"Girlhood" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have, I hope, been successful, and it is as painful for me to tell as for you to hear, that there exists in your midst a youthful reprobate, trained in all the arts of ensnaring the vagrant fancies of innocent but giddy girlhood. ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... into notice, owing to the evident impression that her charms had made upon the susceptible heart of Napoleon III. This lady, Eugenie Montijo, countess de Teba, was no longer in the first bloom of girlhood, having been born in 1826. But she was in the full meridian of a beauty which, had the crown matrimonial of France, like the apple of Ate, been dedicated to the fairest, would have ensured her the throne by sheer right ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... Love's drapeau rouge the truth has told! O' er girlhood's yielding barricade Floats ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... prettier, nor did the eyes and attentions of others afford him any aid. They were general favorites, as well as himself, although it was evident that to some they might become more, should they give encouragement. But they were apparently in the heyday of their girlhood, and thus far had preferred miscellaneous admiration to individual devotion. By the time the evening was over Marstern felt that if life consisted of large parties he might as well settle the question by the ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... him to go to the Free States, where his tongue would not be tied, and where his intelligence would be of more avail to him. He left me, still hoping the day would come when I could be bought. With me the lamp of hope had gone out. The dream of my girlhood was over. ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... this little volume were written at different periods in the life of the author, dating from her early girlhood up to recent years. They were not written with a view of making a book, each poem being the spontaneous outpouring of a deeply poetic nature and called forth by some experience that claimed ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy
... in a corner room, close to the stream which rippled through the little orchard, and its gentle murmur had been a comfort to her—it carried her back to her home in Oxford County (State of Maine), where her early girlhood had been spent. At times it seemed that she was in the little, old, gray house in the valley, and that her father's sharp voice might come at any moment to break ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... must be a bit wide awake." And, curling himself up again, he began to read from the paper, in a monotonous murmuring voice: "'The Princess, as well as being a woman of artistic accomplishments, is an ardent sportswoman, having in her early girlhood hunted and shot with keen zest on her father's estates. The above picture shows her at the age of seventeen, carrying a gun.' By the Lord, she is wide awake!" he added, by way of comment. "She ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... Castilian was the language of the household. The race ideals of Spain—the poetic, the impassioned, the joy in color and movement—pervaded the very atmosphere of Castel d'Ischia. Vittoria's earliest girlhood revealed her exceptional beauty and charm, and gave evidence that the gods loved her and had dowered her with their immortal gifts and genius, which flowered, under the sympathetic guidance and stimulus of such a woman as the Principessa (the Duchessa di Francavilla) and the society she ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... uninterrupted rides. They had nothing much to talk about but themselves, and, while she received a liberal education concerning Arctic travel and gold-mining, he, in turn, touch by touch, painted an ever clearer portrait of her. She amplified the ranch life of her girlhood, prattling on about horses and dogs and persons and things until it was as if he saw the whole process of her growth and her becoming. All this he was able to trace on through the period of her father's failure and death, when she ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... in secret; she worships, she adores without a calculation of return; she loves her fellows, as she loves God,—for their own sakes. And so one might fancy that the Virgin of paradise, under whose care she lived, had rewarded the chaste girlhood and the sacred life of the old man's wife by surrounding her with a sort of halo which preserved her beauty from the wrongs of time. The alterations of that beauty Plato would have glorified as the ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... tinker the rhymes, and lope any superfluity of feet. The senior office boy "just spread himself," as he said, and delighted to do the job in style. But there was a woman fading into a gray old-maidishness which had hardly ever been girlhood, who did not at all approve of these corrections. She endured them because over the signature of "Heather Bell" it was a joy to see in the rich, close luxury of type her own poetry, even though it might be a trifle tattered and tossed about by hands ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... necessary to record what occurred on the previous night. As we know, Nagendra had held no converse with Kunda Nandini on his return. In her own room, with her head on the pillow, Kunda had wept the whole night, not the easy tears of girlhood, but from a mortal wound. Whosoever in childhood has in all sincerity delivered the priceless treasure of her heart to any one, and has in exchange received only neglect, can imagine the piercing pain of that weeping. "Why have I preserved my life," she ...
— The Poison Tree - A Tale of Hindu Life in Bengal • Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
... those keen, quizzical eyes; but what the sight roused in him was not so much disapproval as pity, and an immense longing to help and comfort. He loved her; he understood her; he honestly believed he could help her to rise above the weaknesses of girlhood, and become the fine large-hearted woman which Providence had intended her to be; and the time had come when he intended to speak his mind and ask her to be his wife. The silence had lasted so long that at last Joan herself became conscious of it, and roused herself to apologise ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Lean your stricken head upon me—this is still your lover's breast! She who sleeps was first and sweetest—none we have to take her place; Empty is the little cradle—absent is the little face. Other children may be given; but this rose beyond recall, But this garland of your girlhood, will be dearest of them all. None will ever, Araluen, nestle where you used to be, In my heart of hearts, you darling, when the world was new to me; We were young when you were with us, life and love were ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... I like it. It carried me back to my girlhood and the summers in the Sandy River valley. I don't know why it is, of late, that my mind turns so often back to those days, and with such affection. Perhaps it is only because I find myself once more living in the country. It may be true that life is a circle, ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... Hung, in the stately way of old, From the ears' drooping lobes On festivals and Lord's-day of the week, Show all too matron-sober for the cheek,— Which, now I look again, is perfect child, Or no—or no—'t is girlhood's very self, Moulded by some deep, mischief-ridden elf So meek, so maiden mild, But startling the close gazer with the sense Of passions forest-shy and forest-wild, And delicate ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... friends on the vine-grown porch. They seemed strangely trivial and unmeaning compared to the exhilarating present. She was living now, feeling the force of a rising growth, her horizon widening to suit that which her eyes sought, the dependence of her sheltered girlhood gone from her as the great adventure called upon untouched energies and untried forces. It was like looking back on another girl, or like a woman looking back ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... any courage I owe it to my grandmother. I will perhaps be pardoned if I say that all my girlhood life was spent with my Grandmother Bronson, a very small woman, weighing less than ninety pounds, small featured, always quaintly dressed in the old-fashioned Levantine silk with two breadths only in the skirt, a crossed silk handkerchief with a small white one folded neatly across ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... sometimes caused her to laugh merrily; and her musical voice once used to mingle with Rupert's and my own more manly and deeper notes, in something like audible mirth; not that Lucy was ever boisterous or loud; but, in early girlhood, she had been gay and animated, to a degree that often blended with the noisier clamour of us boys. With Grace, this had never happened. She seldom spoke, except in moments when the rest were still; and her laugh was rarely audible, though so often heartfelt ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... listened. Without was balm and starlight and the spirit of flowers, breathed out in odours. The quaint and pretty tune rose and fell, quavered, lilted along as it listed without regard for law and order. It struck Miss Mattie to the heart. Her girlhood, with its misty dreams of happiness, came back to her on the ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... quasi Simpson—formerly Moissart—was, in sober fact, my great, great, grandmother. In her youth she had been beautiful, and even at eighty-two, retained the majestic height, the sculptural contour of head, the fine eyes and the Grecian nose of her girlhood. By the aid of these, of pearl-powder, of rouge, of false hair, false teeth, and false tournure, as well as of the most skilful modistes of Paris, she contrived to hold a respectable footing among the beauties ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... new complication. It had begun to rain. Hopelessly lost in the woods and a storm coming on! It was a situation to try the patience of a saint. And the girls were not saints. They were just happy, fun-loving, lovable specimens of young American girlhood who could upon occasion show rather alarming flashes ...
— Billie Bradley on Lighthouse Island - The Mystery of the Wreck • Janet D. Wheeler
... spot in every man's armour; there is always an Achilles' heel. I am no exception. Well, the gods ordained that I, James Sefton, a man who thought himself made wholly of steel, should fall in love with a piece of pink-and-white girlhood. What a ridiculous bit of nonsense! I suppose it was done to teach me I am a fool just like other men. I had begun to believe that I was exceptional, but ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... got letters from the Josselyns and Dakie Thayne. There was news in them such as thrills always the half-comprehending sympathies of girlhood. Leslie's vague suggestion of romance had become fulfilment. Dakie Thayne was wild with rejoicing that dear old Noll was to marry Sue. "She had always made him think of Noll, and his ways and likings, ever since that ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... the usefulness of womankind. Tarnish the sacredness of girlhood and you scar the purity of womanhood. Deface the beautiful countenance of chastity, which is found in the bosom of girlhood, and you not only mar the happiness of girlhood, but you deface and obliterate the families of the future, ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... door near which the others sat enjoying the balmy midsummer afternoon, beckoning to one of her brothers to follow her, as the big fellow did unquestioningly, for Lightfoot had been, almost from young girlhood, the dominant force in the family, even the strong father, though it was contrary to the spirit of the time, admiring and yielding to his one daughter without much comment. The great, hulking youth, well armed and ready for any adventure, joined her, nothing both, and the two disappeared, ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... one who was evidently a late comer, and whose presence appeared to fill the apartment. All the others paled before her, as do the stars when the moon rises among them. She was evidently young, and yet she did not suggest youth. One would almost imagine that she had never had a childhood or a girlhood, but was rather a direct creation of metropolitan society. Her exquisitely turned shoulders and arms were bare, and the diamonds about her neck were a circlet of fire. The complexion of her fair oval face was singularly ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... of Dorothy's childhood swell to the slim charms of girlhood, held his own counsel and worshipped her dumbly. Perhaps he remembered the gulf that had separated his father's log cabin from her uncle's manor house in the old Virginia days, but of these things no ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... changed. All the old sweetness was there, that pathetic sweetness which had made the miners call her the Madonna; but alas, forever gone from her was the fragrant flower of girlhood. Her pallor was excessive, and the softness had vanished out of her face, leaving there only lines of suffering. Sorrow had kindled in her grey eyes a spiritual lustre, a shining, tearless brightness. Ah me, sad, sad, indeed, was the ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... Jack's turn to be surprised. He looked at the lady beside him. She was barely thirty. The beauty of her girlhood had ripened into the maturer beauty of womanhood. There was the same dazzling complexion, the same soft flush upon the cheeks. The eyes, too, were wonderfully like Ida's. Jack looked, and as he looked he ...
— Jack's Ward • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... attention to the curvature of the spine developed by the exclusively sit-at-a-desk-and-study-a-book type of education bequeathed to the girlhood of the nation by the medieval monastery: It ignores the chorea, otherwise known as St. Vitus' dance developed by overstudy and underexercise; it disregards the malnutrition of hasty breakfasts, and lunches of pickles, fudge, cream-puffs and other kickshaws, not ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... farms and villages rush past. She was frightened at the speed at which she was going, and the feeling came over her that she was entering a new phase of life, and was being hurried towards a very different world from that in which she had spent her peaceful girlhood and her monotonous life. ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... the restful peace of happy, innocent girlhood, God called her to her divine work of helpin' to redeem a world ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... politeness frowns on too abrupt a departure from a lady, particularly one whom we have companioned thus distantly from the careless simplicity of girlhood to the equally careless but complex businesses of adolescence. The world is all before her, and her chronicler may not be her guide. She will have adventures, for everybody has. She will win through with them, for everybody does. She may even meet bolder and badder men than the policeman—Shall we ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... a novelist in a class by herself. She never impressed me as a natural story-teller, save when she lived over again that happy girlhood which served to relieve the sadness of her mature life. In parts of Adam Bede and throughout The Mill on the Floss she seems to tell her stories as though she really enjoyed the work. All the scenes of her beautiful girlhood in the ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... first indicated a changing mind. " Well, what will be, will be," she murmured with a prolonged sigh of resignation. " What will be, will be. Girls are very headstrong in these days, and there is nothing much to be done with them. They go their own roads. It wasn't so in my girlhood. - We were obliged to pay attention to our ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... however, might be an improvement, and so, dear, I am going to forestall my Christmas present and give it to you now. I suppose you will value it none the less because I used to wear it long ago in my girlhood days;" and Miss Latimer, lifting a string of fairest pearls from the box, clasped them round her niece's neck as ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... through time to the ancestors of his subjects. Thus, the case of Josephine which he describes. She was eighteen years old and she lived at Voiron, in the department of the Isere. Under hypnotism Colonel de Rochas sent her adventuring back through her adolescence, her girlhood, her childhood, breast-infancy, and the silent dark of her mother's womb, and, still back, through the silence and the dark of the time when she, Josephine, was not yet born, to the light and life of a previous living, when she had been a churlish, suspicious, ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... inner sense leapt to the outer vision, and she saw how it was. The room was a reproduction of her own bedroom at home, only newer and more luxurious. It was almost as if some ghost of herself had been there while she slept—as if her own hand had done everything in a dream of her girlhood wherein common things had ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... found at Lima likely to foster the joyousness of early girlhood. Mr. Ponsonby was excessively fond of her; but his affection to her only marked, by contrast, the gulf between him and her mother. There was no longer any open misconduct on his part, and Mrs. Ponsonby was almost tremblingly attentive to his wishes; but he was chill and sarcastic in his manner ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Thus, from infancy to girlhood, Jeanne had heard continually of the woes of the war, and had herself witnessed some of the wretchedness that it caused. A feeling of intense patriotism grew in her with her growth. The deliverance ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... embodiment of purity and heavenly graces, the most perfect combination of modesty, devotion, patience, affection, gratitude and loveliness, and the perfection of physical beauty. We watch with deep interest the steady and gradual development from girlhood to womanhood, when the whole person improves in grace and elegance, the voice becomes more sonorous and melodious, and the angles and curvatures of her contour become more rounded and amplified, preparatory for her high ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... In early girlhood she had been taken, along with her elder brother, the Duke d'Enghien, to the Hotel de Rambouillet; and the salons of the Rue St. Thomas du Louvre were probably the most fitting school for such a mind as hers, in which grandeur and finesse were ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... the well-loved and familiar view of heath and sky and sea. There seemed to be no particular reason why the past should call to her so insistently to-day; there was, so far as she knew, nothing to account for it, nothing had happened to remind her particularly of the girlhood which lay so far behind her, and of bygone days when the hours had been all too short for the joy they ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... had spent much of her girlhood at Kingthorpe, and had always been made welcome at The Knoll; but although she saw the Wendovers established upon their native soil, the rulers of the land, and revered by all the parish, she had grown up with the firm conviction that Dr. Rylance, of Cavendish Square, and Dr. Rylance's ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... enough to see in her face what it had been, nor to appreciate the fine profile that remained. Hers was not the pink-and-white of rosy girlhood, the only beauty I could understand; and wherein her toil-set features differed from those of the other drudging farmers' wives or the shut-in women of the little village, ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... the novel is this. The heroine, who is young, but not in her first girlhood, has in her aspect and her natural disposition everything that is akin to the mystical aspirations of the saint; but, more or less desolated by the diffused skepticism of the day, she has been robbed of innocence by a man, an old family friend, ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... rested, memories of a happy girlhood welled up in her soft and suffering breast. The geraniums in the window she had watered daily. The canary—she had fed it with groundsel. The brass skillets on the mantelshelf—they had been burnished by her hand. The cushion on "father's" chair was ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... Every one noticed it. Neighbours used to meet her mother in the strasse and say, "Frau Schmidt, your Gretchen is a woman." Frau Schmidt would nod proudly and reply, "Yes, we have seen that; my Peter and I—we are very happy." Thus Gretchen left her girlhood behind her. It was her habit, so Grundelheim tells us, to walk out in the forest with one Hans Breitel, an actor at the municipal theatre. He used to teach her to talk to the birds, and when she besought him ardently to tell her stories ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... really was; then it was shown that she was no hospital matron, but a young and singularly graceful and accomplished gentlewoman of wealth and position, who had, not in a moment of national enthusiasm, but as the set purpose of her life from girlhood up, devoted herself to the studying of God's great and good laws of health, and to trying to apply them to the help of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... still pursues in Cleveland the studies which have literally illumined the world. One of the earliest pioneers of science in geology and archaeology, Charles Whittlesey is identified with Cleveland, where the girlhood of the gifted novelist, Constance Fenimore Woolson, was passed. There, too, Charles F. Browne began to make his pseudonym of Artemus Ward known, and helped found the school of American humor. He was born in Maine; but his fun tastes of the ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... when queens preferred the snug seclusion of those dainty rooms overlooking the dank inner courtyard to the frigid grandeur of their State chambers. Therein it was that Marie Leczinska was wont to instruct her young daughters in the virtues as she had known them in her girlhood's thread-bare home, not as her residence at the profligate French Court had ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... Baillie, as she was called after her marriage, was the daughter of a very eminent Covenanter, Sir Patrick Hume of Polwarth. Grisell was born in 1665, and during all the years of her girlhood her father was seldom able to come home to his house of Polwarth, for fear of the officers of the Government seizing him. On one occasion he was taken and cast into prison in Dumbarton Castle for full fifteen months. ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... come for her to cross another bridge. Thank God she would still be young, but the kid of her would be left on the other side. If Martin had been there, she would have told him some of the things that Alice had said about being honest and paying up, and left it to him to say whether the girlhood which she had wanted to spin out was over and must be put away ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... girlhood onwards Cleopatra had cherished very definite ideas about the man of her taste. In this she was by no means exceptional. But perhaps the circumstances that she had abided more steadfastly than most by the pattern her imagination had originally limned distinguished ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... Perhaps we should include the genus Girl, also, but of that we are not certain; for, not to dwell upon the fact that we have never been a girl, and are, therefore, unable to enter into the feelings of girlhood, we hold that girls are better than boys, as women are better than men, and that, consequently, they take more kindly to school life. What boys are we know, unless the breed has changed very much since we were young, which is now upwards of—but our age does not concern ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... long over this hard-wrung gossip. He could not believe that the object of his dreams was no longer in her first girlhood. There was some mistake. Then it was absurd to suppose that she was reduced to the acceptance of inferior third-class men. How could a waiter understand the charms of Saunders' historical nose? Evidently she had selected him from the whole corps ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... take a back seat and let me try my hand without any advice from you. The girl's name is Doris Kenyon and she's an orphan. Her father used to be the general manager of my redwood mill on Humboldt Bay, and her mother was a girlhood friend of my late wife's; so naturally I've established a sort of protectorate over her. She has to work for a living, and any time there's a potentially fine, two-million-dollar husband like Joey lying round loose I like to see some deserving working girl land the cuss. As a matter of fact, ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... fidelity were soon recognized. He was promoted rapidly, and finally reached the highest office in the gift of the Mogul—that of prime minister of the empire—which he filled with conspicuous ability, wisdom and prudence for many years. As his daughter grew to girlhood she attracted the attention of Prince Jehanghir, who became violently in love with her, and, to prevent complications, the emperor caused her to be married to Shir Afghan Kahn, a young Persian of excellent ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... afraid only to go on living in the same world with one who had taken her girlhood and her womanhood, afraid only of this frightful fever in her veins, of this poison ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... these last weeks of her girlhood were almost too happy. She went over several times with her mother and Lady Dighton to Hunsdon, and grew familiar with her future home; she saw the charming rooms that were being prepared for herself, and could sit down in the midst of all this new wealth ...
— A Canadian Heroine - A Novel, Volume 3 (of 3) • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... delicate bit of womanhood, or girlhood, coming to receive a prize, I suppose," said Mr. Gawaine. "She must be one of the racers in the sacks, who had set ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... changed but that his hungry and unhappy eyes could rest on her, appeased and comforted. And yet she was changed, too. Her girlhood, with all its innocence of suffering, had died in her. But the touch of that death was masterly, it had redeemed her beauty from the vagueness of its youth. Grief, that drags or sharpens or deforms the faces of older women, had given to hers the precision that it lacked. There was a faint ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... in biography, upon noble deeds and sacrifices, especially those which show that the greatest man is not the greatest orator, or the tricky politician. They are a curse; what we need is noble men. National loss comes as the penalty for frivolous boyhood and girlhood, that gains no moral stamina from ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... to embrace as its own, wondered why she did not love him, wondered if she should, had she never met the other man. Doubtless, for he possessed all the attributes of the conquering hero, and she would have excavated the ideals of her romantic girlhood, brushed and re-cut their garments, and then deliberately set fire to her imagination. If the responsive spark had held sullenly aloof, awaiting its time, she, knowing nothing of its existence, would soon have ceased to remember the half-conscious labours of the initial stage of her affections, ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... from the station and her eyes fixed on the ground. She wanted to run away, as she had run from him the first time she had ever seen him. Then, as now, he came in triumph, hailed by the plaudits of his fellows; and now, as on that long-departed day of her young girlhood, he was borne high over the heads of the people, for Minnie cried to her to look; they were carrying him on their shoulders to his carriage. She had had only that brief glimpse of him, before he was lost in the crowd that was so glad to get him back again ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... short-lived hallucination. It humiliated him bitterly to think that all his religious zeal had proved in her regard but the empty crackling of a fire of thorns. No matter what may be a youth's sentiment for girlhood, he never likes it to be witness of anything disparaging to his sturdy resolution and manly purpose. But Adele had seen him shake like a reed under the deepest emotions that could give tone to character; and in his mortification ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... oak; the roofs of both were of the same sombre wood; so also were the floors. They were literally oak chambers. And in both rooms the draperies of the beds, chairs, and windows were of white dimity. But in Sophia's, there were many pictures, souvenirs of girlhood's friendships, needlework, finished and unfinished drawings, and a great number of books mostly on subjects not usually attractive to young women. Charlotte's room had no pictures on its walls, and ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... stopped. Upon a bench sat a sweet-faced mother holding a sleeping babe in her arms, while a curly-pated boy nestled his head in her lap and slept through the magic lanes and fairy woods of dreamland. The woman's face was one of those that blend the confidence of girlhood with the uncertainty of womanhood. 'Twas a pretty face, which had been plainly tagged by its Maker for a light-hearted trip through this world, but it had been seared by the ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson
... old Sheep Eater, who rarely talked of her people. She settled herself more comfortably, pulled her blanket around her shoulders, and began her tale in a dull, listless way, but as scene after scene came before her mind, she forgot her audience and herself and lived again those days of her girlhood. As I watched the flush come to her cheeks and the light kindle in her eyes, I lost sight of the withered old relic of a tribe now passed away, and saw only the beautiful girl of the past taking part in the ...
— The Sheep Eaters • William Alonzo Allen
... resided nearer to him than his other daughters, and who had the same affectionate zeal to sustain him, that she had manifested by secretly slipping a portion of her earnings into his pocket, in the days of her girlhood. She was as vigilant and active in behalf of the women discharged from prison, as her father was in behalf of the men. Through the exertions of herself and other benevolent women, an asylum for these poor outcasts, ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... to become of the landlords?" inquired Polly, with a wistful remembrance of her girlhood's ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... four years of age; he had to lay aside his work for three weeks, and, on resuming it, could not tell to which child the respective likeness he had in hand belonged. The mistakes become less numerous on the part of the mother during the boyhood and girlhood of the twins, but are almost as frequent as before on the part of strangers. I have many instances of tutors being unable to distinguish their twin pupils. Two girls used regularly to impose on their music teacher when ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... given her life. As she looked her face became radiant. Dave was unkempt, unshaven, dirty, but to her he was of a godlike beauty, and the knowledge that he was hers to comfort and guard was strangely thrilling. Her love for Ed, even that first love of her girlhood, had been nothing like this. How could it have been like this? she asked herself. How could she have loved deeply when, at the time, her own nature lacked depth? Experience had broadened her, and suffering had uncovered depths in her being which nothing ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... age, she had won the day. Uncle John had agreed to a small but adequate allowance, Aunt Janet had wept a few rather bitter tears in private, and Joan had come to London to train as a secretary, according to herself. They had taken rooms for her in the house of a lady Aunt Janet had known in girlhood, and there Joan had dutifully remained. It was not very lively, but she had a sense of gratitude in her heart towards Aunt Janet which prevented her from moving. Joan was not thinking of all this as she sat there, nor was she exactly seeing the sweep of grass that spread out in front ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... be true that the boy is father to the man, it is even more tritely true that the girl is mother to the woman, there being here less chance for change. So it was with Mary Virginia. That gracious little girlhood of hers, lived among the birds and bees and blossoms of an old Carolina garden, had sent her into the Church School with a settled and definite idealism as part of her nature. Her creed was simple enough: The world she knew was the best ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... had really happened. Rumour had been busy, and Ambrose Gifford had been supposed to have been slain in a disgraceful fight; but nothing was absolutely certain; and Humphrey Ratcliffe, who had known Mary from her girlhood, now discovered that he had loved her always, and that he had failed to win her in her early youth because he had never tried to do so, and now that he loved her passionately, he was to find his suit ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... Peters' statement, she approached the injured man—the friend of her childhood and her girlhood—and did what little she could to make his position at least ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... daughter appeared in Old Chester and said she was going to hire a house, and bring her mother back to end her days in the home of her girlhood, Old Chester displayed a friendly interest; when she decided upon a house on Main Street, directly opposite Captain Price's, it began to recall the romance ...
— An Encore • Margaret Deland
... Duff Salter, rather angrily, "to maintain a whole family on the servitude of your young body, wearing its roundness down to bone, exciting your nervous system, and inviting premature age upon a nature created for a longer girlhood, and for ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... a Hellene. We will talk of the Nile, not of the Cephissus," Artazostra said, whenever he spoke of home. Then she would tell of Babylon and Persepolis, and Mardonius of forays beside the wide Caspian, and Roxana of her girlhood, while Gobryas was satrap of Egypt, spent beside the magic river, of the Pharaohs, the great pyramid, of Isis and Osiris and the world beyond the dead. Before the Athenian was opened the golden East, its glitter, its wonderment, its fascination. ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... finally entreated the baronet's permission to address his daughter herself on the subject. To this Sir Robert offered no opposition; he was ignorant of the strength of Constantia's feelings with regard to Burrell. She had been affianced to him in her early girlhood, when much too young to have an opinion on the matter; and as the union had never been pressed upon her, she had not been called upon to state any objections to it. Her poor mother had seen, with the clearness of a mother's ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... was a typical Englishwoman of her age, which was forty-three, and of her class, which was that from which are drawn most of the women from whom the clergy of the Established Church choose their wives. There are thousands such, living in serene girlhood, wifehood, or widowhood, to be found in the villages and country towns of dear old England. With but very few exceptions, they are kindly-natured, unimaginative, imbued with a shrinking dislike of any exaggerated display of emotion; ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... 1790, when the evils against which Mrs. Fry had to contend were intensified and a hundred times blacker, it cannot do harm to recall the condition of prisons in England during the last quarter of the eighteenth century; that is, during the girlhood of Elizabeth Fry. Possibly some echoes of the marvellous exertions of Howard in prison reform had reached her Earlham home, and produced, though unconsciously, an interest in the subject which was destined to bear fruit at a later period. At ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... nor occupied with work, run upon the freedom which marriage shall bring them, and form a distorted image of the world, of which they know as little as of their own undisciplined selves. Denied the just and wholesome amusements of society during their girlhood, it is scarcely a matter of surprise that they should throw themselves into the giddiest whirl of its excitement when marriage sets them free ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... he met Jane Welsh, a brilliant and beautiful girl, descended on her father's side from John Knox and on her mother's from William Wallace. With the spirit of Wallace, she climbed in her girlhood up to places that a boy would have considered perilous. When she was forbidden to take up such a masculine study as Latin, she promptly learned to decline a Latin noun. Carlyle had much trouble in winning her; but she finally consented to be his wife, and ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... go on calling her Hannah Winter, for she married Hermie Slocum and became, according to law, Mrs. Hermie Slocum, but remained, somehow, Hannah Winter in spite of law and clergy, though with no such intent on her part. She had never even heard of Lucy Stone. It wasn't merely that her Chicago girlhood friends still spoke of her as Hannah Winter. Hannah Winter suited her—belonged to her and was characteristic. Mrs. Hermie Slocum sort of melted and ran down off her. Hermie was the sort of man who, christened Herman, is called Hermie. That all those who had known her before her marriage ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... upon the whole a hard worker. I wrote a series of volumes on various portions of Italian, and especially Florentine, history, beginning with The Girlhood of Catherine de Medici. They were all fairly well received, the Life of Filippo Strozzi perhaps the most so. But the volume on the story of the great quarrel between the Papacy and Venice, entitled Paul the Pope and Paul the Friar, was, I think, the best. The volumes entitled A Decade ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... prospects, to the accompaniment of the roaring sea, and a third party was destructive of such intention. Besides, poor May, although exceedingly unselfish and sweet and good, was at that transition period of life when girlhood is least attractive—at least to young men: when bones are obtrusive, and angles too conspicuous, and the form generally is too suggestive of flatness and longitude; while shyness marks the manners, and inexperience dwarfs the mind. We would not, however, suggest for a moment that May was ugly. ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... as any one could wish for. There is something wonderfully attractive about her, she is so pretty, proud, and high-spirited, and, at the same time, so intensely real and human. It is a pleasure to say that the author of this "love story of the university" has given us a picture of modern girlhood that goes straight to the heart and stays there. ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... very brink of the grave. All that had been sweet and strong in her friendship with Elsie now flooded in upon her in a mighty wave of undefined emotion. She was immediately conscious only of the wasted figure before her, and its peril, but back of consciousness were unformed memories of their girlhood together, of the inseparable intimacy of their young womanhood, and of that shy and tender time when she had been the confidante ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... in the short time I had been with him an affection stronger than I had ever felt for any one since I had lost my two intensely-beloved parents—a loss that had embittered the otherwise happy period of girlhood. I had never realized until that night how much he was to me. Pity, perhaps, for the bitter pain that had so changed his whole nature, may have awakened me to the fact; but still there was an inexplicable charm about him that even merry-hearted, trifling ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... which I feel is eternal, Must have begun with my life, and that only an absence was ended When we met and knew in our souls that we loved one another. For from the first was no doubt. The earliest hints of the passion, Whispered to girlhood's tremulous dream, may be mixed with misgiving, But, when the very love comes, it bears no vagueness of meaning; Touched by its truth (too fine to be felt by the ignorant senses, Knowing but looks and utterance) soul unto soul makes confession, Silence to silence speaks. And I think that this subtile ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... soul had been ravaged by a terrible grief, which had never been overcome; the law had killed her brother; in her girlhood, she had been tortured by only too frequent repetitions of the sight of her father, whom the law had loaded with chains and punished with severe imprisonment; her sorely wounded heart had found consolation only in a single ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... she rose and confronted him, smiling into his troubled eyes; grace of girlhood and dignity of womanhood adorably mingled ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... left alone, she seated herself before her old music stand which had been brought down to welcome her, and proceeded to glance over and arrange the pieces she had learned and loved in her young girlhood. Most of them made her smile, and when she reflected upon how difficult she used to think them, she realized that now that it was over she was glad for the German regime. Helen had accounted herself an ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... has grown to age in girlhood's fleeting years, And has one only task—to bathe its buried love in tears; The all of life that yet remains to me is but its breath; Then tell me, is it meet that I should seek the ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... nor, in grace of womanhood, ever surpassed one of the female characters there described. By the time she wrote this tale, her taste and judgment had revolted against the exaggerated idealisms of her early girlhood, and she went to the extreme of reality, closely depicting characters as they had shown themselves to her in actual life: if there they were strong even to coarseness,—as was the case with some that she had met ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... showing him at his fullest development and in the complete enjoyment of his physical powers. The men were always represented in their maturity, the women never lost the rounded breast and slight hips of their girlhood, but a dwarf always preserved his congenital ugliness, for his salvation in the other world demanded that it should be so. Had he been given normal stature, the double, accustomed to the deformity ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... tragedy—had changed her. Columbine, the passionate, the impulsive had turned into a being that was foreign to herself. All the happy girlhood had been stamped out of her as by the cruel pressure of a hot iron. She had ceased to feel the agony of it; somehow she did not think that she ever could feel pain again. The nerve tissues had been destroyed and all vitality was gone. The ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... in Boston on the 6th of March 1888, two days after the death of her father in the same city. Miss Alcott's early education had partly been given by the naturalist Thoreau, but had chiefly been in the hands of her father; and in her girlhood and early womanhood she had fully shared the trials and poverty incident to the life of a peripatetic idealist. In a newspaper sketch entitled "Transcendental Wild Oats,'' afterwards reprinted in the volume Silver Pitchers (1876), ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... girlhood are much different now from what they were in my day," said the lady, with a sigh. "When I was young we never thought of doing the ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... figure and face were enveloped in a marvellous wrap, compounded in equal proportions of Russian sables and white cloth. It had not long arrived from Woerth, and Roger had allowed himself some jibes as to its probable cost. Daphne's "simplicity," the pose of her girlhood, was in fact breaking down in all directions. The arrogant spending instinct had gained upon the moderating and self-restraining instinct. The results often made Barnes uncomfortable. But he was inarticulate, ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to "my manners and customs" and the course of my daily life, there is little or nothing to tell. I am essentially a worker, and a hard worker, and this I have been since my early girlhood. When I am asked what are my working hours, I reply:—"All the time when I am not either sitting at meals, taking exercise, or sleeping"; and this is literally true. I live with the pen in my hand, not only from morning till night, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... one whose name is very seldom spoken? Others may not be thinking so much of your loss—your supposed loss," the old gentleman conscientiously supplied—"as your sensitiveness leads you to imagine. But you will give occasion for thinking and for talking if you tear open now your girlhood's secrets. Whom does it concern, my dear, to know where or ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... again, but girlhood made all woman by immense tenderness, by the up-rush of a wild love, and by the awakening of all her instincts of home and mating and child-bearing. And then had come that mad, wind-blown twilight at the riverside when the spirit ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... Elizabeth and I—Elizabeth is my daughter, Mr. Kendrick.... But it is Captain Kendrick, isn't it? Of course, I might have known. You look the sea—you know what I mean—I can always tell. My dear husband was a captain. You knew that, of course. And in the old days at my girlhood home so many, many captains used to come and go. Our old home—my girlhood home, I mean—was always open. I met my husband there.... Ah me, those days are not these days! What my dear father would have said if he could have known.... But we don't know ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... Romance: Relates the story of a fair Virginian whose youthful mistake is righted through the Reno divorce courts. The fair heroine is reunited with her girlhood sweetheart, and they live happily ever after; a short story depicting another ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... And girlhood seemed like some fair sunny day Without a cloud to mar the summer sky. On pleasure's airy pinions borne away Too swiftly far ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... is in it once more—parted for ever from the detested uncle, mistress of this one place that holds for her the only happy memories of her youth. Here she and her father had lived—she a young, young child, and he an old one—a most happy couple; and here, too, she had grown to girlhood. And now here she is again, free to roam, to order, to direct, with no single hitch anywhere to mar ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... She was an unskilled workwoman, not especially gifted in any way or fitted by her upbringing to earn her daily bread. Long years of her girlhood had been spent at a select school, and in the result she knew a part of the Book of Kings by heart, with the Mercy speech from the Merchant of Venice and the date of the Norman Conquest. Every day she bought the Fieramosca, and ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... tremendous forces of the upper and the nether world which play for the mastery of the soul of a woman during the few years in which she passes from plastic girlhood to the ripe maturity of womanhood, he may well stand in ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... which are not called vulgar only because the better classes use them, come trippingly, but never with a pleasant effect from her lips. Nor has she that sense of reticence which is said to have been the distinguishing mark of unmarried girlhood at some former period. That she should talk frivolously on great subjects, if she talks on them at all, is only to be expected. It would be well if her curiosity and her conversation left untouched delicate matters, the existence of which she may suspect but ...
— Punch, Vol. 99., July 26, 1890. • Various
... In their girlhood this sister, a few years older than she, had been the object of her deepest devotion. Caroline was beautiful and clever, and to question her opinions never entered Miss Virginia's mind. It puzzled and hurt her loyal heart that she could not quite get back to the old attitude ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard
... the same frank, tender mouth, winning wherever she smiled; the same slight, graceful figure; and the same manner—its very simplicity a reflex of that refined and quiet life she had always led. For hers had been an isolated life, buried since her girlhood in a great house far away from the broadening influences of a city, and saddened by the daily witness of a slow decay of all she had been taught to revere. But it had been a life so filled with the largeness of generous deeds that its returns had brought her the ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... doubt gave her the aspect of one still new to life, presenting an innocent and naive attitude before the surprises of experience. She looked very guileless and youthful between those two men. Lingard gazed at her with that unconscious tenderness mingled with wonder, which some men manifest toward girlhood. There was nothing of a conqueror of kingdoms in his bearing. Jorgenson preserved his amazing abstraction which seemed neither to hear nor see anything. But, evidently, he kept a mysterious grip on events in the world of living men because he asked ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... off with a sigh, as the face of her girlhood's friend came before her mind's eye. Then laying her hand on her brother's arm, ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... early girlhood she had been married to an elderly and jealous soldier. Her false position in the midst of a gay Court had doubtless done something to bring a veil of sadness over a face that must once have been bright ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... told story. The heroine is as fine a type of girlhood as one could wish to set before our little British damsels ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... fact, during Alicia's girlhood Lady Grillyer had always been at the greatest pains to preserve her daughter's innocent simplicity, as being preeminently a more marketable commodity than precocious worldliness. But if reminded of this she would probably have retorted ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... Why don't you get your silk embroidery or practise upon the spinnet? Such advantages as you have! And all thrown away on a girl who does not know when she is well off. I have no manner of patience with you, Gertrude. If I had had such opportunities in my girlhood, I should never have been ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... passed she found herself more and more excluded from the intimacy that had been so precious. She was thrown much into the society of Raoul de Saint Hubert. All that they had gone through together had drawn them very closely to each other, and Diana often wondered what her girlhood would have been like if it had been spent under his guardianship instead of that of Sir Aubrey Mayo. The sisterly affection she had never given her own brother she gave to him, and, with the firm hold over himself that he had never again slackened, the Vicomte accepted the role of elder ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... possession of her small mind. The Duchess was the fittest person to present her to her gracious mistress, or her gracious mistress's representative, at the first drawing-room of the coming season. Mrs. Winstanley had old friends, friends who had known her in her girlhood, who would have been happy to undertake the office. Captain Winstanley had an ancient female relative, living in a fossil state at Hampton Court, and vaguely spoken of as "a connection," who would willingly ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... Goose in the morning, a white-winged, erratic craft, skimming the sparkling, land-locked harbours of girlhood. She returned, and already the first lifting swells beyond the sheltering bar were tossing her in their arms. She had entered ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... natives who offered for sale fruit, Irish laces, and canes made of black bog oak, with the shamrock carved on the handles. Mrs. Harris was much pleased to renew her acquaintance with the scenes of her girlhood, having sailed from Queenstown for Boston when she was ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... in her girlhood stayed at Thoresby, and occasionally came up to her father's London house, which was in Arlington Street, which visits, accepting the story told by her granddaughter, Lady Louisa Stuart, cannot have been an unmixed delight. ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... 1785, to James Boswell, Anna Seward said that she regretted it was not in her power to collect more anecdotes of Dr. Johnson’s infancy. “My mother passed her days of girlhood with an uncle at Warwick, consequently, was absent from home in the school-boy days of the great man; neither did I ever hear her mention any of the promissory sparkles which, doubtless, burst forth, though no records of them are within my knowledge. ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... to tell for the girls and boys of to-day the stories of some of their sisters of the long-ago,—girls who by eminent position or valiant deeds became historic even before they had passed the charming season of girlhood. ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... to show that a change had come over these two young women, since the giddy days of their girlhood. Jane was pale, but beautiful as ever; she was holding on her knees a sick child, about two months old, which apparently engrossed all her attention. What would be her system as a mother, might be foretold ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... Thomas, both dory mates at different times. They sat fairly well forward, and Code, glancing around during the proceedings, had caught a friendly greeting from Elsa Mallaby, who, with some of her old girlhood friends, sat ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams |
