaid wages. She speculated how long her youth would endure. She began to see the bloom upon ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane
... evidently a late comer, and whose presence appeared to fill the apartment. All the others paled before her, as do the stars when the moon rises among them. She was evidently young, and yet she did not suggest youth. One would almost imagine that she had never had a childhood or a girlhood, but was rather a direct creation of metropolitan society. Her exquisitely turned shoulders and arms were bare, and the diamonds about her neck were a circlet of fire. The complexion of her fair oval face was singularly pure, and the color came and went so easily as to prove that it owed nothing ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... rarely found among our fictionists. Having said this, we must hedge in favor of Miss Jordan's most autochthonic Miss Kittie, so young a girl as to be still almost a little girl, and with a head full of the ideals of little-girlhood concerning young-girlhood. The pendant to her pretty picture is the study of elderly girlhood by Octave Thanet, or that by Miss Alice Brown, the one with its ideality, and the other with its humor. The pathos of "The Perfect Year" is as true as either in its truth to the girlhood which ...
— Different Girls • Various
... she had experienced all the freedom and happiness of girlhood; her heart had beat with a power, a fire condemned by the princess herself, but which she ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... These stirring and terrible scenes had imprinted themselves for ever upon her mind. When she began to go back over these recollections, indissolubly bound up with the days of her girlhood, when she remembered how enthusiasm and wild delight alternated with scenes of terror, her whole life seemed to rise up before her I learnt from her to be so proud of the Revolution that I have liked it since, in spite of my reason and of all ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... there never had entered into his heart a feeling or idea of real affection until he met LAURA. He fell for a moment under the spell of her fascination, and then, with cold logic, he analyzed her, and found out that, while outwardly she had every sign of girlhood,—ingenuousness, sweetness of character and possibility of affection,—spiritually and mentally she was nothing more than a moral wreck. He observed keenly her efforts to win him and her disappointment at her failure—not that ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter
... great towns that may not be dwarfed by the great pulsing of the lands sought by the lovers of rod and gun. Here she had gathered new ideas and unwonted thoughts. She is the best example I have ever seen of the sturdy, beautiful girlhood of modern life, and is an utter pleasure ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... deeds and sacrifices, especially those which show that the greatest man is not the greatest orator, or the tricky politician. They are a curse; what we need is noble men. National loss comes as the penalty for frivolous boyhood and girlhood, that gains no moral stamina ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... natives who offered for sale fruit, Irish laces, and canes made of black bog oak, with the shamrock carved on the handles. Mrs. Harris was much pleased to renew her acquaintance with the scenes of her girlhood, having sailed from Queenstown for Boston when she was ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton |
