"Maidservant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he had not come for a lesson, the dirty maidservant, who opened the third-floor door to him, showed him as a visitor into the best sitting-room. Maurice remained standing, in prescribed fashion. But he had no sooner crossed the threshold than he was aware of loud voices in the adjoining room, separated from ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... naughty, and being shut up in a room and trying to break the windows. I have an obscure picture of a house before my eyes, and of a neighbouring small shop, where the owner gave me one fig, but which to my great joy turned out to be two: this fig was given me that the man might kiss the maidservant. I remember a common walk to a kind of well, on the road to which was a cottage shaded with damascene (Chapter I./2. Damson is derived from Damascene; the fruit was formerly known as a "Damask Prune.") trees, inhabited by an old man, called a hermit, with white hair, who used to give ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... Wherewith I delivered what is technically known in "sporting" circles as a "right hook in the ear," followed by a "left swing to the chin," and my assailant immediately disappeared behind a bush, with a flash of pink silk calves and buckled shoes. Then, while the trim maidservant filled the air with her lamentations, the imp and I ran hot-foot for the wall, over which I bundled him neck and crop, and we set off ...
— My Lady Caprice • Jeffrey Farnol
... step into the hall for a moment," said the maidservant, "and I'll inquire if my missis is at leisure; but if it's the new ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... bribed Mrs. Richards to do something more than 'take her son in and do for him'; and Mrs. Richards, as her first compliance with these requests, had kept the latch-key in her own pocket. So matters went on for a week; but when Mrs. Richards found that her maidservant was never woken by Mr. Charley's raps after midnight, and that she herself was obliged to descend in her dressing-gown, she changed her mind, declared to herself that it was useless to attempt to keep a grown gentleman in leading- strings, and put the key on the table on ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... hands;—for my father fought for you, and adventured his life, and delivered you out of the hand of Midian: and ye are risen up against my father's house this day, and have slain his sons, threescore and ten persons, upon one stone, and have made Abimelech, the son of his maidservant, king over the men of Shechem, because he is your brother;—if ye then have dealt truly and uprightly with Jerubbaal and with his house this day, then rejoice ye in Abimelech, and let him also rejoice in you: but ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... full of the adventure and the golden prospect before her. She wondered if the house she was going to was as grand as Woodview, and she was struck by the appearance of the maidservant who opened the ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... choose to say with some deference, and had differed, if they differed, in silence. But Mrs. Proudie interrogated him and then lectured. "Neither thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant," said she impressively, and more than once, as though Mr. Harding had forgotten the words. She shook her finger at him as she quoted the favourite law, as though menacing him with punishment, and then called upon him categorically to state whether he did not think that travelling ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... early part of the Percy Folio, and the ballad is therefore deficient. Where gaps are marked in the text with a row of asterisks, about nine stanzas are lost in each case—half a page torn out by a seventeenth-century maidservant to light a fire! Luckily we can supply ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... message to an old maidservant, whom she met in the yard, and who went in and told the housewife. The housewife ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... Amador raised his nose in the air, and saluted with the two flakes of fire that sparkled in his bright eyes the pretty maidservant, who thought him neither so ugly nor so foul, nor so bestial; when, following Perrotte up the steps, Amador received on the nose, cheeks, and other portions of his face a slash of the whip, which made him see all the lights of the Magnificat, so well was the dose administered by ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... the stones of the court-yard, I became aware that a certain maidservant had been obtruding upon my view with a persistency that might be intentional. I now regarded her, as she stood in a small doorway leading to the kitchen. She was a plump, well-made thing, with a wholesome, honest face, but the sluttishness ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... reflect that while he lived they never failed to have champagne at their dinner parties; and that they had three men to wait at table on such occasions, while Mr. Smith, next door, had never more than one and a maidservant. If such idiotic women would but look forward, and consider how all this must end! If the professional man spends all he earns, what remains when the supply is cut off; when the toiling head and hand can toil no more? Ah, a little of the economy and management which must ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... the childish fancies of a grandfather's heart. But he died after a few months, and Germinie had fallen back into the service of kept mistresses, boarding-house keepers, and passageway tradesmen, when the sudden death of a maidservant gave her an opportunity to enter the service of Mademoiselle de Varandeuil, then living on Rue Taitbout, in the house of ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... "They ring. A maidservant opens the door, they hand her the letter, and assure the maid that they're both so in love that they'll die on the spot at the door. The maid, stupefied, carries in their messages. All at once a gentleman appears with whiskers like sausages, as red as a lobster, announces that there is ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... and when the door was opened by a neat maidservant, he brought the box of flowers, and laid it on a table in the hall. "Miss Bond's niece!" he said, with a nod of explanation and introduction. "Thought she'd come herself; like to see the young ones. I'll be back for ye in an hour," he added to Hildegarde, ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... Selina had ceased to "wonder" about him, or even to name him—his presence or absence did not touch her personally, and she was always the centre of her own small world of interest—the little maidservant kept in her mind, and pondered over at odd times every possible solution of the mystery of this gentleman's sudden visit; of the long wet Sunday when he sat all day talking with her mistresses in the parlor; of the evening ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... retired corners . . . sitting for hours together with my head on my breast . . . conscious of a peculiar heaviness within me, and at times of a strange sensation of fear, which occasionally amounted to horror, and for which I could assign no real cause whatever." A maidservant thought him a little wrong in the head, but a Jew pedlar rebuked her for saying so, and said the child had "all the look of one of our people's children," and praised his bright eyes. With the regiment he travelled along the Sussex ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... neglige, the momentous instants spent in choosing headgear and fixing patches, the towers of hair built by the modish coiffeur—children trooping in, in hoops and uniforms, to kiss their mother's hand, the fine gentleman choosing a waistcoat and ogling the pretty embroideress, the pert young maidservant slipping a billet-doux into a beauty's hand under her husband's nose, the old beau toying with a fan, or the discreet abbe taking snuff over the morning gazette. The grand ladies of Longhi's day pay visits in hoop and farthingale, ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... and 'his justice was a robe and a diadem.' He 'broke the jaws of the wicked, and plucked the spoil out of his teeth;' and, humble in the midst of his power, he 'did not despise the cause of his manservant, or his maidservant, when they contended with him,' knowing (and amidst those old people where the multitude of mankind were regarded as the born slaves of the powerful, to be carved into eunuchs or polluted into concubines at their master's pleasure, it was no ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... like to treat your daughter like a maidservant, you may go on and search my boxes," ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge |
