"Aproned" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and vanishes. Most of the leading shops are here, and the decorous draper ventures a few yards from the pavement to scan the sky, or note the effect of his new arrangement in scarves. Planted against his door is the butcher, Henders Todd, white-aproned, and with a knife in his hand, gazing interestedly at the draper, for a mere man may look at an elder. The tinsmith brings out his steps, and, mounting them, stealthily removes the saucepans and pepper-pots that dangle on a wire above his sign-board. Pulling to his door he shuts out the foggy ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... a moment alone when the surgeons returned to the sick-room. Other nurses were there now, capped, aproned, quickly and silently unpacking their appliances.... She must call a halt, clear her brain again, decide rapidly what was to be done next.... Oh, if only the crawling hours could bring Amherst! It was strange that there was no telegram yet—no, not strange, after ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... The white-aproned, white-capped maid smiled a polite recognition of the newest arrival. A bit flustered by the calmly impersonal scrutiny with which her greeting was received, she addressed Miss ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... left it outside, and the nearest it came, for a quarter of an hour, to glimmering again into sight was when she watched for a little one of the more earnest of the lady-copyists. Two or three in particular, spectacled, aproned, absorbed, engaged her sympathy to an absurd extent, seemed to show her for the time the right way to live. She should have been a lady copyist—it met so the case. The case was the case of escape, of living under water, of being at once impersonal ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... occupied a beautiful large suite together on the third floor, with a bath all their own, and a maid to wait upon them. Grace was used to this; but she was a very simple-minded girl, and the presence of a tidy, be-aproned and be-capped maid not much older than herself, did not particularly impress ...
— Nan Sherwood's Winter Holidays • Annie Roe Carr
... year. Honour and shame from no condition rise; Act well your part, there all the honour lies. Fortune in men has some small difference made, One flaunts in rags, one flutters in brocade; The cobbler aproned, and the parson gowned, The friar hooded, and the monarch crowned. 'What differ more (you cry) than crown and cowl?' I'll tell you, friend! a wise man and a fool. You'll find, if once the monarch acts the monk, Or, cobbler-like, the parson will be drunk, Worth makes the man, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... like paging a gorilla," chuckled Locke. They went aft and stood by Marjorie, and Shanghai Tom looked out from the cabin door, white-capped and white-aproned, and a ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... ending. He attended Gargantuan feasts, where multitudes fed on innumerable bullocks roasted whole, prying them out of smoldering pits and with sharp knives slicing great strips of meat from the steaming carcasses. He stood, with mouth agape, beneath long rows of turkeys which white-aproned shopmen sold. And everybody bought save Smoke, mouth still agape, chained by a leadenness of movement to the pavement. A boy again, he sat with spoon poised high above great bowls of bread and milk. He pursued shy heifers through upland ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... found herself looking in the garden where the aproned man was at work. But it was Lennox that she saw. Again and again since the wedding-evening, when Paliser had told her of the unscrambled eggs, she had wondered about the broken engagement. On that evening she had felt that she had taken the wrong road and had lost her way. The feeling ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... Gettysburg, aproned, and fresh from his labors at the stove, came hastening out of the cabin to where his partners stood, in ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... there were yellow muslin curtains tied with pink sashes, and amber flower-pots holding sham plants of the most verdant hue. The maid who opened the door exactly matched the house. She was like a cheap doll, very smart, very pert, and capped and aproned in ...
— A Vanished Hand • Sarah Doudney
... We fight in the death throes, Myself and the young nurse. Her firm, crisp aproned bosom Leans toward the bed, As she smooths the rumpled pillow ...
— Precipitations • Evelyn Scott
... one of which would seem to be on board this afternoon, to judge from the flags which bedizen the masts, the sounds of revelry and savory steams which issue from those windows which once were portholes, and the rushing to and fro along the river brink, and across that lucky bridge, of white-aproned waiters from the neighboring Pelican Inn. A great feast is evidently toward, for with those white-aproned waiters are gay serving men, wearing on their shoulders the city-badge. The lord mayor is giving a dinner to certain gentlemen of the Leicester house party, who ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... gate-way under which we have halted is one of the two chief entrances to the Temple. It was built in the reign of James I., being consequently nearly three centuries old. White-aproned porters, with numbered pewter badge on lapel, stand on either side, ready—for a consideration—to direct our transatlantic ignorance into veritable "paths of pleasantness and peace." Access to the Middle Temple from Fleet ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... gold head-ornaments on fire; tiny children in blue sailor-suits, or with a little red fez on a yellow head; old, white-haired gentlemen holding on unsuitable top-hats as they walked against the wind; white-aproned waiters flitting about restaurant verandas, carrying pink ices, or baskets of ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... tribes of soldiers, Israel returned to chair-bottoming. And it was in frequenting Covent-Garden market, at early morning, for the purchase of his flags, that he experienced one of the strange alleviations hinted of above. That chatting with the ruddy, aproned, hucksterwomen, on whose moist cheeks yet trickled the dew of the dawn on the meadows; that being surrounded by bales of hay, as the raker by cocks and ricks in the field; those glimpses of garden produce, the blood-beets, ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... Ecstasy stole over Fanny; other similar wakings strung themselves like beads upon her memory; nursery wakings when her spirit had been guided into daylight by the crackle of a fire new-lit, by the movements of just such an aproned figure as this, by a smile on just such a pink face; or wakings after illness when her freshening life had leapt in her at the sound of a blind drawn up, at the sight of the white-cuffed ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... parlor that MacNutt led the dazed and unprotesting Frank, pinning her to his side by the great arm that was, seemingly, so carelessly linked through hers. He gave a curt nod to the capped and aproned attendant, who touched a button on her desk, without so much as a word of challenge or inquiry. The machine-like precision with which each advance was watched and ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... opposite, the whole collection of shines nearly annihilating the weak daylight from outside. A step further in, and the nostrils were greeted by the scent of green herbs just gathered, and the eye by the plump form of the cook, wholesome, white-aproned, and floury—looking as edible as the food she manipulated—her movements being supported and assisted by her satellites, the kitchen and scullery maids. Minute recurrent sounds prevailed—the click of the smoke-jack, the flap of the flames, ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... knew that the little aproned figure, with flushed cheeks and high-held head, was terrified and homesick under the pride, he said nothing. Nothing, that is, beyond the ordinary courtesies. He offered to help her on with her cloak. After one indignant look ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... Silver Prize Band passed under the window at the solemn pace of Handel's "Dead March." The effect of that requiem, heavy with its own inherent beauty and with the vast weight of harrowing tradition, was to wring the tears from Constance's eyes; they fell on her aproned bosom, and she sank into a chair. And though, the cheeks of the trumpeters were puffed out, and though the drummer had to protrude his stomach and arch his spine backwards lest he should tumble over ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... the vine-dressers. It was "a gay and motley scene, blending the harvest-home with a dash of the carnival spirit." Shepherds and shepherdesses in holiday attire and garlands, tripping the measures of rustic song and dance. Aproned gardeners with rake and spade, their sweethearts with bread-baskets of fruit and flowers, uniting in the dance a la ronde, as they came to a certain point in the procession; and so went the reapers, mowers, gleaners, herdsmen, and dairy-maids in Alpine costume, timing their steps to ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... Main Street the intelligence that she was coming seemed in some mysterious way to speed before her. Those exemplars of male fashion, the dry goods clerks, craned furtively about front doors. Bare-armed and aproned proprietors of grocery stores and their hirelings appeared beneath the awnings and displayed an unprecedented concern in trying to resuscitate, with aid of sprinkling-cans, bunches of expiring radishes and young onions. Owners of amiable steeds that dozed beside ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... now and far away to the eastward rose the first straggling cabins of the town. Creeping toward them down the road rolled a dark squat figure. It grew and spread slowly on the horizon until it became a fat old black woman, hooded and aproned, with great round hips and massive bosom. Her face was heavy and homely until she looked up and lifted the drooping cheeks, and then kindly old eyes beamed on the young teacher, as she curtsied ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... our windows, during Lent, booths were set, and countless flat pancake-looking pieces of dough were caught up by a white-capped and aproned cook, with a long-handled spoon, and fried in olive oil placed in a caldron at the booth's door, to be served to passers in the twinkling of an eye. I watched this process until I grew to regard Lent as a tiresome custom. Having tested the cakes, I found them to be indistinct ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... hall, permeated with a smell of onions and cabbage, was all too familiar to him, but it was not at all the proper setting for Eleanor. His bewilderment increased when the door was opened by a white-aproned figure, who after a moment of blank amazement seized his hand in both of hers and ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... helper by day, this aproned lad with sooty face dreamed dreams. Evenings he studied Greek with the village parson. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... agitated voice his wife's name. Miss Shepperson was the only person at home, for Mrs. Rymer had gone out with the children, the servant accompanying her to wheel baby's perambulator; she ran up from the kitchen, aproned, with sleeves rolled to the elbow, and met the excited man as he descended from a vain search in ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... covers silencing every step, the gilded mirrors throwing their reflections backwards and forwards until the stairs seemed peopled with hosts of Emmys and Alfs. As they drew near the closed doors of the circle the hush filling the staircases and vestibules of the theatre was intensified. An aproned attendant seemed to Emmy's sensitiveness to look them up and down and superciliously to disapprove them. She moved with indignation. A dull murmur, as of single voices, disturbed the air somewhere behind the rustling attendant: and when the doors were quickly opened Emmy saw beyond the darkness ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... groups of gay dresses, set off by black coats and light trousers, came white aproned waitresses with cakes and champagne. In vain Reggie, who had missed getting a cup of tea indoors, watched for a tray of tea cups. Champagne and ices, cakes and champagne, champagne and sandwiches. There appeared to be nothing else, and everybody seemed ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh
... Before the aproned nurse arrives, To tell of soap and tub and sponges, My nephew, fierce and ruddy, drives, Disgraceful edges, callous lunges. Twenty auriculas declare The zeal of his peculiar magic, Till every aunt is in despair, And even Job ...
— More Cricket Songs • Norman Gale
... dive under a counter in pursuit of cinnamon; to serve little girls with a ha'porth of pear drops and lordly people like you and me with a pint of cherry gin —is not this to follow the king of trades? Some day I shall open a grocer's shop, and you will find me in my spare evenings aproned behind the counter. Look out for the currants in the window as you come in—I have an idea for something artistic in the way of patterns there; but, as you love me, do not offer to buy any. We grocers only put the currants out for show, and so that we may run our fingers ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... "That plain white-aproned man who stood at work, Patient and accurate, full fourscore years, Cherished his sight and touch by temperance; And, since keen sense is love of perfectness, Made perfect Violins, the needed paths For inspiration and high ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... shelf of headland, and commanded a fine view of the little village and the bay. Stafford and Copplestone, turning in at the front door, found themselves in a deep, stone-paved hall, on one side of which, behind a bar window, a pleasant-faced, buxom woman, silk-aproned and smartly-capped, was busily engaged in adding up columns of figures in a big account-book. At sight of strangers she threw open a door and smilingly invited them to walk into a snugly furnished bar-parlour where ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... wife and prim, pig-tailed little daughter clad in an exiguous cotton frock of loud and unauthentic tartan, and showing a quarter of an inch of sock above high yellow boots; the superb pair of gendarmes with their cocked hats, wooden epaulettes and swords; the white-aproned waiters standing by cafe tables—all these types are distinct, picked out pleasurably by the eye; they give a cheery sense of variety; the ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... was no more than a blue-clad, white-aproned benevolence, that moved in the shadows behind the bed on which my old mother lay and sank restfully to death. She would come forward to anticipate some little need, to proffer some simple comfort, ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... rose, and burnished copper measures and buckets glinted on the carved shelves running along one side. The adjoining pastry room was tiled with stone, furnished with counters covered with marble slabs, and with refrigerators built into the wall; and here the white-capped, white-aproned priestesses of pots, pans and pestles moved quietly to and fro, performing the labor upon which depended in great degree the usefulness of artificers in all ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... very beautiful fish to sell!... "H! a qui l mang yonne?"—those are "akras,"—flat yellow-brown cakes, made of pounded codfish, or beans, or both, seasoned with pepper and fried in butter.... And then comes the pastry-seller, black as ebony, but dressed all in white, and white-aproned and white. capped like a French cook, and chanting half in French, half in creole, with a voice ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... short-jacketed, long-aproned waiter, who looked as if he had not been to bed since his early youth, ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... well aproned, with a reading lamp trimmed, filled, and ready for lighting. She places it on the table near Morell, ready ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... a dresser laden with dainty china; but only for a moment, for the doorway was almost immediately blocked by a figure which blotted out every other view—the big, broad figure of Anna, white-capped, white-aproned, red-faced ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... period, Samson had his first acquaintanceship with women, except those he had known from childhood—and his first acquaintanceship with the men who were not of his own art world. Of the women, he saw several sorts. There were the aproned and frowsy students, of uncertain age, who seemed to have no life except that which existed under studio skylights. There were, also, a few younger girls, who took their art life with less painful solemnity; and, ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... the terrace, four rows deep with little round tables, is rapidly filling. The white-aproned garcons are hurrying about or squeezing past your table, as they ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... the bright look we know, From the broad, white brows the kind eyes Soothing yet nerving you. Here at his elbow, White-capped, white-aproned, the Nurse, Towel on arm and her inkstand Fretful with quills. Here in the ruck, anyhow, Surging along, Louts, duffers, exquisites, students, and prigs - Whiskers and foreheads, scarf-pins and spectacles ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... being observed by Uncle Rufus. Agnes brought the water and the soap and a hand-brush from the kitchen. Neale removed his collar and tie, and turned back the neck of his shirt. Agnes aproned her Sunday frock ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill
... hidden up his sleeve. This was not true, and he denied it stoutly on the stand. As a matter of fact, he had not thought of his knife until the three young bruisers, habitues of the place and of the questionable pool-room in the rear, rushed him all together, and a dirty-aproned waiter, coming up from behind, hit him a crack that jarred his skull. Then he had sprung back ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux
... a wing's caress On billowed field and climbing shore Whose veiny tidelets beat and cling, Bloom-labouring, Invincibly sweet and far, Up looming cone and scaur, And clambering spill To lap of ledge and aproned hill The heaped and whispering greenery Of beauty's ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... the works at Bermondsey the same activity apparently prevailed as when the Cure had reached the hey-day of its fortune some five years before. In the sweet-smelling laboratory gleaming with white tiles and copper retorts, the white-aproned workmen sorted and weighed and treated according to the secret recipe the bundles of herbs that came in every day and were stacked in pigeon-holes along the walls. In the boiling-sheds, not so sweet-smelling, the great vats of fat bubbled and ran, giving out to the cooling-troughs ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... if he knowed I said anything about snakes. He'd send me right away, and some strange woman would come, and maybe she'd whip Emmy. Emmy want Becky to go?" Sobs, and little arms clinging wildly to Becky's aproned skirts. "No, no! Well, she ain't goin'. But Emmy mustn't tell tales or she might have to. Tattlers are wicked anyway. 'Telltale tit! Your tongue shall be slit, and all the little dogs'—There! run now! There's your poppy. Don't ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... know time no more, was well imbosomed in the old deed-poll, and all stitched firmly in the tough brown frail, whose handles would help for a long strong cast. Towering crags, and a ridge of jagged scaurs, shut out the sunset, while a thicket of dwarf oak, and the never-absent bramble, aproned the yellow dugs of shale with brown. In the middle was the caldron of the torrent, called the "Scarfe," with the sheer trap-rock, which is green in the sunlight, like black night flung around it, while a snowy wreath of mist (like foam exhaling) circled round the basined steep, ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... last glimpse of them; the slowly vanishing streets, where the few pedestrians stopped to look after the cars; the park where she had played as a child; the brilliant flower-beds filled with an autumnal bloom of scarlet cannas; the white-aproned negro nurses and the gaily decorated perambulators; the clustering church spires against a sky of pure azure; the negro hovels, with frost-blighted sunflowers dropping brown seeds over the paling fences; ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... stands studying the procession to destruction, because he must make his living in that way. He is a sort of clean-aproned Charon on a whiskey Styx, ferrying the multitude to perdition on the other side of the river. But ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... her special province, it expressed her own sturdy, kindly nature. Little wonder, then, that we cherished it; that I loved to roam idly there feeling the enfoldment of that same protection and loving-kindness which drew me to the shelter of her gingham-aproned lap when the griefs of Boyhood pressed too hard upon me; and that we walked in it so contentedly in the cool of the evening, after the Four O'clocks had folded their purple petals for ...
— The Long Ago • Jacob William Wright
... that your extraordinary horse with all the legs?' asked Miss Howard, putting her glass to her eye, and scrutinizing a lank, woolly-coated weed, getting led about by a blue-aproned gardener. 'Is that your extraordinary horse, with all the legs?' repeated she, following the ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... humanity, solid or dashing, on a field already gained. But the thought which organizes the fresh advance goes with the pioneer-train that bridges streams, that mines the hill, that feels the country. The controlling plan puts itself forth with that swarthy set of leather-aproned men shouldering picks and axes. How brilliantly the uniforms defile afterward, with flashing points and rhythmic swing, over the fresh causeway, to hold and maintain a position whose value was ideally conceived! So that the brightest ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... aberration, for the hour was within two minutes of nine, and at nine o'clock the latest of the legionaries was supposed to be at her post. Three girls who were being hastily served with glasses of milk by a pink-aproned waitress politely feigned not to see him. Then another girl ran in, and she, too, had to pretend that the spectacle of Hugo pasting posters on mirrors was one of the most ordinary in life. Hugo glanced at this last comer in the mirror, and sighed a ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... harder to him that he should have no more sweets to look forward to. Remember that a man in the prime of years has an appetite like a wolf; and as he passed a restaurant he could see a round-faced, holland-shirted, snow-white aproned fellow of a French chef preparing a dish delicious enough to make it turn to and eat itself; while, again, as he passed a fruit shop he could see delicacies looking out of a window for fools to come and buy them at a hundred roubles apiece. Imagine, ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... clear around the stove. Well do I remember one Winter when the biggest boy in the school stood at the tail-end of the class most of the time, while at the head of the line, or always very near it, was a freckled, check-aproned girl, who once at a spellin'-bee had defeated even the teacher. This girl was ten years older than myself, and I was then too small to spell with this first grade, but I watched the daily fight of wrestling with such big words as "un-in-ten-tion-al-ly" ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... glorious and sonorous. The classic marble on which we ate, the great, light-flooded, vitreous front, adorned with snow-white scrolls; the grand Wagnerian din of clanking cups and bowls, the flashing staccato of brandishing cutlery, the piercing recitative of the white-aproned grub-maidens at the morgue-like banquet tables; the recurrent lied-motif of the cash-register—it was a gigantic, triumphant welding of art and sound, a deafening, soul-uplifting pageant of heroic and emblematic life. And the beans were only ten cents. We wondered why our fellow-artists ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... of memory they passed before her, those white-aproned, bare-elbowed girls she had watched idly in many countries and at many seasons; from the nurse that bathed and combed her own children, singing, to the laundry-maids whose laughter and ringing talk had waked her from more than ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... he will satisfy his hunger therewith. Everything in the whole place was as white as snow; everything so clean; great bins full of flour; huge vessels full of swelling dough, from which six white-dressed, white-aproned assistants were forming every conceivable kind of cake and bun; piled upon the shelves of the gigantic white oven the first supply was gradually baking, filling the whole room with ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... 6 sluices, strongly tymbered, built with stronge wall one either side thereof, 160 foote longe, 3ft heigh, 3 foot thicke, aproned and plancked on the top for a bridge 3 years since, 44 ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... struggled with the problem, he lost all track of time. A door swung open and high-heeled boots clumped on the floor tiles. Tom looked up and saw the portly, aproned figure of Chow ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... America—America ideally true to herself—quickly became, in his mind, one and the same. Quakerism means divine democracy. George Fox was the first forerunner, the John Baptist, of the new time,—leather-aproned in the British wilderness. Seeing the whole world dissolving into individualism, he did not try to tie it together, after the fashion of great old Hooker, with new cords of ecclesiasticism; but he did this,—he affirmed a Mount Sinai in the heart of the individual, and gave to the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... at the uncalled-for act, and springing at the white-aproned figure, she caught her by the shoulder, and shook her till her teeth rattled. Lottie doubled up like a jack-knife and buried her sharp teeth in the brown hand gripping her so tightly, biting so viciously that the blood ran and ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... chewing, of her step coming up the stairs to that little bedroom under Hudson's gaudy roof. Could it be possible that she was homesick for Millings? For the bar with its lights and its visitors and its big-aproned guardian? Her lids were actually smarting with tears at the recollection of Carthy's big Irish face.... He had been such a good, faithful watch-dog. Were men always like that—either watch-dogs or wolves? The simile ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... imaginary token of rank upon his own breast. "I ought to have a jewel to wear to-night," he said musingly, and muttered of the splendid jewel that he had forgotten to bring, given to him years before by the Grand Lodge. By this time the hour of service had come; the aproned Masons had marched to their seats in the nave of the church, and all available space was thronged by an expectant congregation. Nevertheless Dr. Lord requested the rector to go forth from the sacristy, and ask the master of the Lodge whether any of the brethren present ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... bazaars—Hotel de Ville, rue d'Amsterdam, etc.—were the most amusing; really, one could get anything from a five-sou doll to a menagere (the little cooking-stove all the peasant women use in their cottages). There were armies of extras—white-aproned youths, who did their best for us. We explained to one of the superintendents what we wanted, and he gave us a very intelligent boy, who followed us about with an enormous basket, into which everything ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... became even more wretched. Such wretchedness Nekhludoff saw in a number of shoemakers that he saw working near the window of a basement; in the lean, pale, disheveled washerwomen ironing with bare hands before open windows from which soap-laden steam poured out; in two painters, aproned and bare-footed, who were covered with paint from temple to heel. In their sunburnt, sinewy, weak hands, bared above the elbows, they carried a bucket of paint and incessantly cursed each other. Their faces were wearied and angry. The same expression of weariness and anger ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... making her way through the outskirts of potato-barrels and flabby fish, found no one in the shop but the gory-aproned butcher who stood ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... suddenly like the furious driving Jehu. Her cyclonic joint smashing shook the rum power of the United States from apex to foundation-stone. The great American god Bacchus turned pale on his throne. Gambrinus and his thirty thousand white-aproned priests of debauchery and licentiousness trembled in every saloon and bagnio throughout the union. No whirlwind, tornado or simoon of the desert ever startled a nation as her volcanic career. From ocean ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... grapes, and was eating with his eye on a page of Bagehot when the door swung again and Phil piped a cheerful good-morning. She was an aproned young Phil and her face was flushed from recent proximity to the range. She described her entrance in lines she had fashioned for ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... for compromises and concessions. The two ladies wandered to where they saw a large sign of "Buffet" suspended in the air, entering a precinct reserved for little white-clothed tables, straw-covered chairs and long-aproned waiters. One of these functionaries approached them with eagerness and with a "Mesdames sont seules?" receiving in return from her ladyship the slightly snappish announcement "Non; nous sommes beaucoup!" ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... asleep, confident that the devil, friend of the brave, would awaken them on the following morning. He lived in white boats as silent and scrupulously clean as a Dutch home, whose captains were taking wife and children with them, and where white-aproned stewardesses took care of the galley and the cleaning of the floating hearthside, sharing the dangers of the ruddy and tranquil sailors exempt from the temptation that contact with women provokes. On Sundays, ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... as soon as the weather permitted, who was carefully escorted through my chamber by Mrs. Clayton to ascertain the repairs to be made—a fresh-looking, white-aproned Irish lad, I remember (for a human being was a novelty to me then), who found it necessary, in order to repaint the wood-work, to bear the sash away with him, leaving behind his tray of chisels and putty, and ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... was the charwoman of Brett Street. Victim of her marriage with a debauched joiner, she was oppressed by the needs of many infant children. Red-armed, and aproned in coarse sacking up to the arm-pits, she exhaled the anguish of the poor in a breath of soap-suds and rum, in the uproar of scrubbing, in the clatter of ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... safety of the inhabitants for the succeeding eight hours: the rest tramp onwards to their distant stations. The echoes of their iron heels have hardly died away, when there is a sudden and almost simultaneous eruption from every garden-gate on the terrace of clean-faced, neat-aproned, red-elbowed servant-girls, each and all armed with a jug or a brace of jugs, with a sprinkling of black bottles among them, and all bound to one or other of the public-houses which guard the terrace at either end. It is the hour of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... sturdy smocked men and slender boys in full blue-paint jackets, as of the equally silent and clayey girls and women that scrutinized him with earnestly squinting eyelids. The only creature in the room that seemed to evoke the slightest responsive flicker of intelligence was the black-robed, gray-aproned, ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... age and use, stood parallel to the right-hand wall, and behind this three men were sitting with mugs before them, eying the disputants with evident interest. To the left a large space was devoted to three or four bulky casks, and here an aproned drawer sat astride of a rush-bottomed chair, grinning delightedly and exchanging nods and winks from time to time with an impish, undersized lad who lay on his stomach on a wine-butt with his head ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... over hills of corned-beef hash, across shaking quagmires of veal glace, plunging into sloughs of slaw, until, haggard, weary, digestion shattered, complexion gone, he reaches the safe haven of roast beef, medium. Once there, he never again strays, although the pompadoured, white-aproned siren sing-songs in his ear the praises of Irish stew, ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... from the arched entrance to the inn. I looked up quickly. A too familiar figure was standing there watching me,—Lady Delahaye, trim, elegant, a trifle supercilious. By her side stood the innkeeper, white-aproned and obsequious. ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in her present situation this delicate bloom was less apparent. Beside her an old gentleman was drinking absinthe; behind her the dame de comptoir in the pink ribbons was calling "Alcibiade! Alcibiade!" to the long-aproned waiter. I explained to Miss Spencer that my companion had lately been her shipmate, and my brother-in-law came up and was introduced to her. But she looked at him as if she had never seen him before, and I remembered that he ...
— Four Meetings • Henry James
... of the hand.—"Nothing worth looking at twice. Don't give it a thought," he said. "I've been in tighter places." He clapped his hands and waited till he heard the cabin door open behind his back. "Steward, my pistols." The mulatto in slippers, aproned to the chin, glided through the cabin with unseeing eyes as though for him no one there had existed. . . .—"Is it my heart that aches so?" Mrs. Travers asked herself, contemplating Lingard's motionless figure. "How long will this sensation of dull pain last? Will ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... and then shut it again. She did not know what to say. The blue-aproned girl caught sight ...
— Honey-Sweet • Edna Turpin
... den, and made more vain noises there; and then to the stable. Finally, they streamed out into the orchard, and made stupid remarks about the kennels there; and at long last they went away, leaving the green-aproned men in undisputed possession, and free to throw furniture about, and pile it on carts in ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... A sadness oppressed me, not unmixed with guilt and remorse. An old Irish woman came to the market also with her pets to sell, a sow and five pigs, and took up a position next me. We condoled with each other; we bewailed the fate of our darlings together; we berated in chorus the white-aproned but bloodstained fraternity who prowled about us. When she went away for a moment I minded the pigs, and when I strolled about she minded my cow. How shy the innocent beast was of those carnal market men. How she would ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... in the same breath! Why, man, he is the well-known and general referee in all matters affecting the mysteries of Passage, Hazard, In and In, Penneeck, and Verquire, and what not—why, Beaujeu is King of the Card-pack, and Duke of the Dice- box—HE call a reckoning like a green-aproned, red-nosed son of the vulgar spigot! O, my dearest Nigel, what a word you have spoken, and of what a person! That you know him not, is your only apology for such blasphemy; and yet I scarce hold it adequate, for to have been a day ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... him to a nook near the chimney-corner and beckoned to an aproned boy who hung about with a tray under his arm. But before Viner could give an order, his companion touched his arm ...
— The Middle of Things • J. S. Fletcher
... stood and filled the place. His huge hands and his jolly face Were red. He had a mouth to quaff Pint after pint: a sounding laugh, But wheezy at the end, and oft His eyes bulged outwards and he coughed. Aproned he stood from chin to toe. The apron's vertical long flow Warped grandly outwards to display His hale, round belly hung midway, Whose apex was securely bound With apron-strings wrapped round and round. Outside, Miss Thompson, small and staid, Felt, as she always felt, afraid Of this ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... bare-elbowed on the ledge of her half-door, her hair in curl-papers, her face the pale unwholesome pinched oval of most London women of her class. Her bodice was pinned across her chest; she was coarse-aproned, new from the wash-tub or the grate. Not a sign upon her but told of her frowsy round. The stale air of foul lodgment was upon her. I found out indeed this much about her ostensible state, that she was the wife of a ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... of wind-driven smoke! Mine eyes gaze with longing on Kona; A fire-wreath glows aback of the district, And a robe of wonderful green 5 Lies the sea that has aproned my loins Off the point of Hana-malo. A dark burnished form is Hawaii, To one who stands on the mount— A hamper swung down from heaven, 10 A beautiful carven shape is the island— Thy mountains, thy splendor of herbage: Mauna-kea and Loa stand (in glory) apart, To him who looks from Maile-hahei; ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... William was guyed in a most merciless manner! The chief ornament on the principal table was a model of the Reichshaus in "Schwarzbrod," cheese and confectionery. The dome consisted of a Dutch cheese, the "Germania" on the top was represented by a smartly aproned chambermaid on horseback, the horse being led by a footman in imperial livery, while the whole was labeled "Der gipfel des geschmack,"—the acme of taste. Another item of the programme was a sort of automatic machine, which, when a gold medal was ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... and their dogs; and our inn at Grossetto overflowed with abundance of game. On the kitchen floor and in the court were heaps of larks, pheasants, quails, and beccafichi, at which a troop of scullion-boys constantly plucked, and from which the great, noble, beautiful, white-aproned cook forever fried, stewed, broiled, and roasted. We lived chiefly upon these generous birds during our sojourn, and found, when we attempted to vary our bill of fare, that the very genteel waiter attending us had few distinct ideas beyond ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... pour out his heart about the girls he knows and likes, and thrice unhappy he who through mistaken zeal on the part of misguided parents is compelled to keep his thoughts in his heart and brood upon his little aproned companions as upon a secret sin. Two things are thereby engendered, stealth and unhealth. If Fred escaped certain youthful pitfalls, it was because he was so repressed that he had learned to hide himself from himself, his thoughts from the ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... gone John Wesley wandered disconsolately back to his hotel and rested his elbows on the bar. The white-aproned attendant ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... an unmistakable honeymooning couple, there was no one in it. There was little traffic in the wide street beneath Spargo's windows; little passage of people to and fro on the sidewalks; here a countryman drove a lazy cow as lazily along; there a farmer in his light cart sat idly chatting with an aproned tradesman, who had come out of his shop to talk to him. Over everything lay the quiet of the sunlight of the summer afternoon, and through the open windows stole a faint, sweet scent of the new-mown hay lying in the meadows outside ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher
... practitioner would certainly bring down an avalanche of hat-boxes on the heads of the customers. On one side of the room there is a patent stove in which several irons were heating, not for torture, but for the improvement of hats. Several aproned attendants were bustling about, and one or two customers with bare heads were eyeing one another with an exaggerated air of haughty nonchalance, as who should say, "Observe, we do not wear white aprons. We do ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 18, 1914 • Various
... damaged little hut whose thatch almost hid it. It is a granite figure about thirty-six inches high above ground level. I could not find out whether its feet were covered by the earth. It is exactly like the other figure, with the hands over the belly, aproned and ornately tasseled on its left. It has armlets and a ruff-like ornament round its neck. The interesting part of the statuette is most decidedly its head, which had been knocked off and only insecurely replaced, when I first set eyes on it. The ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... Cupid shoots blindfolded—millionaires marry stenographers; wise professors woo white-aproned gum-chewers behind quick-lunch counters; schoolma'ams make big bad boys remain after school; lads with ladders steal lightly over lawns where Juliet waits in her trellissed window with her telescope packed; young ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... in the dog and its accomplishments as he had been in the after-glow. The woman of the chalet, red-faced and white-aproned, with sturdy arms akimbo, stood by smiling, while he put the animal through its tricks. "One can see there's not much on his mind if he can carry on that way," she said in patois to her daughter. "And what a ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... the old man on the head with her muff. Then she stopped a minute, looking at Newman. "Tell M. de Bellegarde, when he wants news of me, to come and get it from ME!" And she turned and departed, the white-aproned waiter, with a bow, holding the door wide open ...
— The American • Henry James
... comfortably supported a quiet country home, and one maid, and eventually have been stretched to afford the daughter and only child a college education or a trousseau as circumstances decreed. As it was, a little house on Broadway was maintained with every appearance of luxury, a capped-and-aproned maid backed before guests through the tiny hall; Connie's vivacity covered the long wait for the luncheons that an irate Chinese cook, whose wages were perpetually in arrears, served when it pleased him to do so. Mrs. Fox bought prizes for Connie's gay little card-parties ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... sanctity move among their fellow-creatures with a nostril-snuffing putrescence, and a foot-spurning filth, in short, with a conceited dignity that your titled * * * * * * * * or any other of your Scottish lordlings of seven centuries standing, display when they accidentally mix among the many-aproned sons of mechanical life. I remember, in my plough-boy days, I could not conceive it possible that a noble lord could be a fool, or a godly man could be a knave—How ignorant are plough-boys!—Nay, I have since discovered that a godly woman may be a *****!—But hold—Here's ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... swimming-lesson with much success, and would have achieved her dinner with composure, if white-aproned gentlemen had not effectually taken away her appetite by whisking bills-of-fare into her hands, and awaiting her orders with a fatherly interest, which induced them to congregate mysterious dishes before her, and blandly rectify her frequent mistakes. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... flutter in my heart. Another soul, another formed and unchangeable temperament, tumbled into the world! Whence? Whither?... As for the quality of majesty—yes, if silver trumpets had announced the advent, instead of a stout, aproned woman, the moment could not have been more majestic in its sadness. I say "sadness," which is the inevitable and sole effect of these eternal and ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... restaurant, on George-street, a large, painted, gilded, veneered, electro-plated place, full of mirrors and gas-fittings and white-clothed tables. It was not busy, the hour being somewhat late and the day Saturday, and so against the walls, on either side the long halls, were ranged sentinel rows of white-aproned, ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... Hinterschlag Gymnasium,' writes he, 'my evil days began. Well do I still remember the red sunny Whitsuntide morning, when, trotting full of hope by the side of Father Andreas, I entered the main street of the place, and saw its steeple-clock (then striking Eight) and Schuldthurm (Jail), and the aproned or disaproned Burghers moving-in to breakfast: a little dog, in mad terror, was rushing past; for some human imps had tied a tin-kettle to its tail; thus did the agonised creature, loud-jingling, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... please," said a white-aproned waiter, gliding forward to take Tom's leather coat and Mary's jacket of like material. The waiter ushered them into a room, in which at first there seemed to be no other diners. Then, from behind a screen which was pulled around a table in ...
— Tom Swift among the Fire Fighters - or, Battling with Flames from the Air • Victor Appleton
... glass. The scheme of colour, ranging from imperial purple through crimson and rose-pink to softest flesh tints, formed an harmonious setting to the rose-scarlet of Poppy's dress, with its froth of trailing frills and flounces, as she stood discoursing to a smart, black-gowned, white-aproned box-keeper. ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... the sound of the orchestra, blaring with forced lung the message of the ordinary camp life. Half a dozen small groups idled on the ground before the cook-houses. A few walked lazily about the stables, and two white-aproned cooks passed from cook-house to cook-house on the night preparations for the morning meal. Outwardly everything was ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... establishment, the white-aproned pot-boy with his shirt-sleeves arranged in a tight roll on each bare shoulder, was a mere hint of the possibility of physical force, thrown out as a matter of state and form. Exactly at the closing hour, all the guests who were left, filed ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... were sure of meeting Claude between four and five in the afternoon at the wholesale auction of the bullocks' lights. He was always there amidst the tripe dealers' carts backed up against the kerb-stones and the blue-bloused, white-aproned men who jostled him and deafened his ears by their loud bids. But he never felt their elbows; he stood in a sort of ecstatic trance before the huge hanging lights, and often told Cadine and Marjolin that there was no finer sight to be seen. The lights were of a soft rosy hue, gradually deepening ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... hundred people. The army of waiters and chamber-maids, of bellboys, and scullions and porters and laundry-folk, was arriving; the stalwart scrubbers were at work, the store-rooms were filled, the big kitchen shone with its burnished coppers, and an array of white-capped and aproned cooks stood in line under their chef; the telegraph operator was waiting at her desk, the drug clerk was arranging his bottles, the newspaper stand was furnished, the post-office was open for letters. It needed ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... amusements, not selfishly, but because of the appreciation of the travelling public. It is the fashion to decry labor-saving devices in the house, because they do away with that sign of pecuniary ability, the capped and aproned maid. The obvious saving of steps by the speaking-tube and telephone-call is frowned upon for the same reason. It is this attitude of society which stands in the way of the adoption of those mechanical helps which might do away with nearly all the drudgery ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... creature and the gingham aproned Eliza was unbelievable. There was but one explanation: She was the mistress of the house, Eliza the servant. And yet, even so, how strangely out-of-place, out-of-keeping she ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon |
