"Stepmother" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his mind. But as he went on with his supper, the shock of it mingled with a good many critical or reproachful thoughts. Why had she persisted in staying on in Langdale, instead of going to her father? All that foolish dislike of her stepmother! It had been open to her to stay in her father's farm, with plenty of company. If she wouldn't, was he to blame ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... adored their mild, kindly stepmother, who, on her side, was as devotedly attached to them as if they had been her own children. The Count noted this mutual attachment, which time only served to strengthen, and it filled his heart with joy and gratification. The family was, indeed, a happy one, and even the servants ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... This uncomfortable state of things continued for some time, when she sickened of some acute distemper, and died in a short time. She possessed some fine jewels, which she had inherited from her mother, and she was heard to say repeatedly that her stepmother should never lay a finger on one of them. It is supposed that she, or her servant acting under her orders, hid the casket containing these jewels somewhere in this house; at all events, they were never ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards
... kind stepmother to Abraham who became strongly attached to her. In the rough and nondescript community of Pigeon Creek, a world of weedy farms, of miserable mud roads, of log farm-houses, the family life that was at least ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... deserve it. For there is an injustice in being moved at the afflictions of those who deserve to be miserable. We may see, without pity, Clytemnestra slain by her son Orestes in AEschylus, because she had murdered Agamemnon her husband; yet we cannot see Hippolytus die by the plot of his Stepmother Phaedra, in Euripides, without compassion, because he died not, but for being chaste ...
— Clarissa: Preface, Hints of Prefaces, and Postscript • Samuel Richardson
... In the 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 ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... her Godmother', No. xxvii, tries to persuade her son to have the young queen burnt alive for a wicked witch, who was dumb, and had eaten her own babes. In 'East o' the Sun and West o' the Moon', No. iv, it is a wicked stepmother who has bewitched the prince. In 'Bushy Bride', No. xlv, the ugly bride charms the king to sleep, and is at last thrown, with her wicked mother, into a pit full of snakes. In the 'Twelve Wild Ducks', No. viii, the wicked stepmother persuades the king that Snow-white ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... 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
... aid rather than upon any family intervention. If she could, by her own strong hand, with the help of the London physician, lead her husband's footsteps out of this Tophet into which he had sunk himself, she would spare no trouble, withhold no sacrifice, to effect his rescue, and she and her stepmother, the kindliest of women, would keep the secret ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... But my father discovering that she had forsaken the faith of her fathers, and had embraced the religion of the Cross, so worried her to return to her childhood's faith that she died broken-hearted. Then he married again, and his second wife, my stepmother, was a very wicked woman. She knew that I was a Christian at heart, and that my lover was also a Christian; so one day, when my father was holding a banquet, she said to him, 'Mudi Ben Raschid, the crescent of the Holy Prophet is waning in thy ...
— Tales from the Lands of Nuts and Grapes - Spanish and Portuguese Folklore • Charles Sellers and Others
... mercenary armies—all these dreams were not the cloudy pageant of a poet but the practical schemes of a great creative mind. They were destined to become reality. Had the geographical conditions been originally more favourable than they were, had Nature been less a stepmother to the metropolis of the rising Batavian realm, the creation might have been more durable. Barneveld, and the men who acted with him, comprehended their age, and with slender materials were prepared to ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... thoughts as she sat looking out of the window. Her English cousins, related to her only through her stepmother, yet called kin for courtesy's sake, had given up trying to understand her complexities, as she had likewise given up trying to explain herself. If they were pleased forever to consider her in the light of a conundrum, she thought, ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... 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 ...
— The Golden Spears - And Other Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... well connected enough, but heartless and an utter snob. I suppose men are often blind to these hateful qualities before marriage; doubtless a clever, unscrupulous woman is able to hide her faults when she has the main chance in view. My stepmother was a good deal younger than my father, and I dare say on the whole made him, socially at any rate, a fairly good wife. Her one idea was social aggrandizement at any cost, and I unhappily was to fall a victim ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... tenderness and humour. Mike was also one of those whom life at the beginning had impressed with the delight of one kind of work and no other. When a mere imp of a boy, the heartless tormentor of a large and sententious stepmother, the despair of schoolmasters, the most ingenious of truants, a humorous ragamuffin invulnerable to punishment, it was already revealed to him that his mission in life was to be the observation and reproduction of human character, particularly in its humorous ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... tender age, pointing out to him the inevitable fate of wicked children, and giving him the earliest possible warning and description of the punishment of little sinners. He repeated these poems to his stepmother after dinner, before a great shining mahogany table, covered with grapes, pineapples, plum-cake, port wine, and Madeira, and surrounded by stout men in black, with baggy white neckcloths, who took the little man ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... after the slaves had lighted the three-branched silver lamps that Demetrius appeared. His stepmother received him kindly and began to talk on indifferent subjects; but he replied with ill-disguised impatience, for he had not come to chatter and gossip. She fully understood this; but it pleased ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... not the mother of the brothers; and she did ill to her step-children, but served Thorbiorn the worst, for that he was hard to deal with and reckless. And on a day Thorbiorn Angle sat playing at tables, and his stepmother passed by and saw that he was playing at the knave-game, and the fashion of the game was the large tail-game. Now she deemed him thriftless, and cast some word at him, but he gave an evil answer; so she caught up one of the men, and drave the tail ...
— The Story of Grettir The Strong • Translated by Eirikr Magnusson and William Morris
... at 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' daughter, Miss ...
— Owen Clancy's Happy Trail - or, The Motor Wizard in California • Burt L. Standish
... Sanitobia, Mississippi. Mother died when I was a child. I was three months old, they said, when I lost her. Father lived to be very old. My mother was Ella Geeter and my stepmother was Lucy Evans. My father's name was Si Hubbard. My parents married after the War. I remembers Grandma Harriett Hubbard. She said she was sold. She was a cook and she raised my papa up with white folks. Her children was sold with her. Papa was sold too at the ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... generally forgotten. If God is a Father, it is the soul that chooses Him; if Nature is a mother, it is the man who chooses to regard her as such, since to the greater number it is well known she seems but a stepmother, and a cruel one at that. Elective affinities, chosen kindred!—"tell me what company you keep, and I will tell you who you are" (what you are worth). How many artist waifs one sees nowadays! lost souls, who choose to ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... and fiercer growl of the large one, sufficiently indicated that the attempt would be not a little perilous. The result was that she was obliged to abandon her design. In killing the cock I can scarcely think that the dog understood the precise import of my stepmother's wish, as his immediate execution of it would seem to imply. The cock was a more recent favourite, and had received some attentions which had previously been bestowed upon himself. This, I think, had led him to entertain ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... the prettiest girl in the village, had been sore at heart, even in his new-wedded happiness, at the thought of leaving the deformed, sensitive boy alone with the careless father and the shrewish stepmother. But his young wife had been the first ...
— The Green Satin Gown • Laura E. Richards
... If your father is able to send some more money for you I might be able to manage it; but with your stepmother always ailing his money seems to be all wanted for doctor's bills and medicines. ...
— The Making of Mona • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... feature and soured in mind by daily toil 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 on his ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... at her curiously. "I mean your stepmother," he said gravely. "I never had the pleasure of ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... sea-monster raised himself above the waters, and frightened the horses so that they ran away and dashed the chariot to pieces. Hippolytus was killed, but by Diana's assistance Aesculapius restored him to life. Diana removed Hippolytus from the power of his deluded father and false stepmother, and placed him in Italy under the protection of ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... that 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, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... man of ours in ten, probably not one in a hundred, has any direct rights or interest in his native soil; and the Motherland has too often (at any rate in the past) turned out a stepmother who disowned him later when ...
— NEVER AGAIN • Edward Carpenter
... was a 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 interlining ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... it, struggled with it nay, internally yielded to it and cherished it, long before he suffered the slightest expression of it, by word, action, or look, to escape him. He watched Alice's docile obedient ways to her stepmother; the love which she had inspired in the rough Norah (roughened by the wear and tear of sorrow and years); but above all, he saw the wild, deep, passionate affection existing between her and her child. They spoke little to any one else, or when any ...
— A House to Let • Charles Dickens
... time, untroubled by the thought of money that was soon to be so important. Bert's various aunts and cousins sent him checks, and Nancy's stepmother sent her all her own mother's linen and silver, and odd pieces of mahogany on which the freight charges were frightful, and laces and an oil portrait or two. The trousseau was helped from all sides, every week had ...
— Undertow • Kathleen Norris
... 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 get paper. Then he would copy ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... believe. And though, for this very reason many do say—though we say not so—that this aiding of our enemies against us, seems neither the act of a father nor of a mother towards us, but rather of a stepmother; yet this notwithstanding, we constantly avow that we are" [remember, it is still the King of England speaking], "and shall continue to be, to your Holiness and to your seat, a devout and humble ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan
... for about a year and a half. He lived in a dormitory uptown, but I used to see him in the restaurant, and then fairly often we had dates after I got off work. He has people out in the Midwest somewhere—a father and a stepmother. He was always sour and close-mouthed about them, even before he got thrown out of NYU. Now he ...
— It's like this, cat • Emily Neville
... said the still Liberal Marquis;—"that is to say, of course he'll do nothing of the kind. But to declare that a young man has disgraced himself because he doesn't care for club life, is absurd;—and coming from you as his stepmother is wicked." As he said this he bobbed his head at her, looking into her face as though he should say to her, "Now you have my true opinion about yourself." At this moment there came a gentle knock at the door, and Mr. Greenwood put in his head. "I am busy," ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... When a stepmother finally appeared upon the scene, there was more trouble for the children. She was a worthy woman and meant to be kind, but her heart wasn't big enough to love boys who carried live mice in their pockets and turned turtles loose ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... beneath which he loved to recline and muse, may still be seen; it was for a long time called "Calvin's vine." He was still living on the last bounties of a church which he had renounced, and which he called "a stepmother and a prostitute"; and on the presents of a queen gallant, whose morals and piety he lauded, continuing to assist at the Catholic service, and composing Latin orations, which were delivered out of the assembly of the synod, at the temple of St. Peter. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... new novel, an animated story of London life, concerns a girl sent out to service by her stepmother. Taking the management of her career into her own hands, and holding the reins, goes first to a house on the north side of Regent's Park, afterwards to the neighbourhood of Berkeley Square; and her adventures in both situations, ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... 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 the land which is their mother, ...
— Menexenus • Plato
... however, really like the Prince's visit, and was reluctantly telling his fellow attendants that, owing to a certain circumstance which had taken place at Iyo-no-Kami's[47] residence, his wife (Ki-no-Kami's stepmother) had taken up her abode with him that very evening, and that the ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... horse and myself were done up, so I halted, and was amazed at the greeting I received from the youth, who was hard at work on his hay, single-handed, except for the two children tumbling in it. The lady in her rocking-chair was contrast enough to make me heartily glad to find that she was his stepmother, not his wife. Since that, I have seen a good deal of him; he comes to Lakeville, five miles across the bush and seven across the lake, to church on Sunday, and spends the day with the parson, and Mr. Currie has given him work in our press of business, and finds him so effective, that he ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of 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 bulwarks of the ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... her service, poor her payment—she is ancient, tattered raiment— India, she the grim Stepmother of our kind. If a year of life be lent her, if her temple's shrine we enter, The door is ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... powers beneath the earth wroth with us: for Phrixos biddeth us lay his ghost, and that we go to the house of Aietes, and bring thence the thick-fleeced hide of the ram, whereby of old he was delivered from the deep and from the impious weapons of his stepmother. This message cometh to me in the voice of a strange dream: also I have sent to ask of the oracle at Kastalia whether it be worth the quest, and the oracle chargeth me straightway to send a ship on the sacred mission. This deed do ...
— The Extant Odes of Pindar • Pindar
... I not draw an argument from the condition of mankind? Nature herself, in bestowing on man that which she seems to have granted him preeminently, and by which she appears to have distinguished us from all other animals, would have acted, not as a parent, but as a stepmother, if she had designed the faculty of speech to be the promoter of crime, the oppressor of innocence, and the enemy of truth; for it would have been better for us to have been born dumb, and to have been left destitute of reasoning powers, than to have received endowments from providence only ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... sooner over than the stepmother began to display her bad temper. She could not endure the excellent qualities of this young girl, for they made her own daughters appear more hateful than ever. She thrust upon her all the meanest tasks about the house. It was she who had to clean the plates and the stairs, and sweep out ...
— Old-Time Stories • Charles Perrault
... to take my advice about a stepmother. I have a stepmother myself, and I am the very man to advise you. But suppose you and I agree on the person for the place, and ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... 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 of ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... with something intimate in her smiling undertone that thrilled him, yet on the next instant seemed pure dream stuff. The others broke in and Constance begged a song of the new patriotism; but Miranda, the pretty stepmother, spoke rather for something a thousand miles and months away from the troubles and heroics of the hour; and when Anna seconded this motion by one fugitive glance worth all their beseechings Hilary, as he stood, gayly threw open his smart jacket lest his brass buttons mar the instrument, and sang ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... to live to save her child from a stepmother's terrible thraldom, which might crush her darling's life. Upon this new vision of threatened possibilities followed one of those paroxysms of thought at fever-heat which ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... in 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, ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... in the wind like raven's wings. A sudden jealousy gripped him; Mr. Tiralla had spoken of a nice young fellow. And Mikolai was also a young fellow. Two young fellows, and with her day and night under the same roof. Stepmother? Pooh! She was still young ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig
... 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 Kiss ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... Devoted daughter of Major Carroll and firm ally of her dainty stepmother, Madame Carroll, in the latter's renewal of intercourse with her eldest son and concealment of his existence from her husband. Sara contrives that the mother shall be with the young man when he dies, and by becoming ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... her stepmother a cloth, "remimber you have to go to Darby Skinadre's for meal. I'd go myself, an' save you in the journey, but that I'm afraid you might fall in love wid one another in my absence. Be off now, you ould stepdivle, an' get the meal; ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... loud rabble. At all other times, the hours during which the library was open were from nine to eleven o'clock a.m., and from one to four o'clock p.m. Suspended on the wall was a large board inscribed with the names both of the books and the donors "lest oblivion, the stepmother of memory, should pluck from our breasts the remembrance of our benefactors." To the same intent thrice every quarter a solemn mass of the Holy Ghost, and once every quarter a requiem mass, were said at the altar of St. Katherine in the Church of the Blessed Virgin. Every night the books and ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... 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 their harshness. By duty ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... 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 was, if possible, viler than Zeno, ...
— 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
... Her stepmother stood beside her with a young baby in her arms, but when she saw what held the gaze of the child she drew her away, saying: "We mustn't look, Waitstill; your ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... lies in an American girl marrying an European nobleman. Instead, it administers a solar plexus blow to American womanhood. The heroine marries a German prince, merely because he is a Prince, discarding her honest and true lover in a scoundrelly fashion, while her beautiful stepmother comes within an ace of surrendering her person to her son- in-law, and is prevented only by the inopportune arrival of her idiotic husband. It is all very "elevating," and a good thing to take your wife and daughter ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... this quarter that both Night and Sleep, issuing out at the close of day, spread themselves, as if, for robbing all living creatures of half their allotted periods of life. It was here that Sakra, beholding (his stepmother) the goddess Diti lying asleep in a state of pregnancy, cut off the foetus (into forty-nine parts), whence sprang the (forty-nine) Maruts. It is towards this direction that the roots of Himavat stretch towards the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... 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
... me these books for another purpose. But there ye shall read—in Asser and the Saxon Chronicles—how that the old Queens of Saxondom, when that they were humble or were wives coming after the first, sat not upon the throne to be crowned and sacred, but—so it was with Judith that was stepmother to King Alfred, and with some others whose names in this hurry I may not discover nor remember in my mind—they were, upon some holidays, shewn to the people ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... much in an undertone over the ices to Miss Wade, who sat beside me—though I ought not to have discussed them at their own table. "Hugo Le Geyt seems to have made an excellent choice," I murmured. "Maisie and Ettie will be lucky, indeed, to be taken care of by such a competent stepmother. Don't you think so?" ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... Yard that belongs to my Friend's Country House, I was wonderfully pleased to see the different Workings of Instinct in a Hen followed by a Brood of Ducks. The Young, upon the sight of a Pond, immediately ran into it; while the Stepmother, with all imaginable Anxiety, hovered about the Borders of it, to call them out of an Element that appeared to her so dangerous and destructive. As the different Principle which acted in these different Animals cannot ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... 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 ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... had such a mother!" cried my lord. "But I have only the advantage of a stepmother, and she draws me. There is the dinner-bell. Shall we go into the eating-room?" And taking his young friend's arm, my lord led him to the apartment ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... had 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
... 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 make a ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... 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 Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... palace there were few kinsmen of her husband besides his younger brother Galeazzo, for the dynasty was not fruitful and was dying out. Even Camilla d'Aragona, Giovanni's stepmother, was not there, for she had left Pesaro for good in 1489, taking up her residence in a castle ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... 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 she ...
— Favorite Fairy Tales • Logan Marshall
... breakfast, perhaps in anticipation of a sort of Roman holiday in which his usually late and apologetic stepmother would furnish the amusement. They were both surprised to find her there before them, looking uncommonly fresh in crisp, sheer white, with deep-toned violets ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... unaccustomed restraints to which they now 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 upon eligible ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie
... stepmother, France, did not know it, at least the waiters in the cafes, shopkeepers, and other people in the Latin Quarter were aware that Field and I were among the extremely small and select number of gentlemen who had operated at the barricades for the health of Freedom, and for some ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... a considerable benefactor to the Collegiate Church of Manchester, where he was ultimately buried, although he left directions in his will to be buried at Ely. His numerous promotions are possibly due to the influence of his stepmother, the famous Lady Margaret, Countess of Richmond and Derby, the mother of King Henry VII. He was very little at Ely, and bore an indifferent moral character. The quaint set of verses[3] drawing his character says there was "little Priest's metal in him," that he was "a goodly tall man as any in ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ely • W. D. Sweeting
... matter so wholly from Sher Singh's point of view as to consider him justified in killing not only poor Charteris, but Gerrard as well, for the offence of abducting his stepmother." ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... 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 at his trade in Germany, Austria, Italy, and ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... as she had been called as a Jewess, Hannah, had spent her girlhood under the rule of a stepmother. Peter was a young man earning a fair salary as a clerk at the Town Hall. He was a frequent visitor at Bendet's wine-shop. And Peter was an expert judge of the comeliness of Jewish maidens in general and of Anna's beauty in particular. So, when Pater did come, he came as a veritable ...
— In Those Days - The Story of an Old Man • Jehudah Steinberg
... 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
... had also not been able to sleep for hunger, and had heard what their stepmother had said to their father. Gretel wept bitter tears, and said to Hansel: 'Now all is over with us.' 'Be quiet, Gretel,' said Hansel, 'do not distress yourself, I will soon find a way to help us.' And when the old folks had fallen asleep, he got up, put on his ...
— Grimms' Fairy Tales • The Brothers Grimm
... 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 ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... THE little stepmother, with her blue eyes and rosy cheeks, sat in the yard, surrounded by her pets, and ...
— The Nursery, July 1873, Vol. XIV. No. 1 • Various
... do exactly as she liked until after they were married. Then she might have to find out that once in a while it would be just as well if she did what he liked. But he asked me not to mention this to Carolyn and her stepmother, so I didn't. And in spite of my objection, the rehearsals were interesting. I felt as if I oughtn't to laugh and joke, but the others all did tremendously, so I did too ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... second wife was a wicked, plotting woman, and a cruel stepmother to Imogen, Cymbeline's daughter by ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... jelly-fish, neither sea-weed nor crabs enliven the sands at low water; the sea life is poor and meagre. What is wonderful is the struggle of man against a miserly and formidable power. Nature has done little for him, but she allows herself to be managed. Stepmother though she be, she is accommodating, subject to the occasional destruction of a hundred thousand lives in a ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... even by an enemy (for an enemy I am to thee), take away a life insupportable through these dreadful agonies, hateful, too, {to myself}, and {only} destined to trouble. Death will be a gain to me. It becomes a stepmother ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... Fanshawe failings were 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 but ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... to look out for my stepmother, too. She'd crown me with a chair if she thought I held out on her. Beans me about every ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... into the details of the crime. He had been beaten by his father that evening after a quarrel with his stepmother about spilling the milk. He went, as usual, to his bed in the barn; but the hay was suffocating, his head ached, and he could not sleep. He arose in the middle of the night, went to the house, and killed both ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... of the same soothing effect upon his nerves that a cat's purring has upon some people's. He began to think that he should be fortunate if he could win her, for his own sake. Yesterday he had looked upon her more as a possible stepmother for Molly; to-day he thought more of her as a wife for himself. The remembrance of Lord Cumnor's letter gave her a very becoming consciousness; she wished to attract, and hoped that she was succeeding. Still they only talked of the countess's state for some time; then a lucky shower came on. ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... A STEPMOTHER drove me from home, embittering me. A squaw-man, a flaneur and dilettante took my virtue. For years I was his mistress—no one knew. I learned from him the parasite cunning With which I moved with the ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... in order to have a look at 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 ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... mother died we have had no good days; our stepmother beats us every day, and if we go near her she kicks us away; we have nothing to eat but hard crusts of bread left over; the dog under the table fares better; he gets a good piece every now and then. If our mother only knew, how she would pity us! Come, let us go together ...
— Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm • Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
... eldest son, 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
... of my readers, as is possible, should be unacquainted with the story of Romulus and Remus, let me say that I believe (but am not quite sure) that they were two twin brothers, both boys, left orphans at an early age, and nursed by a stepmother in the shape of a wolf. They were subsequently discovered, and having grown to manhood, it occurred to Romulus to build Rome. For this modest undertaking Remus chaffed his brother, and practised the high jump over his walls, naturally damaging them considerably. ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... The Amadan's stepmother was always afraid of his beating her children, he was growing so big and strong. So to keep him from growing and to weaken him, she had him fed on dough made of raw meal and water, and for that he was called "The Amadan of the Dough." But instead of getting weaker, it was getting ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... mother's maiden name. But it was unlikely this character could have known that. Joe had been born in Naples and his mother had died in childbirth. His father hadn't brought him to the States until the age of five and by that time he had a stepmother. ...
— Gun for Hire • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... uncover at the name of Jesus than to swear by the name of God. When a rhymer reads his poem to him he begs a copy, and persuades the press there is nothing that he dislikes in presence that in absence he censures not. He comes to the sick-bed of his stepmother, and weeps when he secretly fears her recovery. He greets his friend in the street with so clear a countenance, so fast a closure, that the other thinks he reads his heart in his face, and shakes hands with an indefinite invitation ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... "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 and please ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... the 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 one day return, ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... and we lived in a sumptuous house in the upper part of the city. This was when I was about ten years old. My father was twice married; I was the child of the first wife, who died when I was very young; my stepmother came five years later. She was the elder of two sisters, both beautiful women. The sister often came to visit us. I remember I liked her better than I liked my stepmother; in fact, I regarded her with that sort of romantic ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... months, in no day of which had her stay seemed anything but temporary—a condition to be 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 ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... was born in a Thuringian village, April Twenty-first, Seventeen Hundred Eighty-two. His father was pastor of the Lutheran Church. When scarcely a year old his mother died. Erelong a stepmother came to fill her place—but didn't. This stepmother was the kind we read about in the "Six ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... that he had been; 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 ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... "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
... 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 for the crown of Spain, as ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... there is vast difference between them and tyrants. This was Pittacus's reply to Myrsilus, and it was spoken in jest, quoth Thales; nor was it an old king I said I should marvel at, but an old pilot. In this mistake however, I am much of the youth's mind who, throwing a stone at a dog, hit his stepmother, adding, Not so bad. I therefore esteemed Solon a very wise and good man, when I understood he refused empire; and if Pittacus had not taken upon himself a monarchy, he had never exclaimed, O ye gods! how hard a matter it is to be good! And Periander, however he seems ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... 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
... tree, and intimates a chaffinch's call. Another bird replies. Cyril walks on to Oldport, leaving Everard and Lilian, between whom there follows a warm love scene and betrothal. During this episode Mrs. Lee, Alma's stepmother, tells her husband that Alma is gone to meet her unknown lover in the wood at the signal of a chaffinch's call. Lee follows, and finds Alma there alone. He picks up a paper she had torn and dropped; it contains an assignation for that evening ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... no longer. The guilty vauntings of Jehovah's foes, Misdeeming against Him His silence deep, Too long of falsehood's taxed His promises: What do I say? Success imparting life Into their fury, even on our shrines Your cruel stepmother would offer up To Baal idolatrous incense. Let us show The infant monarch, whom your hands have saved, Raised in the temple 'neath the Lord's defence. He will possess the courage of our princes; His mind already ...
— Athaliah • J. Donkersley
... stepmother," scolded Sunny Boy, at the end of the first act. "Poor little Snow White! I hope they never find out where she went when she ...
— Sunny Boy in the Big City • Ramy Allison White
... dismemberment exposure separation of the first parents. IV, B: The dismembered [man or woman] the rejuvenated the reborn [m. or w.]. VI, A: Potiphar motive separation of first parents Onan motive. VII, A: The wicked stepmother Potiphar's wife man eater. VII, B: Flight from the "man eater" flight from Potiphar's wife flight from the wicked stepmother separation of the first parents magic flight. IX, A: The first parents magic flight. IX, A: The killed ram Thor's ram Thyestes' meal soma. XIII, A: The ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... 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 take ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... cannot be compared for cruelty with the infamous Pedro. Burke has said that if Pedro was not absolutely the most cruel of men, he was undoubtedly the greatest blackguard who ever sat upon a throne, and King Juan was far from meriting similar condemnation. Sibyl de Foix, his stepmother, had exercised so strange and wonderful a power over his father, that when Juan came to the throne he was more than eager to turn upon this enchantress and make her render up the wide estates which ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... of the Salviati lived a rich Venetian nobleman, head of the house of the Capelli. He had one son and one daughter, but not by his wife then living, who, in consequence, was stepmother to his children. With the son, our narrative is not concerned; the daughter, Bianca Capello, was a charming girl of the age of fifteen or sixteen, of a pale complexion, on which the blood, at every emotion, would appear, and pass ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... hardy and rather quarrelsome. Thord their father had married in his old age, and his then wife was not the mother of these two. She was very much against her stepsons, especially Thorbjorn, because he was intractable and headstrong. One day when he was playing at "tables", his stepmother came up and saw that he was playing at "hnettafl"; they played with big peg pieces. She considered that very lazy of him and spoke some words to which he answered hastily. She took up the piece and struck him on the cheek bone with the peg, and it glanced into ...
— Grettir The Strong - Grettir's Saga • Unknown
... determined, should enter life under her wing, and hers only. In the end she had her way. Jeanne was entering life now, not through the respectable but somewhat bourgeois avenue by which her great monied relatives would have led her, but under the auspices of her stepmother, whose position as chaperon to a great heiress had already thrown open a great many doors which would have been permanently closed to her in any other guise. The Princess herself was always consistent. She assumed to herself an arrogant right to do as she pleased and live as she pleased. She was ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the grandfather's second family, for the first time, into close as well as friendly contact with the first. Mr. Browning had always remained on outwardly friendly terms with his stepmother; and both he and his children were rewarded for this forbearance by the cordial relations which grew up between themselves and two of her sons. But in the earlier days they lived too far apart for frequent meeting. The old Mrs. Browning was now a widow, and, in order to be near her relations, ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... he had spent his youth at the court of Nicomedia, and looked upon the East as his home. Rome, moreover, had tragic associations for him. It was there that he had caused his young son Crispus, falsely accused of treason by his stepmother Fausta, to be put to death. The young Caesar had been brave and upright and a favorite with all. Too late did his father learn that he was innocent. Fausta paid the penalty for her evil deed, but her death could not give life to the ...
— Saint Athanasius - The Father of Orthodoxy • F.A. [Frances Alice] Forbes
... another complication," Martius continued, after a pause. "The real cause of my stepmother's illness was Virgilia's declaration that she, too, has adopted the Christian faith. Where she heard about it, further than the things I taught her, I do not know. Thou seest, that the matter ...
— Virgilia - or, Out of the Lion's Mouth • Felicia Buttz Clark
... her third year she made herself thoroughly ill through overwork, so ill that she had to give up Newnham altogether and go abroad with her stepmother. She made herself ill, as so many girls do in those university colleges, through the badness of her home and school training. She thought study must needs be a hard straining of the mind. She worried ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... white-linen-clad boy with his preternaturally clean face, his light-brown hair brushed till it shone like lacquer, his polished nails and his adult appendage of a tutor, aroused a contempt in Judith's mind which was only equaled by her astonishment. On that occasion he sat upright in a chair between his stepmother and his tutor, looking intently out of very bright blue eyes at the two gipsy-brown little girls in their single-garment linen play-clothes, swinging their tanned bare legs and feet from the railing of the porch. They returned this inspection in silence—on Sylvia's part with the keen and welcoming ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... the door and his stepmother, followed by Malcolm Sage, passed out. They descended ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... me. As far as the past is concerned, I will dispel your fears on that point. I was proof against the temptation both of enriching myself and of revenging myself. I—a step-father, mind you—contended for my wicked step-son with his mother, as a father might contend against a stepmother in the interests of a virtuous son; nor did I rest satisfied till, with a perfectly extravagant sense of fairness, I had restrained my good wife's ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius |
