|
|
|
More "Spinster" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not very unusual type of spinster who is in a condition of retarded development (and you will find this kind of woman even on County Council's), is completely unconscious of the sexual element in herself and in human nature generally. Nay, though one went from the dead, he ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... panes. And the long wooden veranda that he had invoked did not unify the trinity. But one didn't want it to. The wrongness had a character all its own. The wrongness was right—at any rate after Mary had hit on it for William. As a spinster, she would, I think, have been happiest in a trim modern villa. But it was a belief of hers that she had married a man of strange genius. She had married him for himself, not for his genius; but this added grace in him was a thing to be reckoned with, ever ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... child welfare and education, should be expanded at whatever cost into something truly national and all embracing. The ancient grudging selfishness that would not feed other people's children should be cast out. In the war time the wealthy bachelor and the spinster of advancing years took it for granted that other people's children should fight for them. The obligation must ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... first great assertion that the humdrum life of modern civilisation is a disguise as tawdry and deceptive as the costume of a 'bal masque.' She showed that abysses may exist inside a governess and eternities inside a manufacturer; her heroine is the commonplace spinster, with the dress of merino and the soul of flame. It is significant to notice that Charlotte Bronte, following consciously or unconsciously the great trend of her genius, was the first to take away from ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... in Geneva. If you had ever travelled through Europe with a charming spinster who never sat down at a Continental table d'hote without being asked by an American vis-a-vis whether she were one of the P.'s of Salem, Massachusetts, you would understand why I call my friend Salemina. She doesn't mind it. She knows that I am ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... and girls were established in Massachusetts, and before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth there was at least one public school for both sexes in Virginia. But for the most part the girls of early New England appear to have gone to the "dame's school," taught by some spinster or poverty-stricken widow. We may again turn to Sewall's Diary for bits of evidence concerning the schooling in the seventeenth century: "Tuesday, Oct. 16, 1688. Little Hanah going to School in the morn, being enter'd a little within the Schoolhouse Lane, is ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... liked her countenance, Adele," said the spinster, in her solemn manner; "and I am rejoiced that you will not be under her ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... too; and found suited to her the adjective "motherly." This for the same reason which moved new acquaintances instinctively to address her as "Mrs." For Sue Milo, at forty-five, bore none of the marks of the so-called typical spinster. ...
— Apron-Strings • Eleanor Gates
... well, my dear boy. But I can assure you that that sort of thing might touch the heart of an elderly spinster, and she might adopt you, and then there would be no need for you to be a ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... and a "You old beast! come on," started the animal on its travels. Finally, when the creature stopped to deliberate upon the propriety of going forward at all, the vials of the wrath of the Japanese spinster exploded, and I was tempted to believe her affections had been blighted. But when we met any of her friends on the road, or passed the wayside shops or farm-houses, the scolder of horses was the lady who wished all Ohaio ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... creature!" whispered Miss Jemima Parkinson, an interesting spinster of thirty-six, to Miss Ellen Broadhurst, who was only thirty-four; and Miss Ellen ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... was unmarried by every implication of her being, as Henry James would say: but Samantha Ann Ripley was a spinster purely by accident. She had seldom been exposed to the witcheries of children, or she would have known long before this that, so far as she was personally concerned, they would always prove irresistible. She marched into the kitchen ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... by a very young curate, and an elderly spinster with mittens and many ailments, the symptoms of which she lucidly specified in a refined undertone to any lady who would listen; with gentlemen, however, she was most discreet, except with the curate, who complained that his cloth was no protection. Finally Hilary came in and ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... ditched at the end, owing to a certain grim old dame—to wit, Miss Elizabeth Carr of the Upper Glen—who wouldn't rein her horse out to let us pass, honk as we might. Father was quite furious; but in my heart I believe I sympathized with Miss Elizabeth. If I had been a spinster lady, driving along behind my own old nag, in maiden meditation fancy free, I wouldn't have lifted a rein when an obstreperous car hooted blatantly behind me. I should just have sat up as dourly as she did and said 'Take the ditch if you ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... with a tearful and blushing cheek held up to the good spinster's, "kiss me, won't you?—you ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... wind, and the "something" would doubtless bear fruit; for this elderly spinster aunt, with a mania for psychical research, had brains as well as will power, and by hook or by crook she usually managed to accomplish her ends. The revelation was made soon after tea, when she sidled close up to him as they paced slowly along the ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... was a tall, grim, angular spinster who looked like the last person in the world to whom a love affair might be confided. But never were appearances more deceptive than in this case. Behind her unprepossessing exterior Miss Susan had a warm, sympathetic heart filled to the brim with kindly affection ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the trinkets. In a secret drawer there was a certificate of marriage between Percival Nowell, bachelor, gentleman, and Lucy Geoffry, spinster, at St. Pancras Church, London. The most interesting contents of the jewel-case consisted of a small packet of letters written by Percival Nowell to Lucy ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... bell of St. Cow's began ringing for Ritualistic morning-service, with a sound as of some incontinently rambling dun spinster of the lacteal herd—now near at hand in cracked dissonance, as the wind blows hither; now afar, in tinkling distance, as the wind blows hence—MONTGOMERY PENDRAGON was several miles away from Bumsteadville upon his walking-match, with head already bumped like a pineapple, and face ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870 • Various
... the man with the pot of beer. For instance, it was logical to allow some degree of distinction between beer and tea, on the ground that a man may be moved by excess of beer to throw the pot at somebody's head. And it may be said that the spinster is seldom moved by excess of tea to throw the tea-pot at anybody's head. But the whole ground of argument is now changed. For people do not consider what the drunkard does to others by throwing the pot, but what he does to himself by drinking the beer. The ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... Lady Laura Bethell, spinster, had just returned to her house in Queen's Gate, with her dearest friend, Mrs. Stapleton, for a few days of psychical orgy. It was in her house, as much as in any in London, that the modern prophets were to be met with—severe-looking ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... Isocrates took to write his Panegyric, "Because, says the Critick, it is a pitiful Comparison of Alexander the Great with a Schoolmaster." What then wou'd he have said of Sir Richard's Metaphorical Comparison of the CREATOR Himself, to a Spinster, and a Weaver? The very Beasts of Mr. Milton, who kept Moses in his Eye, carry Infinitely more Majesty, than the Skies ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill
... like the elderly spinster lady when confronted with the corporal in the Life Guards ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... were employed, according to the formula, "in virtue of these and subsequent engagements," and among the "subsequent engagements" you are kind enough to reckon one between Mademoiselle Berthe Lorinet, spinster, of no occupation, and M. Fabien Mouillard, lawyer. "Fabien Mouillard, lawyer"—that I may perhaps endure, but "Fabien Mouillard, son-in-law of Lorinet," never! One pays too dear for these rich wives. Mademoiselle Berthe is half a foot taller ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... to live in peace with all men, and how I resent interference in the management of my children! If the time ever comes that I live, a spinster of a certain age, in the family of an elder brother, what a model of forbearance, charity, and sisterly loving-kindness I ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... making some inquiries about you,' said Mr Witherden, 'little thinking that I should find you under such circumstances as those which have brought us together. You are the nephew of Rebecca Swiveller, spinster, deceased, of Cheselbourne ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... spinning jenny, a mob and a flight from Lancashire, a wrecked machine and a sacked house! To Crompton, inventing the spinning-mule (which, in simulating, surpassed the delicate pulling motion of the spinster's arm)—to Crompton, poverty so complete that the mule, patient bearer of innumerable fortunes to investors, was surrendered to them unpatented, while its maker retired to his "Hall-in-the-Wood" and his ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... I am, established at Blackwater Park, "the ancient and interesting seat" (as the county history obligingly informs me) "of Sir Percival Glyde, Bart.," and the future abiding-place (as I may now venture to add on my account) of plain Marian Halcombe, spinster, now settled in a snug little sitting-room, with a cup of tea by her side, and all her earthly possessions ranged round her in three ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... of shock from a spinster-appearing female sunning herself hard by and angularly in the sand in a swimming suit monstrously unbeautiful, Lee Barton was aware of an involuntary and almost perceptible stiffening on the part of ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... trouble, and much expense. The woman with the eight children had been moved into a spacious new cottage made out of two old ones; the old granny alone in a house now too big for her, had been induced to take in a prim little spinster, the daughter of a small grocer just deceased; and the father of the deficient girl, for whom Miss Dempsey had made herself responsible, received Winnington with a lightening of his tired eyes, and taking him out of earshot of Delia, told him how Bessie "had got through her trouble," ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... she was near forty; a thin, hard-featured spinster, dwelling alone with her mother the Lady Balgarnock. Her two younger sisters had married early—the one to Captain Luce, of Dunragit in Wigtownshire, the other to a Mr. Forbes, of whom I know nothing save that his house was in Edinburgh: and as they had no great love for Miss Catherine, so ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of a practical joke in our younger days, and I did not wish to interpose between him and the venerable spinster. I thought that he would not do anything really ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... In one neatly gloved hand her silk skirt was held primly; in the other she carried a little white silk flag, on which the staring gold letters were lost in the rippling folds. With her eyes on the sky and her feet in the dust, she marched, a prim, ladylike figure, an inspired spinster, oblivious alike of the hooting small boys and the half-compassionate, ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... an' some less," remarked Sarah Jane, as ill-favored a spinster as ever the sun shone on; "generally it means so much grub ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund
... game, and we must go on singing "Tipperary," and saying what fun it is. A young friend of mine at home gave me a pamphlet (price 2d.) written by a spinster friend of hers who had never left England, proving what a good thing this war was for us all. When I said I saw another aspect of it, the kind, soothing suggestion was that I must ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... sorry," cried Bea, running to pick up the things, and return them to the startled and scarlet-faced spinster. "I don't know why Kittie shut ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... the traditional pleasantry to chaff him as an inveterate bachelor, at whom all the young ladies of the place were setting their virginal caps. These jests he received very much as Tim Linkinwater received the allusions of Mr. Cheeryble to the "uncommonly handsome spinster," rather encouraging them as tributes to the fact that, though now advanced in years, he was well preserved, and, as most ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... without a groan the pictured Madonna on every wall. Carnival comes, and completes the wreck of the proprieties. The girls secure their window and pelt their black-bearded Professor in the street below without dread of a scolding on the "convenances." The impassive spinster whose voice never rises at home above the most polite whisper screams with delight at the first sugarplum that hits her, and furtively supplies her nieces with ammunition to carry on the war. "It is such fun, isn't it, papa?" shout the boys as they lean breathless over the balcony, ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... Then the spinster ladies of his old parish of Thorpington Parva gave him a Ford car, and with this he scoured back areas for provisions and threaded his tin buggy in and out of columns of dusty infantry and clattering ammunition limbers, spectacles gleaming, cap slightly awry, while his batman (a wag) perched ...
— Punch, Volume 153, July 11, 1917 - Or the London Charivari. • Various
... pity, old Lady Belstone whispered to her spinster sister, that John was not a Crewys, for he had a remarkably fine head, and had he been but a little taller and slimmer, would have been a ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... a very strict law intended to eliminate the spinster from the social horizon. It is a law born of craft and inspired by foresight. The daughters of a household must be married off in the order of their nativity. The younger sister dare not contemplate matrimony until the elder sister has been led to the altar. It is impossible ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... no blear-eyed spinster mooning over the trumpery of a heyday that is gone, but a Miss Mischief offering her dainty fingers to you before the kiss of your grandfather's lips is yet dry on them. The damask petticoat, the powdered wig, and the coquettish little patch by her ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... to marry. I don't know as I do at my time of life," responded the spinster. "I rather guess my day for chances ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... sly observation of one of the sisterhood. At a well-known tea-table in a country town in Forfarshire, the events of the day, grave and gay, had been fully discussed by the assembled sisterhood. The occasion was improved by an elderly spinster, as follows:—"Weel, weel, sirs, these are solemn events—death and marriage—but ye ken they're what we must a' come till." "Eh, Miss Jeany! ye have been lang spared," was the arch reply of a ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... herself, taken before the change, and conceives the idea that what she was once must still exist somewhere. The phantasy is played upon by impostors, who undertake to materialize the fancied creature and introduce her as the soul-sister of the credulous spinster. The instrument of the audacious fraud becomes conscience stricken and reveals it.—Edward Bellamy, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... practical matron grew more and more fond of her. The girl came to be considered, and almost to consider herself, one of the family. The "family" consisted of Mrs. Wyeth, Mary, Miss Pease, the other "paying guest," and Maggie, the maid, and Nora, the cook. Miss Pease was an elderly spinster without near relatives, possessed of an income and a love of travel which she gratified by occasional European trips. She and her closest friend, Mrs. Wyeth, disagreed on many subjects, but they united ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... moment is engaged in conversation with little Miss Haight immediately behind him. Immediately there is a terrific uproar, in which through the delighted yells of the crowd, the crashing of the overturned chairs, and the general confusion could be heard the shrieks of the little spinster and weird Scotch oaths from McTavish. After the noise had somewhat subsided and when the confusion had been reduced to a semblance of order, McTavish was discovered with his hand upon the collar of the dazed parson who in turn held the obese Teuton in a firm and wrathful grip, at which ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... pleasantest rooms of which, to me, were the small apartment on the ground floor, lined with books from floor to ceiling, and my own peculiar lodging in the upper regions, which, thanks to my mother's kindness and taste, was as pretty a bower of elegant comfort as any young spinster need have desired. There I chiefly spent my time, pursuing my favorite occupations, or in the society of my own especial friends: my dear H—— S——, when she was in London; Mrs. Jameson, who often climbed thither for an hour's pleasant discussion of her book on Shakespeare; and a lady with ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... do as he thinks best about that." The spinster shut her lips tight and walked from ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... spoke of her, it might lead in future to embarrassing questions; if she did not speak of her, Selina was liable to learn of Sylvia from some other source; for no way had yet been discovered of permanently concealing anything from Miss Lane, and that spinster, so fond of jumping at conclusions that she frequently overleaped them, would be sure to decide that Miss Martha was ashamed of ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... sympathetic, fond of children and animals, wholesome and normal in your habits, without crankiness, and popular with both sexes. While there are many wives and widows possessed of these qualities, there seems to be some handicap to the spinster in the race of life who undertakes to arrive at middle age with all the womanly attributes. Almost invariably she drops some of them by the wayside. She becomes overorderly and fussy—so that association with her for any length of time is insupportable—or careless and indifferent. ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... company assembled was an odd one, although she lived too far away to appreciate the fact that none of the guests, with the possible exception of Rangely, were exactly what she would have been asked to dine with at home. A country member, a self- made vulgarian, an antiquated spinster, and a literateur who, after all, was received rather upon sufferance into such exclusive houses as he entered at all, made up a group of which Miss Merrivale, with feminine instinct, felt the inferiority, despite the fact that ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... of the Indian was over now, and the day of the farmer who succeeded him was over, too. The crash of the loom and the whir of the spinning-wheel were heard no longer, but Amanda Dalton, spinster,—descendant of the original Tristram Dalton, to whom the claim belonged,—sat on alone in her house, and not far away sat Caleb Kimball, sole living heir of the original Caleb, himself a Dalton Righter, and contemporary ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... during the first six months which followed the revolution of July by Mademoiselle Marie-Jeanne-Brigitte Thuillier, a spinster of full age, stands about the middle of the rue Saint-Dominique d'Enfer, to the right as you enter by the rue d'Enfer, so that the main building occupied by Monsieur Thuillier ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... are more intensely devoted to the pursuit of gain. An adventurer, he had but one purpose in view when he settled in the United States and commenced teaching—to find an heiress. After a fruitless search among his young pupils of the fair sex, he finally fascinated and married a spinster. Her savings are nightly dwindling ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... willing to," added Sister Maria Cartridge, a spinster still possessing faith, hope, and charity, notwithstanding she had been on the waiting list a ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... ran upstairs, Barbara found Caleb's tiny spinster sister, in negligee and boudoir cap, sitting cross-legged like a girl in the middle of the floor. There was an orderly litter of papers around her, and a confusion of clothes; and Barbara hesitated on the threshold until Miss Sarah ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... probably wanted by the American police was a frightful misfortune. Women had no business to travel alone. It was all very well when they toured in parties of eight or ten; but for a charming young woman like Elsa, attended by a spinster companion who doubtless dared not offer advice, it was decidedly wrong. And thereupon he determined that her trip to Yokohama should find ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... lodgings to which I was limited by my narrow income, interrupted frequently by invasions on various pretexts of the ill-fed chambermaid, who insisted on telling me her woes, or by my neighbor from the next room, the good little spinster, who always knocked to ask if she might heat a flat-iron at my grate when I was in the midst of a bit of minute description. She would sit down, too, would poor withered Miss Jane, in my little rocking-chair to wait while the ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... Forest Ranger, "that is a well known, game old elderly spinster lady commonly called the Moon; and that other on the branch chittering swear words is nothing in the world but a Douglas squirrel hunting—I think he is really hunting—a flea to mix in his ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... be observed in studying these figures, that farmers' wives and children, working at home, are not reported as gainfully occupied. But a widow or a spinster owner, if herself acting as the enterpriser, is reported as "occupied" in agriculture. The increasing number of such cases in the past generation in part explains the growing number and percentage ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... been living all these years, if you do not know that the very first thing a woman wants to do when she has made a good match is to make ones for all her spinster friends. Jane does not mean any harm. She does it ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... a female, Katydid I know it by the trill That quivers through thy piercing notes, So petulant and shrill; I think there is a knot of you Beneath the hollow tree,— A knot of spinster Katydids,—- ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... season he'd growed well-t'-do: a drive in the teeth o' hell, in season—if hell's made o' wind an' sea, as I'm inclined t' think—an' the ease of a bachelor man, between whiles, in his cottage at Rickity Tickle, where he lived all alone like a spick-an'-span spinster. 'Twas not o' the sea he was scared. 'Twas o' want in an unkind world; an' t'was jus' that an' no more that drove un t' hard sailin' an' contempt o' death—sheer fear o' want in the wolf's world that he'd made this world out t' be in ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... dull work, of course, for such a young girl to live with an old spinster and go to a village school. Her books bore testimony to this; for there was a look of sadness in the faces she drew, and a sense of weariness and longing for some imaginary conditions of blessedness or other, which began to be painful. She might have gone through this flowering ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... by her grayish hair being drawn up tightly and rolled into a "bun" on the very top of the head. She was the personification of neatness, if such be the word to characterize the prim stiffness of a flat-figured, elderly spinster. She wore large, square-toed, common-sense shoes, with low heels capped with rubber cushions, which, as I was shortly to discover, had earned for the lady the sobriquet of "Old Gum Heels." What her real name was I never found out. Nobody knew. She was the most hated of ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... only!" And instantly the thought came that Marguerite and her mother might be living there. One more lump of bread, a final gulp of coffee, a short search for the waiter's check, and he stands at the cashieress's desk. She makes change without looking at him or ceasing to tell a small hunchbacked spinster standing by about somebody's ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... Lowe, and several other members of the party. Miss Hoyle had begged them to buy a few yards of anything with which she might trim a large shady rush hat she had brought with her, so the girls asked the postmistress to show them some white ribbon. That elderly spinster, having first, with considerable ingenuity, satisfied her curiosity as to the object for which they required it, commenced a vigorous hunt among the miscellaneous collection of boxes ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... darling boy!—Aunt Merry—Aunt Merry! Come—come quick! He is here." But Aunt Merry at the head of the stairs had heard the voice, and Dick, tearing himself ungallantly from the embrace of beauty, was up the stairs in four leaps and in the arms of the fainting spinster. ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... house is plain now. It was once the residence of a country squire, whose family, probably dwindling down to mere spinster-hood, got merged in the more territorial name of Donnithorne. It was once the Hall; it is now the Hall Farm. Like the life in some coast town that was once a watering-place, and is now a port, where the genteel ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... that until you supplied this information I was feeling profoundly dubious about poor old Gussie's chances of inducing any spinster of any parish to join him in the saunter down the aisle. You will agree with me that he is not ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... the spinster, stoutly. "It's of no use looking at me in that way; if every hair of his head was hung with diamonds, I wouldn't have him. It's no use asking me, I'm a sot cretur where I am ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... the damp atmosphere and the clouds of mosquitos, to produce a sigh for home and its joys. If any one had hummed "Sweet Home" in his ears, it would have brought the tears to his eyes. He thought of everything connected with his hallowed home: of the good-natured spinster who was his housekeeper, and of the ten-acre lots upon his farm; of the red steers and the gray mare; of the shaggy watch-dog and the tabby-cat; of home in all its minutiae. Its familiar scenes visited him with a vividness which added ten-fold to their influence. ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... I say that I'll never forget what you've done for me and mine," were the parting words of the old spinster, as she ...
— Fred Fenton on the Crew - or, The Young Oarsmen of Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... And with a firm, unwavering pen, in his own particularly distinct and characteristic caligraphy, he disposed of everything of which he died possessed "absolutely and without any conditions whatsoever" to Mary Deane, spinster, at present residing in Weircombe, Somerset, adding the hope that she would, if she saw fit to do so, carry out certain requests of his, the testator's, as conveyed privately to her in a letter accompanying ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... genial Comic Paper man upon FLORA did not, indeed, pass away, until she and Miss CAROWTHERS were in their appointed quarters under the roof of Mrs. SKAMMERHORN, whither they went immediately upon the arrival of the elder spinster from Bumsteadville. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 29, October 15, 1870 • Various
... disappointed; and that as some well-informed Benedick of long experience may after supper advise the bachelor to find the way to woman's heart—vice versa, some deep-feeling wife or widow, by "pity moven," may, perhaps, after supper advise the spinster the other way, which, in public, is an ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... which, however, was a work of time, and not yet a quarter accomplished. The place had been a fowl-house, and, at the bottom of the door, there was a small hatch for the ingress and egress of these bipeds, the original invention of some thrifty spinster, to prevent the maids from stealing eggs. But this hatch was closed, or Snarleyyow would have escaped through it. Smallbones took up his quarters in another outhouse, that he might not be observed, ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... harsh-featured spinster, who eked out a precarious living by teaching music. Ethel knew her slightly, as a gaunt woman who usually toiled up the stairs with a sort of scornful weariness of ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... from Bernardine's eyes and sobs were trembling on the tender lips, she could restrain her feelings no longer, and, catching up the thin, shriveled-up figure of the dear little old spinster in her arms, she strained her to her ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... She is thin, thirty, colourless, bosomless. I should say she was passionless—a predestined spinster. She has never drunk hot tea or lived in the sun or laughed a hearty laugh. I remember once, at my wit's end for talk, telling her the old story of Theodore Hook accosting a pompous stranger on the street with the polite request that he might know whether he was anybody in particular. ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... guess the power of persuasion, family pressure, all the converging traditional influences he had so often ridiculed, yet, as she knew, had never completely thrown off.... Yes, those quiet invisible women at Altringham-his uncle's widow, his mother, the spinster sisters—it was not impossible that, with tact and patience—and the stupidest women could be tactful and patient on such occasions—they might eventually persuade him that it was his duty, they might put just the ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... Gentleman, with light prominent eyes and a crest of grizzled auburn hair, in the wake of an imposing Matron in ruby velvet: they are followed by an elderly Spinster in black and silver, who rattles ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 28, 1893 • Various
... and masculine acquirements in the fair sex;—we usually consider a certain degree of weakness, both of mind and body, as friendly to female grace. I am not absolutely of this opinion; yet I do not see the advantage of supernatural force, either of body or mind, to female excellence. Hercules-Spinster found his strength rather an incumbrance ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... have twelve. But talk is cheap. The modern woman who's had even half that number has pretty well given up her life to her family. It's remarkable, by the way, the silent and fathomless pity I've come to have for childless women. The thought of a fat spinster fussing over a French poodle or a faded blond forlornly mothering a Pekinese chow gives me a feeling that is at ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... badly mixed up. The shoes of a portly red faced man whose berth was in the forward end of the car, I placed by the berth of a tall and slim western yankee at the other end of the car, while a number 7 and a number 9 shoe were placed decorously by the berth of a sour spinster from New York. This naturally caused a good sized rumpus the next morning. And sundry blessings were heaped on the head of yours truly. Nearly all the passengers were mad and the tips were conspicuous by their absence. That made me mad and thoroughly disgusted ...
— The Life and Adventures of Nat Love - Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick" • Nat Love
... and worthy of imitation in all intricate cases. As I have a fund of justice at the bottom of my conscience, which will not permit me to exact from others more than I would perform myself, I do hereby certify that I have this day addressed a letter to my well-beloved sister Isabella Tyler, spinster, in which letter I do desire for her all manner of blessings, spiritual and temporal; that she may speedily obtain a husband six feet high, if it so pleases her, with ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... melancholy impression on you, what then would all his others? Leslie Stephen says his Humour is heavy (Qy is not his Tragedy?), and wonders how Miss Austen could admire him as it appears she did; and you discern a relation between her and him. I find plenty of grave humour in this Book: in the Spinster, the Bachelor, the Widow, etc. All which I pointed out (in the still-born) to L. S. . . . He says too that Crabbe is 'incapable of Epigram,' which also you do not agree in; Epigrams more of Humour than Wit; sometimes only hinted, as in those two ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... Columbine she had become to all who knew her. Her mother dying when she was only three, Columbine had been left to the sole care of her wastrel father. And he, then a skipper of a small cargo steamer plying across the North Sea, had placed her in the charge of a spinster aunt who kept an infants' school in a little Kentish village near the coast. Here, up to the age of seventeen, Columbine had lived and been educated; but the old schoolmistress had worn out at last, and on her death-bed had sent for Mrs. Peck, as being the girl's only remaining ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... play better than work, wandering in the meadows and lanes better than the spinning-wheel and distaff. The mother was heartily vexed at this, for in those days no lassie had any chance of a good husband unless she was an industrious spinster. So she coaxed, threatened, even beat her daughter, but all to no purpose; the girl remained what her mother called ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... devout abhorrence, mingled with awe, for this ancient spinster. He told me the other day, in a whisper, that she was a cursed brimstone—in fact, he added another epithet, which I would not repeat for the world. I have remarked, however, that he is always extremely civil to ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... renderings of plays by himself and his fellow-actors at her palaces on the banks of the Thames. When Shakespeare was penning his new play of A Midsummer Night's Dream next year, he could not forbear to make a passing obeisance of gallantry (in that vein for which the old spinster queen was always thirsting) to "a fair vestal throned by the West," who passed her life "in ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... you think, Luke?" asked his mother, after the spinster had gone. "Do you think the box we have ...
— Struggling Upward - or Luke Larkin's Luck • Horatio Alger
... step upon the stairs abruptly, and turned, with a look of fierce surprise upon her lean, white-headed lord, arresting thereby the upward march of Corfe Crutchleigh, Esq., the hope of his house, who was pulling on his gloves, with his eldest spinster ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... place Parkish, as was at one time the prevailing phrase, has not induced the owners to pull down the venerable and sheltering appendages with which their wiser fathers had screened their mansion, and to lay the whole open to the keen north-east; much after the fashion of a spinster of fifty, who chills herself to gratify the public by an exposure of her thin red elbows, and shrivelled ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... I'm sure," returned Cope in a carefully generalized tone of suavity. It was successful with the spinster in the side room above, but it was no tone to use with a ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... "and Russell's Wagon 's another nasty thing to hit in the dark. We're on the main road, you know." Before refixing the lamp beside him, he held it up for a good stare at me, and grinned. "Well, you're a nice guest for a spinster at this hour, I must say! But there's no ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... there was a great flow of tea-table hospitality in the village, and my friends and their friends used to be asked out, by respective parents and by more than one amiable spinster, to faint little entertainments where those sang who were ambitious to sing, and where all played post and forfeits after a rich tea. My Father was constantly exercised in mind as to whether I should or should not accept these glittering invitations. ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... do-out,' if two or three troublesome children have to be housed and fed during the critical days after an operation on father or mother, do I look for assistance from 'the cleanest woman in the street?' Alas, no; whether she be wife, widow, or spinster, I pass her by, careful not to tread on her pavement, much less her doorstep, and seek the happy-go-lucky person whose own premises would be better for more water and less grease, but from whose presence neither husband nor ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... or form matrimonial connections, are ever on the alert for something or somebody better than themselves; and under such circumstances, naturally enough, Miss Alice Somebody—though a pretty girl—talented, as the world goes, highly educated, too, as many hundreds beside her, was still a spinster at twenty-three. The fact was, Mrs. Somebody was a woman of experience in the world—indeed, a dozen years' experience in life at Washington, had given her very definite ideas of expediency and diplomacy; and hence, as the means were cut off to live in their usual style and expensiveness—Mrs. ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... her spinster daughter, Robina, lived in a bit of a house on the edge of the pine wood that sheltered our presbytery from the east winds; they were consequently our nearest neighbors with the exception of Willy and Bell. They possessed a cow and a few hens, ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... Fielding, she far surpassed those pioneers in the exquisite and easy verisimilitude of her art. Nay, we can go further and say that nobody has reproduced life with a more faithful accuracy, that yet was not photography because it gave the pleasure proper to art, than this same Jane Austen, spinster, well-born and well-bred: in her own phrase, an "elegant female" of the English past. Scott's famous remark can not be too often quoted: "That young lady had a talent for describing the movements and feelings of characters of ordinary life, which ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... perceive! How would the prudent father grieve, That all th' Athenians had not skill Enough to understand his will!" Then at their joint request he solved That error, which had all involved. "The gardens, house, and wine vaults too, Give to the spinster as her due; The clothes, the jewels, and such ware, Be all the tippling lady's share; The fields, the barns, and flocks of sheep, Give the gay courtesan to keep. Not one will bear the very touch Of things that thwart their tastes so much; The slut to fill her cellar straight Her ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... a fancy store, kept by two prim but pleasant spinster sisters. Besides newspapers, stationery, thread and needles, and so forth, they kept a stock of toys, candies, and pickled limes, which insured them a run of custom among the young folk, who always spoke of them as the Little Women. Not to disappoint the confidence placed in them by ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... compels me to add, with so many noises of such excruciating kinds that I followed Ulysses' well-known plan and then tried to find quiet for my siesta in the back spare-room. The worst of this house is that it really has no back—it has various fronts, like the war. The spinster next door but one has a parrot—a cynical, tired parrot, but still fond of the sound of his own voice. The lady across the street is raising Pekinese puppies, who apparently bitterly regret being born outside ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... a description of the Isle of Refuge, where Lemminkainen tarries three whole years with the sea-maidens, who bid him a tender farewell when he sails away again. He has, however, proved neglectful toward one of them, a spinster, who curses him, vowing he will suffer many things in return for his neglect. True to her prediction, he encounters many dangers on the homeward journey, and finds his house reduced to ashes and his parents ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... however wealthy, so he were of low condition, seemed to her worthy to have a gentlewoman to wife; and seeing that for all his wealth he was fit for nothing better than to devise a blend, set up a warp, or higgle about yarn with a spinster, she determined to dispense with his embraces, save so far as she might find it impossible to refuse them; and to find her satisfaction elsewhere with one that seemed to her more meet to afford it than her artificer ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... of Alizon Deuice, of the Forrest of Pendle, in the County of Lancaster Spinster, taken at Reade in the said Countie of Lancaster, the xiij. day of March, Anno Regni Jacobi Angliae, &c. Nono: ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... to consider the matter, whenever the Duke, or other class of nobleman, should propose to her. At present no sign of him had appeared above the horizon. Her own idea was that, if she lived long enough, she would become a spinster. Unless someone took pity on her when she was old and decrepit and ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... town. John Eyrick or Heyricke—he spelled his name recklessly—had five sons, the second of which sought a career in London, where he became a goldsmith, and in December, 1582, married Julian Stone, spinster, of Bedfordshire, a sister to Anne, Lady Soame, the wife of Sir Stephen Soame. One of the many children of this marriage was ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... in her turn interrupted by Cornelia Blair. Cornelia was a spinster with more freedom than most human beings ever attain, her father having worked himself to death to leave her well provided for. "The whole fault is the social system," she declared. "Because of it men have been able to take the really interesting work of the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... came back. He found me reading. He lighted his pipe and pretended to read too. I shall never forget that my book was "Anne Judge, Spinster," while his was a volume of "Blackwood." Every five minutes his pipe went out, and sometimes the book lay neglected on his knee as he stared at the fire. Then he would go out for five minutes and come back again. It was late now, and I felt that I should like to go to my bedroom and lock myself ...
— My Lady Nicotine - A Study in Smoke • J. M. Barrie
... and Steve spin around the room was a sight to bring a smile to the lips of the crustiest bachelor or saddest spinster, for happy lovers are always a pleasing spectacle, and two such merry little grigs as these ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... Anne, was married soon after Frederick's coming to England. Up to the age of twenty-four she had remained unmarried, a long time for a princess to continue a spinster. Many years before, she had had a good chance of marrying Louis the Fifteenth {41} of France. George was anxious for the marriage; the Duc de Bourbon, then minister to Louis, had originated the idea; Anne was only sixteen years old, and would no doubt have offered no objection. ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... preamble was finished, and the unincumbered half of Carter Hall had been bequeathed to "my ever valued aunt Ann Carter, spinster," and he had reached a new paragraph beginning with, "All bonds, stocks, and shares, whether founders', preferred, or common, of the corporation known as the Cartersville and Warrentown Air Line Railroad, particularly the ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Anna Warrington, spinster-aunt of Richard. She occupied the other half of the Bennington pew. Until half a dozen years ago, when her boy had come into his own, she had known but little save poverty and disillusion; and ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... To which the good spinster answered,—"You have never neglected him, Sara; to that I am ready to bear witness. If God has seemed to bereave you, it is because he sees it is best; meanwhile, take comfort in this: you have been tenderer than many ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... of relief that Sara, in obedience to the warning raucously intoned by a hurrying porter, vacated her seat in the railway compartment in which she had travelled from Fallowdene. Her companions on the journey had been an elderly spinster and her maid, and as the former had insisted upon the exclusion of every breath of outside air, Sara felt half-suffocated by the time they ran into Oldhampton Junction. The Monkshaven train was already standing in the station, ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... restrains it. They join in the general laugh however, for it can be nothing serious where his friends make merry with it. When he retires from view, his health is drank with three times three. Di, who seemed to take pleasure in annoying the spinster, said she had a great mind not to join in that toast, for he was a loose fellow, otherwise he would have rent his heart and not his garments. It is a pity a clever girl like her will let her tongue run that way, for it leads them to say things they ought not. Wit in a woman ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... dream she marries a vicar, foretells that she will fail to awake reciprocal affection in the man she desires, and will live a spinster, or marry ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... the sun in heaven 's a fact. God A'mighty's Self couldn't undo it wi'out some violent invention; an' for that matter I doan't see tu clear how even Him be gwaine to magic a married woman into a spinster again; any more than He could turn a spinster into a married woman, onless some ordinary human man came forrard. You must faace it braave an' strong. But that imp o' Satan—that damn Blanchard bwoy! Theer! I caan't say what I think 'bout him. Arter all that's ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... author tells of an English spinster who said, as she watched a great actress writhing about the floor ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... which I could assure Mr. Taylor "sized up" very well with the letters written in my part of the United States. And it was signed, "Your very sincere spinster, ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... only memento of the aged spinster. In the grave-yard is a simple monument of gray marble, which gratitude and affection have erected to her memory. Instead of the willow, with weeping branches, the usual badge of grief—a wheel carved in bas relief perpetuates the remembrance of her life-long occupation. Below this ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... articles of attire were obtained from Aunt Anne, without a word of speech on the part of that pale spinster. The deferential hostility between the two women acknowledged an intervening chasm. Aunt Anne produced a bundle, and placed the hat on it, upon which she had neatly pinned a tract, "The Drunkard's Awakening!" Mrs. Boulby glanced her eye in wrath across this superscription, thinking ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... advanced that the finishing stroke only is wanting. Applied to a man who is courting a widow or spinster already in possession of ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... under a veil of modesty, a spinster under a cloak of cynicism, a wife under a mantle of tact, and a widow under a cloud of mystery—and then women wonder ...
— A Guide to Men - Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl • Helen Rowland
... in all, daughters of the superior families of Bunkers and the surrounding district. Miss Arnott, their teacher, was a tall, bony spinster, with austere glasses and sharp elbows that looked like weapons ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... this garment revealed a breast to be likened only to that of an old peasant woman who cares nothing about her personal ugliness. The fleshless arm was like a stick on which a bit of stuff was hung. Seen at her window, this spinster seemed tall from the length and angularity of her face, which recalled the exaggerated proportions of certain Swiss heads. The character of their countenance—the features being marked by a total want of harmony—was that of hardness in the lines, sharpness in the tones; ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... more than middle-aged spinster came to be an authority on affairs of the heart she would have found it difficult to explain; but she had ever an opinion to offer on such matters, and she gave it with a weightiness and a conclusiveness which ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... patted her hand. He was cynical generally about romance. He felt that his own perfect love affair with his wife had been the exception. He looked upon Emily as a sentimental spinster who knew practically ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... disposal of Mrs. Poppit's friends) and the incessant lunches and teas had done their work; she had fed rather than starved Tilling into submission, and Miss Mapp felt that she alone upheld the dignity of the old families. She was positively the only old family (and a solitary spinster at that) who had not surrendered to the Poppits. Naturally she did not carry her staunchness to the extent, so to speak, of a hunger-strike, for that would be singular conduct, only worthy of suffragettes, and she partook of the Poppits' hospitality to the fullest extent possible, but ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... The little spinster paled. "Jane! Going away?" Her eyes brimmed up with sudden tears. "My dearest girl, aren't you happy in your home? I've tried, oh, how I've tried to take your dear, dead mother's ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... pewter, old brass, old glass, old furniture and other trumpery of that character; a passion with which I have little sympathy. I do not know that Miss Susan is prouder of her collection of all this folderol than she is of the fact that she is a spinster. ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... aged 14, late of Burgh cum Girsby, spinster, com. Nov. 22, 1817, charged with twice administering a quantity of vitrol or verdigrease powder, or other deadly poison, with intent to murder Susanna, the infant daughter of George Barnes of Burgh ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... her girlhood, that friend for whom she had called her first baby, she had always to admit, to Mary Alice's eager questioning, that the friend was neither beautiful nor rich nor gifted. She was a "spinster person" and years ago some well-to-do friend had taken her abroad for company. And there she had stayed; while the friend of her girlhood, whose baby was called for her, heard ...
— Everybody's Lonesome - A True Fairy Story • Clara E. Laughlin
... and not yet a quarter accomplished. The place had been a fowl-house, and, at the bottom of the door, there was a small hatch for the ingress and egress of these bipeds, the original invention of some thrifty spinster, to prevent the maids from stealing eggs. But this hatch was closed, or Snarleyyow would have escaped through it. Smallbones took up his quarters in another outhouse, that he might not be observed, and commenced ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... family, who were all in company such a night particularly, at a collation to which they were invited by Robert Lovelace, of Sandoun-hall, in the county of Lancaster, esquire, in company with Magdalen Sinclair, widow, and Priscilla Partington, spinster, and the lady complainant, when the said Robert Lovelace addressed himself to the said lady, on a multitude of occasions, as his wife; as they and others did, as Mrs. Lovelace; every one complimenting and congratulating her upon her nuptials; and that she received ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... you been living all these years, if you do not know that the very first thing a woman wants to do when she has made a good match is to make ones for all her spinster friends. Jane does not mean any harm. She does it ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... very unusual type of spinster who is in a condition of retarded development (and you will find this kind of woman even on County Council's), is completely unconscious of the sexual element in herself and in human nature generally. ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... sake take care of him; he is diabolically handsome; he never fails where he sets his heart." "Cospetto!" cried the doctor aloud, as these admonitions shaped themselves to speech in the camera-obscura of his brain; "such a warning would have undone a Cornelia while she was yet an innocent spinster." No, he resolved to say nothing to Violante of the Count's intention, only to keep guard, and make himself and Jackeymo all eyes ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... disdaining the customary twaddling topics of the rhymesters. Such an amazing allegory as "On Raiding the Ice Box," which deals, of course, with the experience of a man who attempts to explore the mind of an elderly Boston spinster, marks this powerful poet as a man of unusual satirical and ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... the hasty trip back to this country in their company. Colonel McIntyre had planned to bring the twins, then at school in Paris, home himself, but business had kept him in the West and he had cabled to a spinster cousin to chaperon them on the trip across the Atlantic Ocean. Nor had he reached New York in time to see them disembark, and thus had missed meeting Mrs. Brewster, then in her first ...
— The Red Seal • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... the middle of it with his family to the seashore, described it to Honora as a normal week. During its progress there came and went a missionary from China, a pianist, an English lady who had heard of the Institution, a Southern spinster with literary gifts, a youthful architect who had not built anything, and a young lawyer interested in ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... House, and all the old cats who go there to slander each other in—in the name of religion.' That's what she'd have said. It's all different now. Gone is her love of adventure; gone is her defiance of convention; gone is—is her independence. What is she now? A mere farmer, a drudging female, spinster farmer, growing cabbages and things, and getting her manicured hands all mussed up, and freckles on her otherwise ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... the leading spinster of Plainton. In companies where there were married ladies she was sometimes obliged to take a second place, but never among maidens, old or young. There were very few subjects upon which Miss Shott had ...
— Mrs. Cliff's Yacht • Frank R. Stockton
... was an anomaly in the community, being by theory a spinster, and by practice a double grass-widow. Capable and self-supporting, she attracted the ne'er-do-wells as a magnet attracts needles, but having been twice induced to forego her freedom and accept the bonds of wedlock, she had twice escaped and reverted to ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... the awkward termination of his visit,—or perhaps BECAUSE of it,—Courtland called again at the plantation within the week. But this time he was accompanied by Drummond, and was received by Miss Miranda Dows, a tall, aquiline-nosed spinster of fifty, whose old-time politeness had become slightly affected, and whose old beliefs had given way to a half-cynical acceptance of new facts. Mr. Drummond, delighted with the farm and its management, was no less fascinated ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Beck into the room she rented, Percival was greatly surprised to find, seated comfortably on the only chair to be seen, no less a person than the worthy Mrs. Mivers. This good lady in her spinster days had earned her own bread by hard work. She had captivated Mr. Mivers when but a simple housemaid in the service of one of his relations. And while this humble condition in her earlier life may account for much ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... erected in the extravagance of the San Francisco builder's hopes, and occupied finally in his despair. Intended originally as the palace of some inchoate California Aladdin, it usually ended as a lodging house in which some helpless widow or hopeless spinster managed to combine respectability with the hard ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... the plain English of half your fashionable matches. I 'm 'odd,' you know, and prefer to be an independent spinster and teach music all ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... was stronger because her father was supposed—by his unfortunate wife at least—to have been the scion of a proud and aristocratic family, who had not been too proud, however, to leave her to starve. Altogether, Miss Husted was an exceedingly romantic, high-strung, middle-aged spinster, miles and miles above her station in life, whose heart and purse were open to any foreigner who had discernment enough to see her weakness and tact enough to pander to it by hinting at his noble lineage. This love of things and beings aristocratic was more than a weakness. It ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... "Oh, we heard of her through Adelaide Painter—;" and in reply to his glance of interrogation she explained that the lady in question was a spinster of South Braintree, Massachusetts, who, having come to Paris some thirty years earlier, to nurse a brother through an illness, had ever since protestingly and provisionally camped there in a state of contemptuous protestation oddly manifested by ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... under October 5 is written the ominous word, "Mr. Ridout." And later: "Dec. 12. Charlotte's picture returned." A tragedy (or was it a comedy?) seems written in these few words. Edward FitzGerald adds to this his own note: "Miss Ridout I remember—an elegant spinster; friend of my mother's. About 1825 she had been at Sidmouth, and known Crabbe." The son quotes some very ardent verses belonging to this period, but not assignable to any particular charmer, such as one ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... old lady, a sort of spinster, I guess," Jimmy explained. "She lives all by herself, and I guess she gets kind of lonesome sometimes. She's kind of deaf, though," he ...
— The Radio Boys' First Wireless - Or Winning the Ferberton Prize • Allen Chapman
... in the year of our Lord 1852, between William Charles Capas, of Charles-Henry Street, in the borough of Birmingham, in the county of Warwick, carpenter, of the one part, and Emily Hickson, of Hurst Street, Birmingham aforesaid, spinster, of the other part. Whereas the said William Charles Capas and Emily Hickson have mutually agreed with each other to live and reside together, and to mutually assist in supporting and maintaining each other during the remainder ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 190, June 18, 1853 • Various
... dear uncle, you were employed, according to the formula, "in virtue of these and subsequent engagements," and among the "subsequent engagements" you are kind enough to reckon one between Mademoiselle Berthe Lorinet, spinster, of no occupation, and M. Fabien Mouillard, lawyer. "Fabien Mouillard, lawyer"—that I may perhaps endure, but "Fabien Mouillard, son-in-law of Lorinet," never! One pays too dear for these rich wives. Mademoiselle Berthe is half a foot taller than I, who am moderately tall, and she ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... a bachelor who called now and then at the home of Miss Betsey Smead, a wealthy spinster of Pointview, but nothing had ever ...
— Keeping up with Lizzie • Irving Bacheller
... Warrington, spinster-aunt of Richard. She occupied the other half of the Bennington pew. Until half a dozen years ago, when her boy had come into his own, she had known but little save poverty and disillusion; and the good she always dreamed of ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... case, there is plenty for the "superfluous women" to do, in taking care of these helpless men and their families. I see that more clearly every day, and am very glad and grateful that my profession will make me a useful, happy, and independent spinster.' ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... Whitehead, the stenographer-in-chief, was big, vigorous, blond—vulgar, energetic, vivid; and Miss Munch, her assistant, a thin, hollow-chested spinster, who loafed upon her job so that she might save her sight for the manufacture of incredible yards of tatting, never missed an opportunity to lift her eyes significantly behind ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... soldiers, valentines, fire-crackers before the Fourth, elastic for slingshots, spools, needles and yards of blue calico with white dots, which hung over strings above the counters. Emily was a dark, heavy-browed spinster with a booming bass voice and a stern manner, and when you crept, awed and timid, into the store she glared at you and boomed out, 'Which side, young man?' Yet her store was a kid's paradise. I have often wondered since whether she didn't, in her ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... of the ringbone!" And there was so much glee at the mention of deformity in the thick voice, and so much patience in the movement of the mare's long unshapely head, that the incident was as unpleasing as if it had been an ill-favoured spinster who had been insulted. Yaverland was roused suddenly by the tiniest sound of ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... Rockland, in mid-winter, and had crossed the mountains to watch beside the feverish pillow of her motherless niece. Careful and kind was her nursing; and even the physicians owned that to her patient watchfulness I owed my life. How grateful was I; and with what looks of love did I gaze on her trim, spinster figure, as she moved earnestly and pains-taking around my chamber; but, alas! the kitchen told a different story when I was well enough to make my appearance there. Biddy, a raw, bewildered-looking Irish girl, with huge red arms and stamping feet, had quite ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... that she was glad to have her back. That indomitable spinster had actually missed her lodger. She was surprised at her own pleasure in seeing the boxes carried upstairs again, in hearing the soft voice talking to Mawson, in sniffing the faint sweet scent that seemed to hang about the house when Miss Reston was in it, conquering the ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... day had passed. They had both been dead for some years. Captain Seymour died first and his place and property were inherited by his maiden daughter, Miss Lobelia Seymour. Sears Kendrick remembered Lobelia as a dressy, romantic spinster, very much in evidence at the church socials and at meetings of the Shakespeare Reading Society, and who sang a somewhat shrill ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... matter of course, appropriated to herself the part of "Lydia Languish." One of her favored swains next secured "Captain Absolute," and another laid violent hands on "Sir Lucius O'Trigger." These two were followed by an accommodating spinster relative, who accepted the heavy dramatic responsibility of "Mrs. Malaprop"—and there the theatrical proceedings came to a pause. Nine more speaking characters were left to be fitted with representatives; and with ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... allowed to go unchallenged. Helen Johnson, who was well along in the twenties at least, and still a spinster, prided herself on her powers of conquest, despite the fact that she had no husband to show for it. So, now, she spoke with ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... dear little spinster of fifty, with endless interests and not a hobby to her name, the most downright, practical person I have ever known, and the most helpful to strangers and pilgrims in the city. It is quite incidental that she is uncommonly rich and uncommonly ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... motor by this time—the rich, the noble motor, as Mr Pepys would have described it—and there was poor Miss Lyall hung with parcels, and wearing a faint sycophantic smile. This miserable spinster, of age so obvious as to be called not the least uncertain, was Lady Ambermere's companion, and shared with her the glories of The Hall, which had been left to Lady Ambermere for life. She was provided with food and lodging and the use of the cart ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... spending my holidays with my spinster aunt, my father's sister, who lived at Compiegne, in a house situated at the far end of the town. She had three servants, one of whom was my dear old Julie, who had left us because my mother could not get on with her. My aunt Louise was a little woman of fifty, with countrified ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... struck dumb with astonishment to hear you think of such things. Go, get your doll-baby, or your sampler, and look on that. Saints of Mercy! It seems only yesterday you were a baby in long clothes," answered Miss Henrietta Mayfield, a spinster of uncertain age; but the folks in the village, who always knew everything, declared she had not owned to a day over thirty-five for the last ten years. This, if true, was quite excusable, for Miss Henrietta's little toilette ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... a lock of my hair?" asked the gallant old bachelor of the spinster who had been a belle a few ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... all who knew her. Her mother dying when she was only three, Columbine had been left to the sole care of her wastrel father. And he, then a skipper of a small cargo steamer plying across the North Sea, had placed her in the charge of a spinster aunt who kept an infants' school in a little Kentish village near the coast. Here, up to the age of seventeen, Columbine had lived and been educated; but the old schoolmistress had worn out at last, and on her death-bed had sent ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... softly lighted by a waning old moon, were on the lookout everywhere among the suburbs for two malefactors distinctly differing in type, yet equally in demand. One, said the descriptions, compiled from the original information of Zenobia Perkins, Spinster; residence 259 Calle Real, Ermita; occupation, Vice-President and Accredited Representative for the Philippine Islands of the Patriotic Daughters of America, and the additional particulars later obtained from Lieutenant Gerard Stuyvesant, aide-de-camp ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... with the strange gentleman,' whispered the spinster aunt, with true spinster-aunt-like envy, to her brother, ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... proposition; it implied—oh! it implied all sorts of things. It meant that she would care as little for philandering as an able young business man. Perhaps some day, a long time ahead, she might marry. There wasn't much reason for it, but it might be she would not wish to be called a spinster. "Take a husband," thought old Grammont, "when I am gone, as one takes a butler, to make the household complete." In previous meditations on his daughter's outlook old Grammont had found much that was very suggestive in the precedent of Queen ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... pleasantry to chaff him as an inveterate bachelor, at whom all the young ladies of the place were setting their virginal caps. These jests he received very much as Tim Linkinwater received the allusions of Mr. Cheeryble to the "uncommonly handsome spinster," rather encouraging them as tributes to the fact that, though now advanced in years, he was well preserved, and, as most ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... Pilgrims landed at Plymouth there was at least one public school for both sexes in Virginia. But for the most part the girls of early New England appear to have gone to the "dame's school," taught by some spinster or poverty-stricken widow. We may again turn to Sewall's Diary for bits of evidence concerning the schooling in the seventeenth century: "Tuesday, Oct. 16, 1688. Little Hanah going to School in the morn, being enter'd a little within the Schoolhouse Lane, is rid over by David Lopez, ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... Finally I mentioned the report of a case of measles in the village, and Ev'leen Ann responded in kind with the news that her Aunt Emma had bought a potato-planter. Ev'leen Ann is an orphan, brought up by a well-to-do spinster aunt, who is strong-minded and runs her own farm. After a time we glided by way of similar transitions to the mention of ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... I was a little girl, had to learn to use her needle," declared the spinster. "When I was your age, Dorothy Kenway, I had pieced half a block bedquilt and ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... feeling more in the mood of the latter, but never dreaming how much those carriages meant to me. As I went timidly into the room I found nearly every seat full, and was greeted with cordial applause. My sister took a seat beside me. My subject was "Spinster Authors of England." My hands trembled so visibly that I laid my manuscript on the table, but after getting in magnetic touch with those before me, I ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... justice, the tax upon a widow who purchased permission to remarry or not, at her pleasure, was far heavier than the fine exacted from a man who married a ward of the Crown without royal licence. The natural result of this arrangement was that the ladies who were either dowered widows or spinster heiresses very often contracted clandestine marriages, and their husbands quietly endured the subsequent fine and imprisonment, as unavoidable evils which were soon over, and well worth the advantage ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... turned heavily into the kitchen, and closed the door with a bang that impoverished invective—for volumes may be spoken—in the banging of a door. The moment was inauspicious for the entrance of Harriet Penny. At best, Chloe merely endured the little spinster, with her whining, hysterical outbursts, and abject, unreasoning fear of God, man, the devil, and everything else. "Oh, my dear, I am so glad!" piped the little woman, rushing to the girl's side: "we need never fear ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... afternoon, and the sun was beginning to strike under the laurels around the hotel into the little office where the widow sat with the housekeeper—a stout spinster of a coarser Western type. Mrs. MacGlowrie was looking wearily over some accounts on the desk before her, and absently putting back some tumbled sheaves from the stack of her heavy hair. For the widow had a certain indolent Southern negligence, which in a less pretty woman would have been untidiness, ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... put an elderly maiden lady who presided at the tea-table to sore confusion by neglecting utterly her invitation to be seated, and walking round and round the circle, stopping ever and anon to steal a lump from the sugar basin, which the venerable spinster was at length constrained to place on her own knee, as the only method of securing it from his uneconomical depredations. His appearance mumping the eternal sugar was something indescribable." It is probably the same story Robert Chambers gives in his Traditions of Edinburgh, and he makes the ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... was near forty; a thin, hard-featured spinster, dwelling alone with her mother the Lady Balgarnock. Her two younger sisters had married early—the one to Captain Luce, of Dunragit in Wigtownshire, the other to a Mr. Forbes, of whom I know nothing save that his house was in Edinburgh: and as they had no great love for ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... themselves in their true light, irresistibly facetious. These funny gentlemen, mostly husbands, seated themselves near to large groups of indulgent women and kept up an exquisite banter directed at each other's personal defects, or upon the idiosyncrasies of any bachelor or spinster near. These funny gentlemen kept alluding to the excursion as the "Exertion." If the boat rolled a little they said, "Now, Mother, don't ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... occupied by an old man named Poiret and a man of forty or thereabouts, the wearer of a black wig and dyed whiskers, who gave out that he was a retired merchant, and was addressed as M. Vautrin. Two of the four rooms on the third floor were also let—one to an elderly spinster, a Mlle. Michonneau, and the other to a retired manufacturer of vermicelli, Italian paste and starch, who allowed the others to address him as "Father Goriot." The remaining rooms were allotted to various birds of passage, to ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... h&self have authorized him to drop it. He never missed Fifi now, according to the way of this world, but he thought of her sometimes, which is all that anybody has a right to expect. Miss Weyland he had not seen since the day Fifi died. Mrs. Paynter had been away all summer, a firm spinster cousin coming in from the country to run the boarders, and the landlady's agent came to the house no more. Buck Klinket he saw incessantly; he was the first person in the world, probably, that the little Doctor had ever really liked. It was Buck ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... and, as may be supposed, it formed the subject of conversation at the breakfast-table when it was announced where my uncle had gone. His return was accordingly looked for with no little anxiety, especially by the young ladies of the party, including my three spinster aunts. Mr Kilcullin ...
— Ben Burton - Born and Bred at Sea • W. H. G. Kingston
... Non-suites my Mediators. For certes, saies he, I haue already chose my Officer. And what was he? For-sooth, a great Arithmatician, One Michaell Cassio, a Florentine, (A Fellow almost damn'd in a faire Wife) That neuer set a Squadron in the Field, Nor the deuision of a Battaile knowes More then a Spinster. Vnlesse the Bookish Theoricke: Wherein the Tongued Consuls can propose As Masterly as he. Meere pratle (without practise) Is all his Souldiership. But he (Sir) had th' election; And I (of whom his eies had seene ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... a pretty, gentle-faced spinster, could not hush her mother, whisper as pleadingly as she might into the sharp old ear in the bonnet-frills. The old woman was full of the desire for tea, and could scarcely be restrained from following up its fragrant ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... that had come to him from a branch of his mother's family in Virginia—a branch that had gone out with a King's grant when Virginia was a crown colony. The collateral ancestor, Pendleton, had been a justice of the peace in Virginia, and a spinster daughter had written down some of the strange cases with which her father ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... was willing to talk about these pets all through dinner; and so was her aunt, a thin and angular spinster, who sat on Montague's other side. And he was willing to listen—he wanted to know it all. There were umbrellas for dogs, to be fastened over their backs in wet weather; there were manicure and toilet sets, and silver medicine-chests, ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... letters, the multiplication table, the points of the compass, the chicken pox, whooping cough, measles, and scarlet fever. All these unhappy incidents of childhood left but little impression on my mind. I have, however, most pleasant memories of the good spinster, Maria Yost, who patiently taught three generations of children the rudiments of the English language, and introduced us to the pictures in "Murray's Spelling-book," where Old Father Time, with his scythe, and the farmer stoning the boys in his apple trees, gave rise in my mind ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... curled and uncurled and strayed all about her brow and neck like an explosion of spun lava. For the rest, had she really been a little girl of twelve, one would feel free to describe her as fat and roly-poly; but in the case of a young spinster of somewhere in her third decade, well-gowned and stayed and otherwise in physical subjection to the modiste, and singing of love like a diva, what can one say? No more than this, perhaps, that the fortunate man who carries her off the field a prize, will realize before he has got very ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... a sigh of relief that Sara, in obedience to the warning raucously intoned by a hurrying porter, vacated her seat in the railway compartment in which she had travelled from Fallowdene. Her companions on the journey had been an elderly spinster and her maid, and as the former had insisted upon the exclusion of every breath of outside air, Sara felt half-suffocated by the time they ran into Oldhampton Junction. The Monkshaven train was already standing in the station, and, commissioning a porter to transfer her luggage, ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... handkerchief, and Aunt Hester, who was a spinster, cast down her eyes and fidgeted with some papers which she ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... neither uncles nor aunts. For me, no yellow liverless individual, with characteristic bamboo and pigtail—emblems of half a million—returned to his native shores from Ceylon or remote Penang. For me, no venerable spinster hoarded in the Trongate, permitting herself few luxuries during a long-protracted life, save a lass and a lanthorn, a parrot, and the invariable baudrons of antiquity. No such luck was mine. Had all Glasgow perished by some ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... took the form of Ann McDonald, a Scotch spinster, to whom was intrusted the care of Evelyn as soon as she was christened. It was merely a piece of good fortune that brought a person of the qualifications of Ann McDonald into the family, for it is not to be supposed that Mrs. Mavick had given any thought to the truth that the important education ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... with little Cherry-lips close at my heels. I strained every nerve and sinew—it was a matter of life and death to me—and I have no doubt but I should have won the race in fine style, if I had not, unfortunately, in my blind haste, run against Miss Patty Hanson, the primest and worst tempered spinster in Hallswell. ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... asked to come in, and thus they met, the quick, slim, active little spinster, whose whole life had been work, and the far younger widow, whose vocation had been chiefly home-making. Their ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fortune, nothing that would avail her in the least when her father died; and the gentle coldness of her manner did not encourage women to intimacy, or invite men to pay her attentions that she would scorn. In any other situation, her natural gifts and virtues would have fairer play. As a spinster, she would still have had lovers; as a widow, suitors by the dozen; as a happily married woman she would have been courted, complimented, flattered, by all the world. But, as a woman merely separated from a husband with whom ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... conscience, the advantages and the disadvantages of its possession, and the consensus of opinion was of its being quite appropriate in regard to a clergyman, and that it was not altogether out of place on the part of a spinster, provided that she had counteracting virtues; but, on the whole, it was perhaps wiser to leave ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... late Mr. T. C. Noble kindly communicated to me a copy of the original marriage certificate, which is as follows: "Samuell Peps of this parish Gent. & Elizabeth De Snt. Michell of Martins in the fields, Spinster. Published October 19tn, 22nd, 29th 1655, and were married by Richard Sherwin Esqr one of the justices of the Peace of the Cittie and Lyberties of Westm. December 1st. (Signed) ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... hear them, whether you want to or not," continued the indomitable spinster, "and I don't see any use in palavering the truth. Master Hightower and Mr. Arthur knows it by this time, and there's no harm in talking before them. Helen's an uncommon child. She's no more like other children, ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... from the stars in the night sky to the stars in the young man's eyes. "Why, yes, I hope I am," said she lightly enough, but one saw she had been startled. "What a funny boy you are, Laurence, to be sure! You don't expect me to remain a spinster, ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... had known Dr. Spencer's opinion; and yet he only believed that they were grateful for good advice, and went about among them, easy, good-natured, and utterly unconscious that for him sparkled Mrs. Ledwich's bugles, and for him waved every spinster's ribbon, from Miss Rich ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... prospective rank seemingly an obstacle to anything he desired. For a moment the whimsicality of it interrupted the current of his feeling. He thought of the probable comments of the men of his London club upon the drift his conversation was taking with a New England spinster about his fitness to marry a school-teacher. With a smile that was summoned to hide his annoyance, he said, "I don't see how I ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... not believe there were many women to whom Shargar's attentions would be disagreeable: they must always be simple and manly. What was more to the point, she had given him her address in London, and he was going to call upon her the next day. She was on a visit to Lady Janet Gordon, an elderly spinster, who ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... the season O' the year when I am older than you. Besides A bride is always younger than a spinster. ...
— The Lamp and the Bell • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... and bring some of her work. Flamby had never forgotten the visit. The honey of Miss Kingsbury was honey of Trebizond, and it poisoned poor Flamby's happiness for many a day. Strange is the paradox of a woman's heart; for Flamby, well knowing that this spinster's venom was a product of jealousy—jealousy of talent, super-jealousy of youth and beauty—yet took hurt from it and hugged the sting of cruel criticism to her breast. In this, for all her engrafted wisdom, she showed herself a true limb ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... who now acted as servant to Mrs Villiers, was rather an oddity in her way. She had been Madame's nurse, and had followed her up to Ballarat, with the determination of never leaving her. Selina was a spinster, as her hand had never been sought in marriage, and her personal appearance was certainly not very fascinating. Tall and gaunt, she was like a problem from Euclid, all angles, and the small quantity of grey hair she possessed ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... were in Geneva. If you had ever travelled through Europe with a charming spinster who never sat down at a Continental table d'hote without being asked by an American vis-a-vis whether she were one of the P.'s of Salem, Massachusetts, you would understand why I call my friend Salemina. She doesn't mind it. ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Carlyle Terrace, Edgware Road, son of Arthur Hawkehurst, journalist; Charlotte Halliday, spinster, of the Lawn, Bayswater, daughter of Thomas ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... the more settled elements of the population were not neglected. For the older married man, there was a blow directly between the eyes: "Do You Want Your Widow to Be Half-Safe?" And, for the spinster without immediate hopes, "I Dreamt I Was Caught Dead Without ...
— And All the Earth a Grave • Carroll M. Capps (AKA C.C. MacApp)
... crossed the ocean twice, and was a wiser, sadder woman for it. At eight she turned in, and ten minutes later Amanda came aboard with a flock of gay friends. But no temptations of the flesh could lure the wary spinster from her den; for the night was rough and cold, and the steamer a ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... except Thursday," wrote Miss Perry, and this was not the first invitation by any means. Were all Miss Perry's weeks blank with the exception of Thursday, and was her only desire to see her old friend's son? Time is issued to spinster ladies of wealth in long white ribbons. These they wind round and round, round and round, assisted by five female servants, a butler, a fine Mexican parrot, regular meals, Mudie's library, and friends dropping in. A little hurt she was already that ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... lonely, harsh-featured spinster, who eked out a precarious living by teaching music. Ethel knew her slightly, as a gaunt woman who usually toiled up the stairs with a sort of scornful weariness ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... proved in Griffith Gaunt's case. The Rev. William Wentworth published, in the usual recitative, the banns of marriage between Thomas Leicester, of the parish of Marylebone in London, and Mercy Vint, spinster, of this parish; and creation, present ex hypothesi mediaevale, but absent in fact, assented, by ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... second Mrs. Fielding's maiden name, which has been hitherto variously reported as Macdonnell, Macdonald, and Macdaniel, is given as Mary Daniel, [Footnote: See note to Fielding's letter in Chap. vii.] and she is further described as "of St Clement's Danes, Middlesex, Spinster." Either previously to this occurrence, or immediately after it, Fielding seems to have taken two rooms in a house in Back Lane, Twickenham, "not far," says the Rev. Mr. Cobbett in his Memorials, "from the site of Copt Hall." In ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... of the household, and also as particular friend to any one in the house who needed her services in that way. Then there was Miss Raleigh, who was supposed to be Mrs. Easterfield's secretary. She was a slender spinster of forty or more, with sad eyes and very fine teeth. She had dyspeptic proclivities, and never differed with anybody except in regard to her own diet. She seldom wrote for Mrs. Easterfield, for that lady did not like her handwriting, and she did not understand the use of the typewriter; nor ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... SAINTE-NITOUCHE.—A demure Spinster says she is quite against the Early Closing Movement, and hopes the shops will keep open as late as possible. "'Early closing' means," she explains, "'early shopping,' and I should blush to commence my rounds before ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 12, 1890 • Various
... Mr. Edward Middleton Encounters the Emir Achmed Ben Daoud The Adventure of the Virtuous Spinster What Befell Mr. Middleton Because of the Second Gift of the Emir The Adventure of William Hicks What Befell Mr. Middleton Because of the Third Gift of the Emir The Adventure of Norah Sullivan and the Student of Heredity What Befell Mr. Middleton Because of the Fourth Gift ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... She knew no other men. He was the only one. In a flash of shame it came over her that a woman with more experience would never have written such a letter. Everybody knew that men forget, change, easily replace first loves. Nobody but such a cloistered, academic spinster as she would have trusted a seven years' promise. This was another result of such lives as they led—such helpless, provincial women. Her resentment grew against the place. It had made her ...
— A Reversion To Type • Josephine Daskam
... Miss Gailey, a spinster of superior breeding and a teacher of dancing, had in the distant past been an intimate friend of Mrs. Lessways. The friendship was legendary in the house, and the grand quarrel which had finally put an end to it dated in Hilda's early memories like a historical event. For many years ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... sigh he went on. Carmen, who missed little, had heard him stop and coming out, volunteered the information that Miss Playfair had gone out real early. Evan thanked her, and hurried on, dreading to face the sharp-eyed spinster. ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... been brought up in a little country town with a spinster aunt and a whole good-natured, tolerant village for company. Well, she has accepted you and your entire household, even down to Dong Ling, on the ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... there. One more lump of bread, a final gulp of coffee, a short search for the waiter's check, and he stands at the cashieress's desk. She makes change without looking at him or ceasing to tell a small hunchbacked spinster standing by about somebody's wedding. ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... colour. In one neatly gloved hand her silk skirt was held primly; in the other she carried a little white silk flag, on which the staring gold letters were lost in the rippling folds. With her eyes on the sky and her feet in the dust, she marched, a prim, ladylike figure, an inspired spinster, oblivious alike of the hooting small boys and the half-compassionate, half-scoffing gazers upon ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... rain falled of a wet winter won't wash away. Theer 's the lines. They 'm a fact, same as the sun in heaven 's a fact. God A'mighty's Self couldn't undo it wi'out some violent invention; an' for that matter I doan't see tu clear how even Him be gwaine to magic a married woman into a spinster again; any more than He could turn a spinster into a married woman, onless some ordinary human man came forrard. You must faace it braave an' strong. But that imp o' Satan—that damn Blanchard bwoy! Theer! I caan't say what I think 'bout him. Arter all that's been done: the guests invited, the ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... fancy store, kept by two prim but pleasant spinster sisters. Besides newspapers, stationery, thread and needles, and so forth, they kept a stock of toys, candies, and pickled limes, which insured them a run of custom among the young folk, who always spoke of them as the ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... some indefatigable spinster of the old school, who had the supreme felicity to be born in "days that tried men's souls," hearing this, may say with Nestor, another of the old school, "But you are younger than I. For time was when I conversed with ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... A gaunt, elderly spinster, with elaborately coiffed white hair and ostentatious costume, demanded a kimono that should be just her style and of embroidered ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... he knew that this offer had been accepted without hesitation; and thenceforth, accordingly, he threw his daily letters to his wife into the form of communications meant for an imaginary group, consisting of a spinster sister, a statistical laird, a rural clergyman of the Presbyterian Kirk, and a brother, a veteran officer on half-pay. The rank of this last personage corresponded, however, exactly with that of his own elder brother, John Scott, who also, like the Major of the book, had served in the Duke of York's ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... enough, till we were interrupted by a miserable-looking crowd, assembled round a dull, dingy, melancholy shop, from which gleamed a solitary candle, whose long, spinster-like wick was flirting away with an east wind, at a most unconscionable rate. Upon the haggard and worn countenances of the by-standers, was depicted one general and sympathizing expression of eager, envious, wistful anxiety, which predominated ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... divine inspiration. Incidentally, the Lord had given her a plump figure, and a knack of apparel which had long appealed to Widower Yarnell's eye. And the Lord approved; in truth He said "Yes!" so audibly that Miss Spinster hesitated ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... At Bagnigge Wells, with china and gilt spoons; 'Tis laying by our stuffs, red cloaks and pattens, To dance cowtillions all in silks and satins." "Vulgar! (cries Miss) observe in higher Life The feather'd spinster and three feather'd wife; The Club's Bon Ton—Bon Ton's a constant trade Of rout, festino, ball and masquerade; 'Tis plays and puppet shows—'tis something new— 'Tis losing thousands every night at loo; Nature it ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... pictured Madonna on every wall. Carnival comes, and completes the wreck of the proprieties. The girls secure their window and pelt their black-bearded Professor in the street below without dread of a scolding on the "convenances." The impassive spinster whose voice never rises at home above the most polite whisper screams with delight at the first sugarplum that hits her, and furtively supplies her nieces with ammunition to carry on the war. "It is such fun, isn't it, papa?" ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... his sixty-fifth year and to do him honor Aunt Hetty assisted by a bevy of rosy-cheeked nieces and cousins, had brewed and baked and stewed one hot morning in late August. Altogether eight families of Maises, arrayed in their best, sallied out to the white-gabled home of their spinster relative. Not only were they prompted to attend because of the prospect of revelling in the contents of Miss Hetty's famous kitchen, but they would also have the opportunity of ...
— Pearl and Periwinkle • Anna Graetz
... a man ..." began the spinster, putting down her work, and raising her head with the air they all knew so well, denoting a long rigmarole about some exceedingly uninteresting person, and Diana immediately chimed in with, "Shall you wear a knickerbocker suit, aunty, or just a ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... the document. It was a certificate of the marriage of Henry Leek, valet, and Sarah Featherstone, spinster, at a registry office in Paddington. Priam also inspected it. This was one of Leek's escapades! No revelations as to the past of Henry Leek would have surprised him. There was nothing to be done except to give a truthful denial ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... reflective an expression as a cow. Beside Rebecca sat a woman of about her own age, who kept looking at her with furtive curiosity; her husband, short and stout and saturnine, stood near her. Rebecca paid no attention to either of them. She was tall and spare and pale, the type of a spinster, yet with rudimentary lines and expressions of matronhood. She all unconsciously held her shawl, rolled up in a canvas bag, on her left hip, as if it had been a child. She wore a settled frown of dissent at life, but it was the frown of a mother ...
— The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural • Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
... all, Timothy, an infant of nine months. With the exception of Lucy and Bim they were exceedingly noisy children. Lucy should have passed her days in the schoolroom under the care of Miss Agg, a melancholy and hope-abandoned spinster, and, during lesson hours, there indeed she was. But in the schoolroom she had no one to impress with her amazing wisdom and dignity. "Poor mummy," as she always thought of her mother, was quite unaware of her habits or movements, and Miss Agg was unable to restrain either the ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... lonely bachelor, nor a lonely spinster, in order to live alone. The loneliest are those who mingle with men bodily and yet have no contact with them spiritually. There is no desert solitude equal to that of a crowded city where you have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... type of the characteristic British spinster, turned round, and addressed M. l'Abbe in laboured and extremely British French (I must leave the accent to be imagined and ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... discussed, and mints established. Wool was the principal export, and fine cloths were taken in exchange from the Continent. Women spun for their own households, and the term spinster was introduced. ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... Alizon Deuice, of the Forrest of Pendle, in the County of Lancaster Spinster, taken at Reade in the said Countie of Lancaster, the xiij. day of March, Anno Regni Jacobi Angliae, &c. Nono: ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... is baffled there. She hoped to become his widow, aha! The plot thickens, indeed! Goodness! what a household! That bad old man, the still viler woman, dangerous Lucian Davlin, and that funny, youthful, cross, 'conceited spinster,' Ellen Arthur, who has a lover, and his name is—heaven save us—Percy! That name will mix itself up with my fate web, and why? Percy beloved of Claire; Percy who brought Philip Girard to his doom; Percy the lover of a rich old maid, are ye one and the same? Percy! Percy! Percy! I must ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... Ronciere, I enjoy the greatest peace. My old spinster cousin Ermelin pets and coddles me like an invalid. I am getting back my colour and am very well, physically ... so much so, in fact, that I no longer ever think of interesting myself in other people's ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... a spinster, and at her age there is not much chance of her changing her condition. Shall I write her ...
— Chester Rand - or The New Path to Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr
... for the first time last week, and immediately decided to invite her to Fletcher's Hall. For, Constance, let me whisper it, the old ladies—bless their hearts!—are killing me. This person, Ida Seymour by name, is a spinster of some forty winters, a kind of roving, charitable star, from what I gather, who spends her life visiting from place to place with a trunkful of fancy work, pious books, and innocent sources of amusement,—a fairy godmother to old ladies, pauper children, and bazaars. My vanity has ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... from Haverhill last night, Doctor Clark accompanying us, he having business in Newbury. When we came up to the door, Effie met us with a shy look, and told her mistress that Mrs. Prudence (uncle's spinster cousin) had got a braw auld wooer in the east room; and surely enough we found our ancient kinswoman and Deacon Dole, a widower of three years' standing, sitting at the supper-table. We did take note that the Deacon had on a stiff new coat; and as for Aunt Prudence ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Ketchura Peck, spinster, however, did see many most excellent reasons. She was a maid with a mission, and maintained it to be an outrage that a Christian boy should be brought up by a godless pagan. She worried over it almost as much as ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... was taking his hasty walk, Thrower and I sat down in the log-hut where these three old spinster sisters had lived all their lives. They were quite characters, and cultivated their land entirely with their own hands; though, when we asked their ages, two of them said they were "in fifty," and one ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... get ingloriously ditched at the end, owing to a certain grim old dame—to wit, Miss Elizabeth Carr of the Upper Glen—who wouldn't rein her horse out to let us pass, honk as we might. Father was quite furious; but in my heart I believe I sympathized with Miss Elizabeth. If I had been a spinster lady, driving along behind my own old nag, in maiden meditation fancy free, I wouldn't have lifted a rein when an obstreperous car hooted blatantly behind me. I should just have sat up as dourly as she did and said 'Take the ditch if you ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the boy out of mischief, he was sent to a sort of kindergarten, kept by a spinster around the corner. The spinster devoted rather more attention to the Browning boy than to her other pupils—she had to, to keep him out of mischief—and soon the boy was quite the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... and mandarins, with the castles on elephants' backs, George the Third and his queen in pink ivory, against the Emperor of China and lady in white—the delight of Clive's childhood, the chief ornament of the old spinster's sitting-room. ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... his arm and toddled out of the office whistling a wedding march. An hour later, dressed in this regalia and a new black suit, buttoned primly and exactly in a fashion unknown to Mehronay, he appeared at the opera house with Miss Columbia Merley, spinster, teacher of Greek and Hellenic philosophy at the College. The office force asked in a gasp of wonder: "Who dressed him?" Miss Merley—late in her forties, steel-eyed, thin-chested, flint-faced and with hair knotted so tightly back from her high stony ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... there is a very strict law intended to eliminate the spinster from the social horizon. It is a law born of craft and inspired by foresight. The daughters of a household must be married off in the order of their nativity. The younger sister dare not contemplate matrimony until the elder sister has been led to the altar. It is impossible for a ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... Here is the roller cotton-gin, which was doubtless used in India before the conquests of Alexander. Then we have the spinning-wheel, which differs in no important respect from that of England in the thirteenth century, and is similar to, but ruder than, that used by our great-grandmothers, when "spinster" meant something, and a girl brought to the home of her choice a goodly array of linen. This was before cotton was king, and before factories were known either for cotton, flax or wool. Was it a better day than the present, or no? Things work round, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... Spindelston Heugh, vi. Laird of Darnick Tower, The, vii. Laird of Hermitage, The, xix. Laird of Lucky's Howe, ix. Laird Rorieson's Will, xviii. Last of the Pedlars, The, v. Last Scrap, The, xxiii. Leaves from the Life of Alexander Hamilton, xix. Leaves from the Diary of an Aged Spinster, vi. Leein' Jamie Murdieston, viii. Leveller, The, xvi. Linton Lairds, The; or, Exclusives and Inclusives, iv. Lord Durie and Christie's Will, ii. Lord Kames's Puzzle, xxiii, Lost Heir of the House of Elphinstone, xx. Lottery Hall, xiii. ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... view of the man with the pot of beer. For instance, it was logical to allow some degree of distinction between beer and tea, on the ground that a man may be moved by excess of beer to throw the pot at somebody's head. And it may be said that the spinster is seldom moved by excess of tea to throw the tea-pot at anybody's head. But the whole ground of argument is now changed. For people do not consider what the drunkard does to others by throwing the pot, but what he does to himself by drinking the beer. ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... his course in circumstances so unprecedented. He restlessly paces the pavement, trying to determine how he shall deal with the strange conditions raising their barrier between him and the object of his desire. Magdalene calls to her the object of hers. The middle-aged spinster has a weak spot in her heart for David. The boyish shoe-maker's apprentice on his side adores her—and the pleasant bits she maternally smuggles to him from Pogner's kitchen. Questioned, he informs her that he is making the place ready for the master-singers. ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... all responsibilities and restrictions such as customarily attach to the supervision of a household, excepting as she may elect to exercise her wifely prerogatives; being absolutely free to pursue whatsoever occupation or devices she may desire or choose, the same as if she were yet a spinster.... ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... course, for such a young girl to live with an old spinster and go to a village school. Her books bore testimony to this; for there was a look of sadness in the faces she drew, and a sense of weariness and longing for some imaginary conditions of blessedness or other, which began to be painful. She might ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... and answered gaily—'Oh! he made up to an elderly spinster, and married her, not long since; weighing her heavy purse against her faded charms, and expecting to find that solace in gold which was denied him in ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... bedroom by a bad cold, the friendship of shy, nervous Milly Fauncey, and of bold, confident Lionel Varick, had fast ripened, fostered by the romantic Italian atmosphere. During these three days Varick, almost without trying to do so, had learnt all there was to learn of the simple-minded spinster and of her financial circumstances. But he was not the man to take any risk, and he had actually paid a flying visit to London—a visit of which he had later had the grace to feel secretly ashamed—for it had had for object that of making quite sure, at Somerset House, that Miss ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... at hand; there were no longer many guests in Aalsgaard. At the meals in the great timber-ceiled dining-hall on the ground floor, whose high windows opened out upon the sun-porch and the sea, the hostess always presided, an elderly spinster with white hair, colorless eyes, delicately pink cheeks, and a quavering, chirping voice, who always tried to group her red hands to advantage on the white table-cloth. A short-necked old gentleman with ice-gray sailor's beard ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... acknowledge that she did not, and under a hot volley of questions from Donna admitted further that not a soul in San Pasqual had even hinted to her of such a contingency. Too late the spinster realized that she had, figuratively speaking, placed all of her eggs in one bucket and ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... was over now, and the day of the farmer who succeeded him was over, too. The crash of the loom and the whir of the spinning-wheel were heard no longer, but Amanda Dalton, spinster,—descendant of the original Tristram Dalton, to whom the claim belonged,—sat on alone in her house, and not far away sat Caleb Kimball, sole living heir of the original Caleb, himself a Dalton Righter, and ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... have to be housed and fed during the critical days after an operation on father or mother, do I look for assistance from 'the cleanest woman in the street?' Alas, no; whether she be wife, widow, or spinster, I pass her by, careful not to tread on her pavement, much less her doorstep, and seek the happy-go-lucky person whose own premises would be better for more water and less grease, but from whose presence neither husband nor child ever ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... eight, but who dauntlessly tackled sausages and plum pudding on Christmas Day, and suffered for it for a week to come. There were Mr and Mrs Willoughby, and two cousin husbands and their wives, and a spinster aunt to represent the next generation, then came sweet and twenty as represented by Janet and Claire, followed by Reginald of Eton, on whom they looked down as a mere boy, the while he in his turn disdained to notice the advances of two curly-headed cousins of nine and ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... hair was wavy in spite of the severely straight brushing, and it glinted gold where little flecks of sunlight filtered through the branches of the tall trees to caress it. In the hair, too, was a single red rose, caught into place with a natural grace that it seemed a pity to waste on three spinster aunts and two dogs, and the same note of color was repeated in another rebellious blossom at the throat. The young face was plump and oval, and the cheeks were pink, the brown eyes were wide and sparkling and—Oh, well, the young man in the pool stopped ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... coming in sight of the promontory of Sunium, where the Greek Muse, in an awful vision, came to me, and said in a patronising way, "Why, my dear" (she always, the old spinster, adopts this high and mighty tone)—"Why, my dear, are you not charmed to be in this famous neighbourhood, in this land of poets and heroes, of whose history your classical education ought to have made you a master? if it did not, you have wofully neglected your opportunities, and ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
