"Stepmother" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the designs of his stepmother, embarked in a ship, with his sister Helle, and sailed for Colchis, where he met with a kind reception from his kinsman AEetes. The young princess, however, either becoming sea-sick, and leaning over the ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... was established and a supposed competent tutor was appointed, Booker Washington did not find that his course had ceased to be a pursuit of knowledge under difficulties. His mother and stepmother were so poor that it was not thought that his services at the salt works could be altogether dispensed with in order that he might attend school. Then a kind of compromise was made, and without the work being entirely suspended, ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike
... who were to ask clemency for the Issaeans and censure the king in that he was wronging them without previous cause. Now these men found Agro no longer in existence: he had died, leaving behind a child named Pineus. Teuta, Agro's wife and stepmother of Pineus, held the power over the Ardiaeans,[lacuna] Being [lacuna] by boldness, she made no moderate response to their requests, but woman-like she showed a vanity (due to innate recklessness as well as to the power that she was holding) by casting some of the ambassadors into prison ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio
... thought her stepmother had gone out to visit a neighbor, as she had said something about doing so earlier in the morning. Mr. Langmore had gone to the bank in town at nine o'clock and Margaret saw him come home about half-past ...
— The Mansion of Mystery - Being a Certain Case of Importance, Taken from the Note-book of Adam Adams, Investigator and Detective • Chester K. Steele
... how her stepmother would have had her killed, but the Huntsman had spared her life, and how she had wandered about the Whole day until at last ...
— Favorite Fairy Tales • Logan Marshall
... was only three years old, his mother died. And when he was five years old, there was given to him a stepmother. ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... "My stepmother wanted I should give you this. She said to thank you for the grape-juice." As he spoke he looked at me gravely out of deep-set blue eyes, and when he had delivered his message ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... it might perhaps be all right with Hilde. For she is scarcely more than a child. And I believe that at bottom she worships Ellida. But, you see, it's different with me—a stepmother who isn't so very much ...
— The Lady From The Sea • Henrik Ibsen
... grief of Constantine's life was, that he put his eldest son Crispus to death on a wicked accusation of his stepmother Fausta. On learning the truth, he caused a silver statue to be raised, bearing the inscription, "My son, whom I unjustly condemned;" and when other crimes of Fausta came to light, he caused ...
— Young Folks' History of Rome • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... exaggerated to a monstrous and almost laughable degree. Whatever may be said against me, it cannot be denied I was a pattern daughter; but it was in vain that, with the most touching patience, I submitted to my stepmother's demands; and from the hour she entered my father's house, I may say that I met with nothing ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... house seems blest indeed with a lucky fate, for none has lived there without rising to better fortune, and none has ever acquired a stain on his reputation there. One would be hard put to it to find any agree as well with their mothers as he with his stepmother—his father had already given him two, and he loved both of them as truly as he loved his mother. Recently his father gave him a third stepmother: More swears his Bible oath he has never seen a better. Moreover, he is so disposed towards his parents and children as to be neither ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... was only one of the miseries of his estate at Oxford. There is reason to believe that Balliol College was in his day a stepmother to her Scotch sons, and that their existence there was made very uncomfortable not merely at the hands of the mob of young gentlemen among whom they were obliged to live, but even more by the unfair and discriminating ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... the Frau Ahavzi had gone out, one of the little dogs who was treated by her in a very stepmother-like manner, but whose favor he had in a great degree gained by various acts of kindness, pulled him by his wide pantaloons, and acted as if he wanted Muck to follow him. Muck, who always gladly played with him, did so, and perceived that the dog was leading him to the ...
— The Oriental Story Book - A Collection of Tales • Wilhelm Hauff
... you. Eliz and I are giving a party to-night. There hasn't been any company in the house since father died four years ago, and we know he wouldn't like us to be dull, so when our stepmother went out, and sent word that she couldn't come back to-night, we decided to have a grand party. There are only to be play-people, you know; all the people in Miss Austen's books are coming, and the nice ones ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... knows but the man married her for the chance of what the child's succession might bring them! They mean to tell the fellow, when the proper time comes, how they saved him from being murdered by his stepmother, and carried him off at the risk of their lives! Well they knew him for a pot of money! You may be certain they've got all the proofs safe! I hate the ugly devil! What right has he to come to an estate, and have my children looked down upon by Mrs. Bookbinder! I'll put a spoke in her wheel, ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... surmised a special interest from that other group of facts which had first set him thinking—namely, that Steel's Corner owned a laboratory—two, for the matter of that; that old Dr. Corfield was a clever toxicologist; that Leam had stayed there during her father's honeymoon; and that her stepmother had died on the night of her arrival. "And your average Englishman calls himself a creature with brains and inductive powers!" was his unspoken commentary on the finding of the coroner's jury and the verdict of the coroner. "Bull ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... told me she was a thief. She didn't try to make any excuses for herself, but when I heard her little hard luck story and knew what she'd always been up against, I didn't wonder that she stole or committed any crime. She had had a regular Cinderella stepmother who had licked her when she was a kid because she took food from the pantry when she was hungry. The old hag called it stealing and warned the school teacher, and the other kids got hold of it and of course you know what ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... going to be. That's whom I am now—or just as soon as I change clothes with some unfortunate. It's in a book. 'Ben Blunt, the Newsboy; or, From Rags to Riches.' He run off because his cruel stepmother beat him black and blue, and he become a mere street urchin, though his father, Mr. Blunt, was a gentleman in good circumstances; and while he was a mere street urchin he sold papers and blacked boots, and he was an honest, manly lad and become adopted by a kind, rich old gentleman ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... The new stepmother quickly perceived the superior aptitudes and abilities of Abraham. She became very fond of him, and in every way encouraged his marked inclination to study and improve himself. The opportunities for ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... to Rome. [Footnote: See page 164; and portrait, page 141] It has been imitated and copied in modern times, and notably by Sir Richard Steele in his Conscious Lovers. Andria was followed by Hecyra (the Stepmother), Heautontimoroumenos, (the Self- Tormentor), Eunuchus (the Eunuch), Phormio (named from a parasite who is an active agent in the plot), and Adelphi (the Brothers), the plot of which was mainly derived from ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... neck, her cheeks tinted with varying hues reminded one of the lovely Englishwomen who have been so poetically compared in their manner to the gracefulness of a swan. She entered the apartment, and seeing near her stepmother the stranger of whom she had already heard so much, saluted him without any girlish awkwardness, or even lowering her eyes, and with an elegance that redoubled the count's attention. He rose to return the salutation. "Mademoiselle de Villefort, my daughter-in-law," said Madame de Villefort ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... at his stepmother in surprise. Then he looked at his father. "I'm much obliged, Pa," ...
— Abe Lincoln Gets His Chance • Frances Cavanah
... have branded, As felons are branded, As cattle are branded, With these words they've stamped it: 'To take away with you 690 Or drink on the premises.' Was it worth while, pray, To weary the peasant With learning his letters In order to read them? The land that we keep Is our mother no longer, Our stepmother rather. And then to improve things, These pert good-for-nothings, 700 These impudent writers Must needs shout in chorus: 'But whose fault, then, is it, That you thus exhausted And wasted your country?' ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... the Musalman faith, who still lives at Sardhana,[5] but she had become insane, and has ever since remained so. By this first wife he had a son, who got from the Emperor the title of Zafar Yab Khan, at the request of the Begam, his stepmother; but he was a man of weak intellect, and so little thought of that he was not recognized even as the nominal chief on the death ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... what would have become of me, if my good-natured royal godmother, who never forgot anybody, had not packed me into a carriage with some of the ladies who were accompanying Mademoiselle. That lady had a suit of her own, and went about quite independently of her father and her stepmother, who, though a Princess of Lorraine, was greatly contemned and slighted ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in which he lived. His father was master of a vessel, and took him to sea when he was eleven. His mother was a pious Dissenter, who was at great pains to store his mind with religious thoughts and pieces. She died when he was young, and his stepmother was not pious. He began to drag his religious anchor, and at length, having read Shaftesbury, left his theological moorings altogether, and drifted into a wide sea of ungodliness, blasphemy, and recklessness of living. ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... with the qualities of both races, though secretly he thought his father a fool to have offered her marriage when something less permanent would have served the purpose. Still, for all his private convictions, he behaved to his stepmother with perfect courtesy, determined to make the best ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... ill-natured, blind man. He has a cruel stepmother and a selfish, petulant younger brother. This boy, the pet of his parents, treated Shun with insolence; and the father and mother joined in persecuting the elder son. Shun, without showing resentment, cried aloud to Heaven and obtained [Page 74] patience to bear ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... looking-glass that magnifies instead of in his ordinary mirror, he imagines that he is suddenly swollen and puffed with disease, and so is led lamenting to bed, leaving the coast clear for the nonce. Isabella, however, has made an assignation with Lodwick at the same time that her stepmother eagerly awaits her own gallant, and in the dark young Knowell is by mistake escorted to Lucia's chamber, whilst Wittmore encountering Isabella, and thinking her Lady Fancy, proceeds to act so amorously ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... these ladies also were very kind and reasonable, but they too were women, and incapable of accepting a less perfect devotion. Indeed, was not his proposed marriage too much like taking her only son from the signora and giving the Paronsina a stepmother? It was worse, and so the ladies of the notary's family viewed it, cherishing a resentment that grew with Tonelli's delay to deal frankly with them; while Carlotta, on her part, was wounded that these old friends should ignore ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... degree by keeping than Madeira, and you latterly appeared so ravenous for it, that I must conceive you wish to have a stock."[141] Gibbon's devotion to Madeira bore its penalty. At the age of forty-eight he sent this account to his stepmother: "I was in hopes that my old Enemy the Gout had given over the attack, but the Villain, with his ally the winter, convinced me of my error, and about the latter end of March I found myself a prisoner in my library and my great chair. I attempted twice to ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... and care; the whole household squalid, cheerless, and utterly void of elevating inspirations... Only when the family had "moved" into the malarious backwoods of Indiana, the mother had died, and a stepmother, a woman of thrift and energy, had taken charge of the children, the shaggy-headed, ragged, barefooted, forlorn boy, then seven years old, "began to feel like a human being." Hard work was his early lot. When a mere boy he had to help in supporting the family, either ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... variations, her father, with his long, thick, hairy middle finger, gave her a fierce fillip on the nose, and she had to swallow her tears and play on. Barty was almost wild with angry pity, but dissembled, for fear of making her worse enemies in her father and stepmother. ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... very wealthy guy. She was 'is only child and 'er mother was dead. The old man, whose name was Portman,—Albert Portman, the banker,—was considering a second venture into matrimony at the time. Mary was eighteen and she didn't want a stepmother. She raised such a row that he sent 'er off to school so as he could do 'is courting in peace and plenty. She was a wayward gal,—leastwise she says so 'erself—and very impetuous-like. One day a circus comes to the town where she was attending school. The young ladies were took ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... to have been the cruel stepmother rather than the mother of many animals, and in some cases not the stepmother, but the ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... thou hadst at one time both a stepmother, and a natural mother living, thou wouldst honour and respect her also; nevertheless to thine own natural mother would thy refuge, and recourse be continually. So let the court and thy philosophy be unto thee. Have recourse unto it often, and comfort ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... the steam begins to advance, and, peering through it, you discern Aunt Elizabeth, Ona's stepmother—Teta Elzbieta, as they call her—bearing aloft a great platter of stewed duck. Behind her is Kotrina, making her way cautiously, staggering beneath a similar burden; and half a minute later there appears old Grandmother Majauszkiene, ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... "the purpose of the paper is to portray a drama of life, not to emulate an opera bouffe. I shall explain more fully. Please figure to yourself that you are a young girl in an unhappy home. Let us suppose that a stepmother is at fault. You feel that you can submit to her oppression no longer—you resolve to be free, or to end your troubles in the Seine. Weeping, you pack your modest handbag; you cast a last, lingering look at the oil painting of your own dear mother who is ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... when her mother died. I had my own mother to care for, and I was school-teaching. Now mother has gone, and my uncle died six months ago and left me quite a little property, and I've given up my school, and I've come for Agnes. I guess she'll be glad to go with me, though I suppose her stepmother is a good woman, and has always done ...
— The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural • Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
... to whom he was speaking, and saw standing in the doorway a little thin woman, with a sharp, cross face, and dull, tired eyes, eyes which looked as though they never brightened, or lost their look of weary hopelessness. This was her stepmother. She gave no sign of welcome, no word of comfort to the child, yet, somehow, Jessie's heart went out to her a little. It might have been only that in her terror of her father, she was ready to cling to any one who might stand ...
— The Story of Jessie • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... How can I object to a stepmother who is playing Blind Man's Buff at the present moment with the Norwegian nobility? I am not so overstrained as all that. But really I cannot allow my old friend HIALMAR, with his great, confiding, childlike mind, to remain in ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 23, 1891 • Various
... aspire to be By verse ennobled to posterity, To hold first place in arts above the law, More grave and noble than it ever saw. Fraud in this age of ours unpunished can Tread down the equity so dear to man. Can you for spirits just and generous find A fairer cause to plead before mankind? Mother or stepmother let Fortune be, The theatre and not the bar for me; For client virtue, truth for counsel's wage; For judge the ...
— Briefless Ballads and Legal Lyrics - Second Series • James Williams
... and blue little things myself. That was all done up for me that night I had the moon in me blood. Ah! my father was a proper hard man. 'Twas bad enough before I had my baby; but after, when I couldn't get the father to marry me, an' he cut an' run, proper life they led me, him and stepmother. Cry! Didn' I cry—I was a soft-hearted thing—never went to sleep with me eyes dry—never. 'Tis a cruel thing to ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... poison, doctors with their drug, The priest and hedgehog in their robes are snug; Ev'n silly woman has her warlike arts, Her tongue and eyes, her dreaded spear and darts;— But, oh! thou bitter stepmother and hard, To thy poor fenceless, naked child—the Bard! A thing unteachable in world's skill, And half an idiot too, more helpless still; No heels to bear him from the op'ning dun; No claws to dig, his hated sight to shun; ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... congenial to the young girl as it might have been, for a stepmother reigned supreme there, and all of her love was lavished upon her own daughter Claire, a crippled, quiet girl of about Faynie's own age, and Faynie was left to do about as she pleased. Her father almost lived in his library ...
— Mischievous Maid Faynie • Laura Jean Libbey
... your Pa, Susie," laughed Rushford. "I can see through you! You'll be trying to make me believe next that you want a stepmother." ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... case. But when there is absolutely no hope, I will not meddle. With this particular patient, such caution is especially incumbent upon me; how my father would treat me, if I tried and failed, I can judge by his disinheriting me when I refused to try. Gentlemen, I am sorry for my stepmother's illness—for she was an excellent woman; I am sorry for my father's distress thereat; I am most sorry of all that I should seem rebellious, and be unable to give the required service; but the disease is incurable, and my art ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... lately acquired a stepmother. Hoping to win his affection this new parent has been very lenient with him, while his father, feeling his responsibility, has been unusually strict. The boys of the neighborhood, who had taken pains to warn Robert of the terrible character of stepmothers in general, recently waited on him ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... was this man, and why was he performing these laborious journeys? Robert Dick, born in 1811, was the son of an excise officer, who gave his children a hard stepmother when Robert was ten years old. The boy's own mother, all tenderness and affection, had spoiled him for such a life as he now had to lead under a woman who loved him not, and did not understand his unusual cast of character, his love of nature, his wanderings by the sea, ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... like it better?" Lvov said, with his beautiful smile, touching her hand. "Anyone who didn't know you would think you were a stepmother, not a ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... much longer, for in that quiet life the advance of one's years was not likely to be noticed. I am sure Miss Edgeworth looked no older to me when I left her than when I first saw her. But she was obliged to go into England to nurse her sick stepmother, and after her departure the place had no attractions for me, ...
— The Vizier of the Two-Horned Alexander • Frank R. Stockton
... was a shepherdess in her youth—sadly plagued she was by a cruel stepmother, till she fled to a convent and found rest ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... end of that time he married again, but the stepmother hated little Tristram, the heir, and longed to destroy him, that her own child might be king. So one day she placed some poison in a cup for him to drink, but her own child, being thirsty, drank the poison ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... well remembered, is the curse which Stepmother Nature placed upon The Dog, when he elected to turn his back on his own kind, and to become the only one of the world's four-footed folk to serve Man of his own accord. To punish the Dog for this abnormality, Nature decreed that his life should begin ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... language in which I am now writing, than to make a whole book of verses in English. For if there should be any good found in my English verses, it would not go to the credit of my mother, Ireland, but of my stepmother, England.' ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... of the group forbid certain unions in marriage. A man may not marry his mother, his stepmother, or a sister of either. He may not marry his daughter, stepdaughter, or adopted daughter. He may not marry his sister, or his brother's widow, or a first cousin by blood or adoption. Sexual intercourse between persons in the above relations is considered incest, and ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... "Your stepmother is very ill, my dear—very ill indeed. I stopped with her to write a letter which she wants me to post. Yes, she is very ill, but she is awake now; you may go upstairs; you won't ...
— The Children's Pilgrimage • L. T. Meade
... He ignored his stepmother completely, but tormented his sister Maud in a thousand impish ways. He disarranged her neatly combed hair. He threw mud on her dress and put carriage grease on her white stockings on picnic day. He called her "chiny-thing," in allusion ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... her father's guardianship had gradually drifted almost out of the ken of her own mother. Her stepmother had done everything possible to make her life miserable, spying upon her and making it impossible to be alone long enough to write Schumann a letter. Now, in her loneliness, Clara turned to the ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... of her," said Joan, "from the Lady Julian my grandmother. She was a Leybourne born, and she wedded my grandfather, Sir John de Hastings, whose stepmother was the Lady Isabel La Despenser, your father's sister. I think, from what she told me, your mother ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... was scarcely over, when the stepmother's bad temper began to show itself. She could not bear the goodness of this young girl, because it made her own daughters appear the more odious. The stepmother gave her the meanest work in the house to do; she had to scour the dishes, tables, ...
— The Tales of Mother Goose - As First Collected by Charles Perrault in 1696 • Charles Perrault
... saying, I was bred up here in the village—father and mother died very young, and I was left a poor orphan—well, bless us! if Thomas haven't kissed her!—to the care of Mrs. Score, my aunt, who has been a mother to me—a stepmother, you know;—and I've been to Stratford fair, and to Warwick many a time; and there's two people who have offered to marry me, and ever so many who want to, and I won't have none—only a gentleman, as I've always said; not a poor clodpole, like Tom there with the red waistcoat (he was ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Patty cried, "you are the dearest thing in the world! How did you know I wanted furs? And white fox, of all things! And ermine for Nan! Oh, but you are a good gentleman! Isn't he, stepmother?" ...
— Patty's Success • Carolyn Wells
... excess by the tongue of his stepmother, too active- minded not to indulge in freakish sports and experiments in life very astounding to commonplace minds, sometimes when in dire distress even helping himself to his unpaid allowance from his ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... found themselves subjected; and as to Carl, his easy tact, notwithstanding the independent position which he enjoyed in his home as salaried member of a coast commission, enabled him to keep on the best of terms with his imperious stepmother. His duties would detain him about home for another year, to be still feted by the town, and idolised by his sisters, who were never tired of speculating ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie
... created the ridiculous race of the unappreciated, the whining poets whose muse has always red eyes and ill-combed locks, and all the mediocrities of impotence who, doomed to non-publication, call the muse a harsh stepmother, and ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... begins with a prose piece on the Death of Sinfjoetli, which says that after Sinfjoetli, son of Sigmund, Volsung's son (which should be Valsi's son, Volsung being a tribal, not a personal, name), had been poisoned by his stepmother Borghild, Sigmund married Hjoerdis, Eylimi's daughter, had a son Sigurd, and fell in battle against the race of Hunding. Sigmund, as in all other Norse sources, is said to be king in Frankland, which, like the Niderlant of the Nibelungen Lied, means the low lands on ...
— The Edda, Vol. 2 - The Heroic Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 13 • Winifred Faraday
... must have discovered her affection, and then admiration on his part would have done the rest. It is, I own, much better as it is; his children will love her more, regarding her in the light of his sister and their aunt, than had she become their stepmother. But why did you seem so surprised at my prophecy, Nelly? Was there anything very impossible in ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume II. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes • Grace Aguilar
... even to the most ignorant. Popular opinion considered him not quite sound in his mind. Probably his timorous, awkward ways and his seeming stupidity were simply the result of an education conducted by bigoted priests in a home that was no home: populated as it was by the offspring of a stepmother who hated him. His own mother, the charming Princess Cristina of Savoy, died while the city was rejoicing at his birth. The story is well known of how, shortly after the marriage, Ferdinand thought it diverting to draw a music-stool from under his wife, causing her to fall heavily. It gives ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... Gabriel's hand in his firm, warm clasp. 'Nature is indeed a harsh stepmother to you. With your nerves, the pin-prickles of life are so many dagger-thrusts. Do you feel better now?' he asked, as Gabriel opened his eyes with a languid sigh. 'Much better and more composed,' replied the ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... would make a difference to Ross. It would make a difference to the Redfields. Traitorous as it seemed, it was a great relief—a joy—to know that her own mother, her real mother, had been "nice." "She must have been nice or Lize would not have said so," she reasoned, recalling that her stepmother had admitted ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... ended next week or the week after at farthest. Her father's illness turned out to be a lingering one, taking every last ounce of strength from his wife and his daughter; and after his death the little stepmother had collapsed for a while, with only Dosia to take the helm. Dosia had worked early and late, nursing, looking after the children, cooking, sewing, and later on, when sickness and death had taken nearly all the means of livelihood, trying to earn money for the immediate ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... John, sixth Duke of Bedford. He was only nine years old when he lost his mother, whom he remembered to the end of his life with tender affection. He always spoke gratefully of the invariable kindness and affection of his father, who married again in 1803, and of his stepmother, but he felt that the shyness and reserve which often caused him to be misunderstood and thought cold were largely due to the loss of his mother in his childhood. He was educated at Westminster, but he ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... were the same songs and stories that had been used for years by their mothers and grandmothers to amuse the children, and had always been known in the country. There was the little girl and the wolf, and the sleeping beauty, and the wicked stepmother, and the girl whom the prince knew by her tiny foot, and many, many more. The shipwrecked guests wondered much, and at last came to the conclusion that they and their hosts were distant cousins; for they ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 34, July 1, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... tell great tales how you are used at home, I suppose. I am sick of it!" said Miss Fortune, setting up the andirons and throwing the tongs and shovel into the corner, in a way that made the iron ring again. "One might as good be a stepmother at once, and done with it! Come, mother, it's time for you ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... the most cheerful flowers of this and of my mother's garden was the happy-faced little pansy that under various fanciful folk-names has ever been loved. Like Montgomery's daisy, it "blossomed everywhere." Its Italian name means "idle thoughts"; the German, "little stepmother." Spenser called it "pawnce." Shakespeare said maidens called it "love-in-idleness," and Drayton named it "heartsease." Dr. Prior gives these names—"Herb Trinity, Three Faces under a Hood, Fancy Flamy, Kiss Me, Pull Me, Cuddle Me unto You, Tickle my Fancy, Kiss Me ere I Rise, Jump Up and ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... doesn't usually stipulate for a stepmother to nourish one's conscience,' said Siegmund. They laughed, making jest of the affair; but they were both too thin-skinned. Siegmund writhed within himself with mortification, while Helena talked as if her teeth were ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... mother's side, she was the daughter of the late Lord Glendarroch, and step-daughter to Lady Hilton, who had become Lady Hilton within a year after Lord Glendarroch's death. Lady Alice, then quite a child, had accompanied her stepmother, to whom she was moderately attached, and who had been allowed to retain undisputed possession of her. She had no near relatives, else the fortune I afterwards found to be at her disposal would have aroused contending claims to the right ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... parlor a large shade of Mrs. Melbury's head fell on the wall and ceiling; but before the girl had regarded this room many moments their presence was discovered, and her father and stepmother came ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... dinners, pumpkin pies. We had very little cake. Pork and beans and Indian pudding were standard dishes, only the pudding was eaten first. My father had always been accustomed to that order. His second marriage was in 1835, and my stepmother, or rather my sister Mary, who was teaching school in Concord and had learned the new way, brought about the change in the order of ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... paragraph in Fashion, he could get one in. For fear of wounding her he did not ask if her brother was a decorative painter, employed by a firm, or an artist who exhibited pictures. Her father had married again. She did not like her stepmother, and that had determined her to ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... of Gothland, who sent his son, Randwer, and one of his servants, Sibich, to escort the bride to his kingdom. Sibich was a traitor, and as part of a plan to compass the death of the royal family that he might claim the kingdom, he accused Randwer of having tried to win his young stepmother's affections. This accusation so roused the anger of Ermenrich that he ordered his son to be hanged, and Swanhild to be trampled to death under the feet of wild horses. The beauty of this daughter of Sigurd and Gudrun ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... excellent in beauty, sent by his mother Aricia. The groves of Egeria nursed him round the spongy shore where Diana's altar stands rich and gracious. For they say in story that Hippolytus, after he fell by his stepmother's treachery, torn asunder by his frightened horses to fulfil a father's revenge, came again to the daylight and heaven's upper air, recalled by Diana's love and the drugs of the Healer. Then the Lord omnipotent, indignant that any mortal should rise from the nether shades ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... pity," said Garnache, "for I believe that the knowledge of the Marquis's death was kept from him by his stepmother." ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... muttered, "she'll set me to hem the towels, or trim the bonnet, or make a pudding for dinner. It's wash day, and I know what that means in our house. I won't go—it's better out in the rain; the towels and the drab bonnet may go au diable, and my blessed stepmother with them, if ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... his second wife was a wicked, plotting woman, and a cruel stepmother to Imogen, Cymbeline's ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... one into the other and dispensing with passages altogether. The dining-room, a big sparsely furnished room, had doors both front and back, and looked on the yard behind as well as on the garden. The table was laid for a substantial tea. Mrs. Warner, Bessie's stepmother, a good-looking woman of thirty, was at the head of the table with the tea-pot in her hand, but the children had left their places and clustered round her; two other girls of sixteen and eighteen were clinging to one ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... had been alive, jest at that point would have been where the West would have lost the benefit of my personal supervision—but then if my mother had lived I shouldn't never 'a' left home. I stood a stepmother six months out o' respect to my Dad, but I wouldn't 'a' stood that one a year—well, anyway, not unless I'd ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... knew I told you that. So let it pass that she's twenty-six. She certainly is not more than three years your senior, a mere nothing, if you wish to make her Mrs. Holbrook;" and Guy's dark eyes scanned curiously the doctor's face, as if seeking there for the secret of his proud young stepmother's anxiety to visit plain Mrs. Conner that afternoon. But the doctor only laughed merrily at the idea of his being father to Guy, his college chum ...
— Aikenside • Mary J. Holmes
... had no brothers and only one sister, Abigail, who died when she was fifteen. His mother also died when he was a lad of twelve, but his stepmother was always very kind to him. His own mother, however, was his idol and even to this day, President Coolidge carries in one of his pockets a gun metal case that holds a picture of his mother. Calvin's father, in speaking of his son, says that he was always a great hand to work. ...
— Modern Americans - A Biographical School Reader for the Upper Grades • Chester Sanford
... were not strangers, nor are these their descendants sojourners only, whose fathers have come from another country; but they are the children of the soil, dwelling and living in their own land. And the country which brought them up is not like other countries, a stepmother to her children, but their own true mother; she bore them and nourished them and received them, and in her bosom they now repose. It is meet and right, therefore, that we should begin by praising ...
— Menexenus • Plato
... had a fatal influence on the home-life of Wenceslas and Lisbeth. The benefactress flavored the exile's bread with the wormwood of reproof, now that she saw her money in danger, and often believed it to be lost. From a kind mother she became a stepmother; she took the poor boy to task, she nagged him, scolded him for working too slowly, and blamed him for having chosen so difficult a profession. She could not believe that those models in red wax—little figures and sketches ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... whisky inspires and all the easy complacency it gives to its servant, he then launched himself lovingly into his work: he married the coachman to the society-young-lady for the sake of the scandal; married the Duke to the blonde's stepmother, for the sake of the sensation; stopped the desperado's salary; created a misunderstanding between the devil and the Roscicrucian; threw the Duke's property into the wicked lawyer's hands; made the lawyer's upbraiding conscience drive him to drink, thence to delirium tremens, thence to suicide; ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Britons, for the fourteen impressionable years during which he was the arbiter of young Andrew's destiny, never for an hour allowed him to forget that he was an Englishman. That Andrew should talk French, his stepmother tongue, to all the outside world was a matter of necessity. But if he addressed a word of French to him, Ben Flint, there was the devil to pay. And if he picked up from the English stable hands vulgarisms and debased vowel sounds, Ben Flint had the ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... Canidia, by her children if ever she had offspring, by the visible evidences of his high rank, and by the never-failing vengeance of Jupiter upon such misdeeds, to say why she casts on him glances, befitting the fury of a stepmother, or suited to a beast already made desperate by the wounds ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... That mighty creation, however, was but a grand makeshift, and always remained so. A Roman fleet was formed, but it was rendered national only in name, and was always treated with the affection of a stepmother; the naval service continued to be little esteemed in comparison with the high honour of serving in the legions; the naval officers were in great part Italian Greeks; the crews were composed of subjects or even of slaves and outcasts. ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... course of years to look upon the older brothers of her stepmother as in some sort her uncles, but for Harold, who was so much nearer her own age, she entertained a sincere sisterly regard. And he was worthy of it and of the warm place his many noble qualities had won for him ...
— Elsie's Womanhood • Martha Finley
... intimacy is.' But from Johnson's letter to Mrs Thrale we see looming ahead a crisis. 'He got two and forty guineas in fees while he was here. He has by his wife's persuasion and mine taken down a present for his mother-in-law,'—an error, doubtless, for 'stepmother.' He had entered himself this time at the Temple, and Johnson was his bond. He left to be in time for practice before the General Assembly, finding 'something low and coarse in such employment, but guineas ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... was it a few weeks—after his mother's death, the father married again. The stepmother was no improvement on the mother. She had lofty ideas of discipline and being "minded." No doubt that little Stephen, crooked in eyes, crooked in body, short and swart, with brown, bare legs, was stubborn and wilful. He looked the part all ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... His stepmother said of him: "He read everything he could lay his hands on, and when he came across a passage that struck him, he would write it down on boards, if he had no paper, and keep it before him until he could ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... numerous fictions were invented to account for it. She had been grossly insulted; she had been threatened; nay, though she was in that situation in which woman is entitled to peculiar tenderness, she had been beaten by her cruel stepmother. The populace, which years of misrule had made suspicious and irritable, was so much excited by these calumnies that the Queen was scarcely safe. Many Roman Catholics, and some Protestant Tories whose loyalty was ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... South Africa, especially as two-thirds of the constituents of these honourable gentlemen would be not Englishmen but Dutchmen? Yet if the stoppage of supplies of this kind would be one of the first results of the transformation of the mother country into the stepmother Union, what motive would South Africa have for entering it? On the other hand, is there any reason to suppose that South Africa would contribute towards the maintenance of cruisers to keep French convicts and others out of the Pacific, or towards expeditions ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 9: The Expansion of England • John Morley
... brought you where none may hear what I wish to say to you. I am Mave, the daughter of the king of Erin. By the magic arts of my cruel stepmother I was changed into a trout, and cast into this lake a year and a day before the evening when you restored me to the waters the second time. If you had not done so the first night the otter brought me to you I should have been ...
— The Golden Spears - And Other Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... To the scandal of his father, who tolerated no one's vices save his own, as well as to the scandal of the university authorities of Alcala, he has been scouring the streets at the head of the most profligate students, insulting women, even ladies of rank, and amenable only to his lovely young stepmother, Elizabeth of Valois, Isabel de la Paz, as the Spaniards call her, the daughter of Catherine do Medicis, and sister of the King of France. Don Carlos should have married her, had not his worthy father found it more advantageous ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... Bavaria, February 5, 1846. According to his memoirs, he early found it necessary to resist the tyranny of a stepmother and the miserable treatment of his master. As a bookbinder apprentice, at a very early age, he took to his heels and went on the road of the world, where he soon came in contact with revolutionary ideas in the ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... singer of merit, a player on the harp, and a person of education. She certainly had no seraglio notions of wanting to be petted and pampered and taken care of, or she would not have assumed the office of stepmother to that big family and married a poor man. Bach never had time to make money. Very soon after their marriage Bach began to dictate music to his wife. A great many pieces can be seen in Leipzig and Berlin copied out in her fine, painstaking hand, with an occasional ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... between the three the little girl had a very hard time. She worked like a slave all day long, and was never allowed to go out of the kitchen. The stepmother and the proud sisters, used to go to balls every night, leaving the little girl alone. Because she was always so dusty and grimy from working over the fire, they called her Cinderella. Now, it happened that the country was ruled by a ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... farewell, had not been in time to receive his blessing, after many years of anger, which had borne heavily on the head of the blameless young woman, was so evidently sincere, and produced such a deep impression on everyone, that her stepmother also was moved. ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... great passion for an unattainable woman, a distant star for the groping years. In other cases, women have divined the mystic quality, and instead of giving themselves, have held the young visionaries pure. Again, poverty, that grim stepmother of the elect, often intervenes. And to common women—such lovers are absurd, beyond comprehension. That helps.... Illumination comes between the age of thirty and forty. After that, the way is clear. They do not grope, they see; they do not ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... cruel stepmother and hard, To thy poor fenceless, naked child, the Bard! A thing unteachable in worldly skill, And half an idiot too, more helpless still: No heels to bear him from the op'ning dun, No claws to dig, his hated sight to shun: No horns, but those by luckless Hymen worn, And ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... union, there was only a strong force of mutual repulsion, which kept them permanently apart. They moved on different planes, spoke different languages, and Rumania, in the person of her delegates, was treated like Cinderella by her stepmother. The Council of Three kept them systematically in the dark about matters which it concerned them to know, negotiated over their heads, transmitted to Bucharest injunctions which only they were competent to receive, insisted on ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... reception of a testimonial of royal approbation, seems sufficiently to prove the loyalty of the Philippines, and the little probability of their revolting, especially if the mother-country does not show herself wholly a stepmother to her ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... confident that, though no absolute promise had been made from her to him, or from him to her, there had then been no reason for him to doubt. In spite of that, she might have married now, or been promised in marriage. He knew that she must have been poor and left in want when her stepmother had died. She had told him of the intentions for her life, and he had answered that perhaps in the course of events something better might come up for her. Then he had been called a pauper, and had gone away to remedy that evil if it might be possible. He had heard while working ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... Even the diners themselves were satisfied—a rare thing at such affairs. Goose was a prominent item in the menu. After the repast the replete guests were entertained from the platform, the Mayor being, of course, in the chair. Harry sang 'In Old Madrid,' accompanied by his stepmother, with faultless expression. Mr. Duncalf astonished everybody with the famous North-Country recitation, 'The Patent Hair-brushing Mashane.' There were also a banjo solo, a skirt dance of discretion, and a campanological turn. At last, ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... with joy, and she asked her consort, "Wherefore hast thou concealed thy children from me?" The king said, "I will do so no longer." And he sent messengers for his son, and he was brought to the Court. His stepmother said unto him, "It were well for thee to have a wife, and I have a daughter who is sought of every man of renown in the world." "I am not yet of an age to wed," answered the youth. Then said she unto him, "I declare to thee, that ...
— The Mabinogion Vol. 2 (of 3) • Owen M. Edwards
... that, the control of the children remained a constant subject of dissension. M. Dudevant was beginning to get into pecuniary difficulties in the management of his wife's estate. Sometimes he contemplated resigning it to her, and retiring to Gascony, to live with his widowed stepmother on the property which at her death would revert to him. But unfortunately he could not make up his mind to this course. No sooner had he drawn up an agreement consenting to a division of property, than he seemed to regret ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... Each circumstance of that atrocious deed,— Her own oppress'd and miserable life, The prosperous traitor's insolent demeanour, The perils threat'ning Agamemnon's race From her who had become their stepmother; Then in his hand the ancient dagger thrusts, Which often in the house of Tantalus With savage fury rag'd,—and by her ...
— Iphigenia in Tauris • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... grandfather's old, half-forgotten diary—by the way, the diary habit seems to run in the family—a very passion of secrecy has possessed me. If I had told Helen, I should have had to dread that even in her sweet sleep she might whisper something to put that ferret, her stepmother, on the scent. Oh, Helen, trust ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... man on the hill whom Siward met was none other than Odin) took a hand in directing his course. But when Bjarki renounced his kingdom, it was altogether unmotivated. The saga says: "Soon afterwards [i.e., after Bjarki's revenge on his evil stepmother] King Hring fell sick and died, whereupon Bothvar succeeded to the throne and was for a time satisfied. Later, he called his subjects together to a 'ing' [i.e., assembly] and said he wished to leave the country, married his mother to ...
— The Relation of the Hrolfs Saga Kraka and the Bjarkarimur to Beowulf • Oscar Ludvig Olson
... after our arrival, when my father told us in the morning, that, from the actions of the horses, he perceived there were Indians lurking about in the woods, and he said to me, "John, you must not go out of the house to-day." After giving strict charge to my stepmother to let none of the little children go out, he went to the field, with the negroes, and my ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... older, and the stepmother made Martha do all the work of the house. She had to fetch the wood for the stove, and light it and keep it burning. She had to draw the water for her sisters to wash their hands in. She had to make the clothes, and wash them ...
— Old Peter's Russian Tales • Arthur Ransome
... Queen dowager, that a convocation of the witan was held to settle the dispute[79]. Here the claim of Edward was fully admitted, and he was crowned and anointed by Dunstan, at Kingston, accordingly, in the year 975—to be sacrificed to the ambition of his cruel stepmother, in less than four ...
— Coronation Anecdotes • Giles Gossip
... by mothers to stubborn daughters, intimating they will come under the hands of a stepmother, who, it is likely, will not deal too tenderly ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... in her son's youth, and his father married again. Catholic writers of the period are unanimous in declaring that Knox had a stepmother. ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... fiery personality that appeared in the ranks of the anarchists after the death of Bakounin. A cruel stepmother, a pitiless employer, a long sickness, and an operation which left his face deformed forever are some of the incidents of his unhappy childhood. He received a poor education, but read extensively, and as a bookbinder worked ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... crying and roaring? The thing must be stopped and put an end to. I don't say I give in to your story, but that would be an unnatural death. I would be scandalised being stepmother to a girl that would ...
— Three Wonder Plays • Lady I. A. Gregory
... it, you angel stepmother, and so, I'm going to decide, right now,—with much quickness. Heigho! Which shall it be? Patty Van Reypen,—or stay an ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... all the more under their dark setting, and though her complexion had no brilliancy, only the clearness of health, and her features would not endure criticism, there was a wonderful lively sweetness about her fresh, innocent young mouth; and she had a tall lithe figure, surpassing that of her stepmother. She would have been a sonsie Border lass in appearance but for the remarkable carriage of her small head and shoulders, which was assuredly derived from her royal ancestry, and indeed her air and manner of walking were such that Diccon had more than once accused her of sailing ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... "But her second husband might have misused the children." Might? So the guardian might, and that where they had no mother to protect them. Had the father been left a widower, he might have made a half-dozen successive marriages, have brought stepmother after stepmother to control these children, and no court could have interfered. The father is recognized before the law as the natural guardian of the children. The mother, even though she be left a widow, is not. The consequence is a series of outrages of ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... most noble and beautiful maiden in Treguier, but, alas! she was almost friendless, for at an early age she had lost her father, her mother, and her two sisters, and her sole remaining relative was her stepmother. Pitiful it was to see her standing at the door of her manor, weeping as if her heart would break. But although she had none of her own blood to cherish she still nursed the hope that her foster-brother, who had journeyed abroad for some years, might ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... that afternoon Miss Dora Bannister was driven to Cobhurst to call upon the young lady who had been taken sick, and who ought not to be neglected by the ladies of Thorbury. Dora had asked her stepmother to accompany her, but as that good lady seldom made calls, and disliked long drives, and could not see why it was at all necessary for her to ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... into a strange quarter of Paris, and had frequently to inquire the way. At length he reached home, and ascended the stairs to a small room in which Lucretia usually sat, and which was divided by a narrow corridor from the sleeping-chamber of herself and Dalibard. His stepmother, leaning her cheek upon her hand, was seated by the window, so absorbed in some gloomy thoughts, which cast over her rigid face a shade, intense and solemn as despair, that she did not perceive the approach ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... her the home and cherished haunts of her mother's youth. As the carriage drew up, young girls threw wreaths into it. Beside the Duchess of Kent were the Duchess and Dowager-Duchess of Coburg, Prince Albert's sister-in-law and stepmother. The staircase was full of cousins. "It was an affecting but exquisite moment, which I shall never forget," declared ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... remonstrate with your papa, Frank," said his stepmother, who was not a great deal older than the Curate. "After his attack he ought to be more careful. But he never takes the least trouble about himself, no more than if he were five-and-twenty. After getting such a knock on the forehead too; and you see he eats nothing. I shall be miserable ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... over my prostrate body, which still aches from the contest. I wish Harriet would resign. She is the only creature I have ever known, except the Bate's parrot and my present cook, who is perpetually out of temper. If she were not my husband's stepmother's niece, I am sure I could stand up to ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... I have to say first, and make your protestations afterwards. You needn't be alarmed; you won't find me quite as bad as the stepmother one reads about in the story-books, who puts her stepdaughter into a pie, and all that kind of thing. I suppose stepfathers have been a very estimable class, by the way, as it is the stepmother who always drops ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... me home when mother died, Again with father to reside, Black shoes, clean knives, run far and wide? My Stepmother. ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... marry before he had been out of college six weeks—marry young, like his father before him. The girl, young Althea, rather resembling her mother,—her own mother,—was beginning to think less of large hair-bows and more of longer dresses. Her father was quite wrapped up in her and her stepmother seemed to ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... asked Bernice to come here to have her father live here, too. However, I also discovered that Alicia is unhappy in her school life, that she does not care much about returning to her Western home to live with a stepmother, and that she adores New York City! So, I wrote to her father asking his opinion, and he leaves the settlement of the question ...
— Two Little Women on a Holiday • Carolyn Wells
... course of the earlier years of his reign he removed every one of them from his path, beginning with his youthful brother-in-law Aristobulus (35), after whom came his old patron Hyrcanus II. (30), then Mariamne his wife (29), and finally his stepmother Alexandra (28), the daughter of Hyrcanus and the widow of Alexander Aristobuli. Subsequently, in 25, he caused Costobarus and the sons of Babas to be executed. While thus occupied with domestic affairs, Herod had constant trouble also in his external relations, and each new phase in his political ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... four young children who were cared for tenderly at first by their stepmother, the new queen; but there came a time when she grew jealous of the love their father bore them, and resolved that she would endure it no longer. Sometimes there was murder in her heart, but she could not bear the thought of that wickedness, and she resolved at last to ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... you liked the new stepmother," he said. "Hasn't she turned out well?—What am I supposed to call her, anyhow? I wanted to find out about that before I was ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... didn't find a mother nearer by, but I haven't any living of my own, except a stepmother, who wouldn't understand, and all the other mothers I know wouldn't qualify for the job any better. I've been looking at your picture and I ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... became a half banker and half broker. When I was a little kid my mother died, and my father after a while married a widow who had a little daughter five years younger than myself. My father died, and my stepmother married a man ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... been submitted to his inspection with a view to matrimony. But finding it easy to delegate the care of his children to school principals and hospitable friends, he concluded that he had nothing to gain and much comfort to lose by adding a stepmother to his establishment; and, after some time, it became the custom to say of Mr. Lind that the memory of his first wife kept him single. Thus, whilst his sons were drifting to manhood through Harrow and Cambridge, and his daughter passing from one relative's house ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... is revealed at a critical moment towards the close. In Little Eyolf, Asta and Allmers are introduced to us at first as half-sister and half-brother; and only at the end of the second act does it appear that Asta's mother (Allmers' stepmother) was unfaithful to her husband, and that, Asta being the fruit of this infidelity, there is no blood kinship between her and Allmers. The danger of relying upon such complexities is shown by the fact that so acute a critic as M. Jules Lemaitre, in writing ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... sister fell into a decline, and died while the three children were still babies. Poor things, I believe they had a sad time till their father married a Miss Condamine, who has been an excellent stepmother to them. I have been to see them, but Mark was not then at home, so he has come to me at Monks Horton. When will he find you at home? Or may I bring him in at once. He was to meet me ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and a few months afterwards came by that son's death to sole power as emperor. The worst character is given to Zeno by the national historians. His conduct was so vile, and his government so discredited by irruptions of the Huns on the Danube, and of Saracens in Mesopotamia, that his wife's stepmother Verina, the widow of Leo I., conspired against him, and was able to set her brother Basiliscus on the throne. Zeno took flight; Basiliscus was proclaimed emperor. He declared himself openly against the Catholic faith in favour of the Eutycheans. But Basiliscus ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... an hour George was with the men who were stripping bark from the great pine logs up on the side of the mountain. With them, and with two or three others who were engaged at the saw-mills, he remained till the night was dark. Then he came down and told something of his intentions to his stepmother. He was going to Colmar on the morrow with a horse and small cart, and would take with him what clothes he had ready. He did not speak to Marie that night, but he said something to his father about the timber and the mill. Gaspar ...
— The Golden Lion of Granpere • Anthony Trollope
... arranged the children for the night, and now the stepmother had come up to kiss them and be kind. She was a conscientious young woman, full of a desire to do right, and she had determined not to be like ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... her through those haunted eyes—a little boy, terrified and forsaken. "Oh, I have no right to soil you with it. But I came back to tell some one about it—I had to, I had to. I had to wait until father and Audrey went away. I knew they'd hate to see me—she was my stepmother, you know, and she always loathed me, and he never cared. In East Africa I used to stay awake at night thinking that I might die, and that no one in England would ever care—no one would know how I had loved her. It was worse than ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... St. Johns, Mich., a father becomes the brother-in-law of his daughter; a sister becomes the mother-in-law of her brother; one man's father-in-law becomes his brother-in-law, and a woman's sister-in-law becomes her stepmother. Charles Jones married Miss Emma E. Ellwanger, of De Witt. A few weeks ago her brother, William Ellwanger, married Jones' ...
— Owen Clancy's Happy Trail - or, The Motor Wizard in California • Burt L. Standish
... seems to set as severe tasks as the wicked stepmother in the fairy tales," said Mr. Cross. "She decrees that you are each to be given a small box of peas and beans and buttons mixed together, and that you are to sort them before you start to run the race. Will you please all kneel on the grass with your boxes in front of you. ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... house on one of her walks, meaning to beard Cheiron in his den, and find out how—should it be necessary—she could communicate with Halcyone. And then she was informed by Mrs. Porrit that her master would be away for a fortnight, and that Miss Halcyone La Sarthe had been taken off by her stepmother—she did not know where—and that the two old ladies had actually gone that day, with Hester and old William, to some place on the Welsh coast they had known when they were children, for a change to the sea! La Sarthe Chase was shut ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... "Mama Joy—my stepmother. I call her that. You see, father wants me to call her mama—he really wanted it mother, but I couldn't—and she's so young to have me for a daughter, so she wants me to call her Joy; that's her name. So I call her both ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... the big dining-room, where his "stepmother-in-law," a diminutive woman, sat at the foot of the oblong table dressed in faded black, even to the poke sunbonnet which, worn indoors and out, completely hid her wrinkled face. Mrs. Henley, as he seated ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... Inchguile tenant and out of her usual beat, she had met once or twice, his bedridden father having sent to beg a visit from her. Their holding was a poor one enough, but by constant hard work the son had managed to keep things going. She knew the old woman who ruled in the house was his stepmother, but had not noticed any want of harmony in the family. Rumours, however, had reached her lately that the old man had been making a will, by which he left the farm and all his possessions to his wife, who had already written ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... the door and his stepmother, followed by Malcolm Sage, passed out. They descended the ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... her face again. I should explain that I was dabbling in finance just then, fairly successfully, and had transactions with Ravengar. He didn't know that I was the son of the man who had taken his stepmother away from his father, and I never told him I had changed my name, because the scandals attached to it by Ravengar and his father had made things very unpleasant for any bearer of that name. Still, Ravengar happened to be the man I wanted to deal with, and so I didn't let any stupid resentment ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... constitutional liberty. It asks but of its subjects to submit to be well governed—without agitating the question "how and by what means that government is carried on." For every man, except the politician, the innovator, Austria is no harsh stepmother. But it is obviously clear that the better in other respects the administration of a state it does but foster the more the desire for that political security, which is only found in constitutional freedom: the reverence paid to personal ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Jim, tell him all!" she said, in her pretty broken English. "Monsieur, may the good God in heaven forgive me if I wrong her; but—but—— Ah, Monsieur Cleek, sometimes I feel that she, my stepmother, and that man, that 'rider' who knows not how to ride as the artist should, monsieur, I cannot help it, but I feel that they are at the bottom ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... Frank, my dear, you are not angry about poor Jack?" said Miss Dora. "He has not known what it was to be at home for years and years. A stepmother is so different from an own mother, and he never has had any opportunities; and oh, Frank, don't you remember that there is joy in heaven?" cried the anxious aunt—"not to say that he is the eldest son. And it is such a thing for ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... me a letter from an imaginary sister in which she asked me to take under my protection this brother of hers who was suffering from the tyranny of a stepmother as imaginary as herself. The brother was not imaginary, that was evident enough. But his sister's letter was as unnecessary for me as expert marksmanship to bring down ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore |
