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More "Girlhood" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rapidly reaching the end of her girlhood as the lodger was nearing the limits of his drink-sapped strength, redoubled her efforts. It was very plain to her that he could not live much longer; death in delirium tremens was inevitable. After that, ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... In my girlhood I was strongly drawn to religion, partly through training and example, but more, as I now know, by the affectability of my strongly feminine temperament. My religious enthusiasm was so intense that often I was in a condition which must have been closely connected with erotic ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... and intense, that notwithstanding his coldness and positive cynicism, I cherished for my guardian in the short time I had been with him an affection stronger than I had ever felt for any one since I had lost my two intensely-beloved parents—a loss that had embittered the otherwise happy period of girlhood. I had never realized until that night how much he was to me. Pity, perhaps, for the bitter pain that had so changed his whole nature, may have awakened me to the fact; but still there was an inexplicable charm about ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... and by industrial independence develop the best qualities of her nature, and I undertook to teach her self-reliance and to lead her into the new life of social and economic freedom. Had she been thus trained from girlhood this tragedy would have been impossible, and her life would have been full of beauty, for I have never known a sweeter character. In the meantime I loaned—not gave, but loaned her the money to live upon. She would have resented a gift. She was making splendid ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... to girlhood, Jeanne had heard continually of the woes of the war, and had herself witnessed some of the wretchedness that it caused. A feeling of intense patriotism grew in her with her growth. The deliverance of France from the English was the subject of her reveries ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... of Joanna's ordinary life. But still, however good she may be as a witness, Joanna is better; and she, when speaking to the Dauphin, calls herself in the Latin report Bergereta. Even Haumette confesses that Joanna tended sheep in her girlhood. And I believe, that, if Miss Haumette were taking coffee alone with me this very evening (February 12, 1847)—in which there would be no subject for scandal or for maiden blushes, because I am an intense philosopher, and Miss H. would be hard ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... go on calling her Hannah Winter, for she married Hermie Slocum and became, according to law, Mrs. Hermie Slocum, but remained, somehow, Hannah Winter in spite of law and clergy, though with no such intent on her part. She had never even heard of Lucy Stone. It wasn't merely that her Chicago girlhood friends still spoke of her as Hannah Winter. Hannah Winter suited her—belonged to her and was characteristic. Mrs. Hermie Slocum sort of melted and ran down off her. Hermie was the sort of man who, christened Herman, ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... alone, she seated herself before her old music stand which had been brought down to welcome her, and proceeded to glance over and arrange the pieces she had learned and loved in her young girlhood. Most of them made her smile, and when she reflected upon how difficult she used to think them, she realized that now that it was over she was glad for the German regime. Helen had accounted herself an accomplished pianist when she went away, but she had ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... Camors woke up the next morning in the chamber where her girlhood had passed. The birds of spring were singing under her windows in the old ancestral gardens. As she recognized these friendly voices, so familiar to her infancy, her heart melted; but several hours' sleep had restored to her her natural courage. She banished ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... Dantzig by French troops. She was at school in the Jopengasse when the Treaty of Tilsit—that peace which was nothing but a pause—was concluded. She had seen Luisa of Prussia, the good Queen who baffled Napoleon. Her childhood had passed away in the roar of siege-guns. Her girlhood, in the Frauengasse, had been marked by the various woes of Prussia, by each successive step in the development of Napoleon's ambition. There were no bogey-men in the night-nursery at the beginning of the century. One Aaron's rod of a bogey had swallowed ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... her girlhood. She went first to live with a sort of cousin in town, in a house where they took in cards on a tray, and then she came to live with Mrs Black, who took a fancy to her at first. I'd had no boyhood to speak of, ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... had lost the sense of happy irresponsibility that goes so far towards making up one of the sweetest essentials of youth. Luckily there is one thing which can never be quite destroyed at secondhand—the romance and illusions that beguile boyhood and girlhood, and the liability to be so beguiled still lived in Valerie's ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... me. We heard my uncle's voice, as I shut the door, calling Dudley. He had been waiting, probably, in the adjoining room. I hurried into my chamber, with Milly at my side, and there my agitation found relief in tears, as that of girlhood naturally does. ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... she went, across the tracks, and up to the river road. It had been a favourite walk of hers in her girlhood. Then she had gone with a quick, light step; now she went slowly, ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... the favorite book (during her girlhood) of Marya Alexandrovna, the daughter of Alexander II., afterwards Duchess of Edinburg, and now Duchess of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. I made acquaintance with this fascinating work by reading aloud from her copy to a mutual ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... Jessica, Thou canst not gain the end that thou dost seek. For even if I have the foolish will (And I assure thee that I have it not) To bring thee back to all the luxury, The silken clothes, the soft and perfumed beds, The shining jewels of thy girlhood days, I could not. I ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... her faults clearly enough with those keen, quizzical eyes; but what the sight roused in him was not so much disapproval as pity, and an immense longing to help and comfort. He loved her; he understood her; he honestly believed he could help her to rise above the weaknesses of girlhood, and become the fine large-hearted woman which Providence had intended her to be; and the time had come when he intended to speak his mind and ask her to be his wife. The silence had lasted so long that at last Joan herself became conscious of it, ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... rising moon, Between the shadow of the mows, Looked on them through the great elm-boughs!— On sturdy boyhood, sun-embrowned, On girlhood with its solid curves Of healthful strength and painless nerves! And jests went round, and laughs that made The house-dog answer with his howl, And kept ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... importance for a Christian mind. Did Eve think about that? Perhaps her association with him, careless as he was in all such matters, had helped to blunt her religious feeling. Yet what hope was there, in such a world as this, that she would retain the pieties of her girlhood? ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... much of her girlhood at Kingthorpe, and had always been made welcome at The Knoll; but although she saw the Wendovers established upon their native soil, the rulers of the land, and revered by all the parish, she had grown up with the firm conviction that Dr. ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... of the Madeleine in Paris are classical, at least in intentions and in the models which they follow; while Victor Hugo's "Notre Dame de Paris," Scott's "Ivanhoe," Fouque's "Der Zauberring," and Rossetti's painting, "The Girlhood of Mary," are no less certainly romantic in ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... the flat chest, straight back and forward falling shoulders of the patient and enduring working woman, though her body was now still in its milder girlhood and work had not yet made these lines ...
— Three Lives - Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena • Gertrude Stein
... Cuyahoga County, in 1840, and still pursues in Cleveland the studies which have literally illumined the world. One of the earliest pioneers of science in geology and archaeology, Charles Whittlesey is identified with Cleveland, where the girlhood of the gifted novelist, Constance Fenimore Woolson, was passed. There, too, Charles F. Browne began to make his pseudonym of Artemus Ward known, and helped found the school of American humor. He was born in Maine; but his fun tastes of the West ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... sometimes caused her to laugh merrily; and her musical voice once used to mingle with Rupert's and my own more manly and deeper notes, in something like audible mirth; not that Lucy was ever boisterous or loud; but, in early girlhood, she had been gay and animated, to a degree that often blended with the noisier clamour of us boys. With Grace, this had never happened. She seldom spoke, except in moments when the rest were still; ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... this girl; she would protect all black girls. She would make it possible for these poor beasts of burden to be decent in their toil. Out of protection of womanhood as the central thought, she must build ramparts against cruelty, poverty, and crime. All this in turn—but now and first, the innocent girlhood of this daughter of shame must be rescued from the devil. It was her duty, her heritage. She must offer this unsullied soul up unto God in mighty atonement—but how? Here now was no protection. Already lustful eyes were in wait, and the ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... was Venetia! the fair, the serene Venetia! the young, the inexperienced Venetia! pausing, as it were, on the parting threshold of girlhood, whom, but a few hours since, he had fancied could scarcely have proved a passion; who appeared to him barely to comprehend the meaning of his advances; for whose calmness or whose coldness he had consoled himself by the flattering ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... surprised to learn how full had been his reading. All through her girlhood she had gone to private schools and had been tutored by high-paid intellectual aristocrats, yet she found this man better educated than herself. He had read philosophy and had browsed, at least, among all the literature of the past; he knew history and a certain measure of science, and most ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... delightful if our daughters might remain innocent. They should have that privilege. Innocence belongs to childhood and girlhood, but under present conditions, it is as dangerous and foolish as level and unguarded railway crossings, or open and unguarded trap doors. It is no pleasant task to have to tell a joyous, sunny-hearted girl of fourteen or fifteen about the evils that are in the ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... enough, with the precocious development of the time, to have known the sense of loss and the general mourning at their death in 1616. It is doubtful if the plays of the elder dramatists were allowed her, though there are hints in her poems of some knowledge of Shakespeare, but by the time girlhood was reached, the feeling against them had increased to a degree hardly comprehensible save in the light of contemporaneous history. The worst spirit of the time was incorporated in the later plays, and the Puritans made no discrimination. The players ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... not be thinking so much of your loss—your supposed loss," the old gentleman conscientiously supplied—"as your sensitiveness leads you to imagine. But you will give occasion for thinking and for talking if you tear open now your girlhood's secrets. Whom does it concern, my dear, to know where or how your ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... perpetual tendency of want to cramp the noblest attitude. Poverty and misfortune had overhung her childhood and she had none of the pretty delusions about life that are supposed to be the crowning grace of girlhood. This very competence, which gave her a touching reasonableness, made Glennard's situation more difficult than if he had aspired to a princess bred in the purple. Between them they asked so little—they ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... stirring times I would like to mention: and that is Antonia Avellanos—the "beautiful Antonia." Whether she is a possible variation of Latin-American girlhood I wouldn't dare to affirm. But, for me, she is. Always a little in the background by the side of her father (my venerated friend) I hope she has yet relief enough to make intelligible what I am going to say. Of all the people who had seen with ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... the little Mary, idolised by her parents and spoiled by their disinterested guests, passed her girlhood. She is said to have been a clever, intelligent child, and of ways so winning as to "rapture" all with whom she came in contact. She was educated at home by her mother, who "instructed her in the principles of religion and ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead
... his pen. This be holy ground on which we tread. All she has she has given him: all the fantasies of her childhood, all the dreams of her girlhood, all her trust, her loyalty—her reverence—all to the very last pulsation of ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... in a class by herself. She never impressed me as a natural story-teller, save when she lived over again that happy girlhood which served to relieve the sadness of her mature life. In parts of Adam Bede and throughout The Mill on the Floss she seems to tell her stories as though she really enjoyed the work. All the scenes of her beautiful girlhood in the pleasant Warwickshire ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... comer, and whose presence appeared to fill the apartment. All the others paled before her, as do the stars when the moon rises among them. She was evidently young, and yet she did not suggest youth. One would almost imagine that she had never had a childhood or a girlhood, but was rather a direct creation of metropolitan society. Her exquisitely turned shoulders and arms were bare, and the diamonds about her neck were a circlet of fire. The complexion of her fair oval face was singularly ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... any change in him he remarked a development in her which was a little short of wonderful. She was at that age when the woman is breaking through the beautiful chrysalis of girlhood. In those two months a remarkable change had come over her, a change which he could not for the moment define, for this phenomenon of development had been ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... workaday politeness frowns on too abrupt a departure from a lady, particularly one whom we have companioned thus distantly from the careless simplicity of girlhood to the equally careless but complex businesses of adolescence. The world is all before her, and her chronicler may not be her guide. She will have adventures, for everybody has. She will win through with them, ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... a custom which she had hitherto supposed to be nothing worse than foolish, twice—at times inadvertently, at times deliberately—she had sought relief from sleepless nervousness and this new depression in the old and apparently harmless manner of her girlhood. For weeks now she had exercised little control of herself, feeling immune, yet it scared her a little to recognise again in herself the restless premonitions of desire. For here, in the sunshine of the forest-bordered highway, that same dull uneasiness ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... through which they may look across the green meadows and into the sunlit gardens of childhood. The result is not theories of child life but appreciation of children. How one who has read understandingly Sonva Kovalevsky's story of her girlhood could ever leave unanswered a child starving for love I cannot see. Mills' account of his early life is worth more than many theories in showing the deforming effect of an education that is formal discipline without an awakening of the heart and soul. Goethe's great study of his childhood ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... commonplace. I can tell it you in a few sentences. I married when I was seventeen at my father's command, to save him from ruin. My husband, like my father, was a city merchant. I did not love him, but then I did not know what love was. My girlhood was a miserable one. My father belonged to the sect of Calvinists. Our home was hideous, and we were poor. Any release from it was welcome. John Drage, the man whom I married, had one good quality. He was generous. He bought me pictures, and books—things which I always craved. When my father's ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... got letters from the Josselyns and Dakie Thayne. There was news in them such as thrills always the half-comprehending sympathies of girlhood. Leslie's vague suggestion of romance had become fulfilment. Dakie Thayne was wild with rejoicing that dear old Noll was to marry Sue. "She had always made him think of Noll, and his ways and likings, ever since that day of the game of chess that by his means came to grief. It was awful slang, ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... the prodigy of the Wellands' daughter urging him to marry his former mistress. But he was still dizzy with the glimpse of the precipice they had skirted, and full of a new awe at the mystery of young-girlhood. ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... though saying nothing. She saw that Lesbia was not happy, not as she had been in the time before the coming of John Hammond. She had never been particularly gay or light-hearted, never gifted with the wild spirits and buoyancy which make girlhood so lovely a season to some natures, a time of dance and song and joyousness, a morning of life steeped in the beauty and gladness of the universe. She had never been gay as young lambs and foals and fawns and kittens and puppy dogs are ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... courage I owe it to my grandmother. I will perhaps be pardoned if I say that all my girlhood life was spent with my Grandmother Bronson, a very small woman, weighing less than ninety pounds, small featured, always quaintly dressed in the old-fashioned Levantine silk with two breadths only in the skirt, a crossed silk handkerchief with a small white one folded ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... the slow silting lagoon of her girlhood came washing over the sands between, and Florimel flew merrily down the stair and across ball and garden and road to the riverbank, where was a little wooden stage or landing place, with a few steps, at which ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... that may not be dwarfed by the great pulsing of the lands sought by the lovers of rod and gun. Here she had gathered new ideas and unwonted thoughts. She is the best example I have ever seen of the sturdy, beautiful girlhood of modern life, and is an ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... although an incurable indolence, she gracefully said, had always prevented her from learning the piano. While yet sustaining the name of Jigbee, she had achieved a high reputation in private circles as a merciless judge of music. But her conversation had been, from earliest girlhood, her chief attraction. She possessed the extraordinary faculty of talking with a dozen persons upon a dozen different subjects ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... virtue because they had had the joy of finding one buyer instead of the many of the red sisterhood. A fierce animalism in them makes them cling to the babe at their breast and in the days of its softness and loveliness they close their eyes and try to catch again an old fleeting dream of their girlhood, a something vague, shadowy, no longer a part of them, brought with the babe out of the infinite. Having passed beyond the land of dreams, they dwell in the land of emotions and weep over the bodies of unknown dead or sit under the eloquence of evangelists, shouting of heaven and of hell—the call ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... left it, as a buxom bright-haired lassie: but oaks had now grown old that she had planted acorns; and grandmothers had died palsied, whom she remembered born; still, around the mountains and the lakes, those changeless features of her girlhood's rugged home, the old woman's memory wandered; they were pictured in her mind's eye hard, and clear, and definite as if she looked upon them now. And her soul's deep hope was to see them ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the girlhood of the delightful little heroine at Riverboro which were not included in the story of "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm," and they are as characteristic and delightful as any part of that famous story. Rebecca ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... her with twinkling eyes. They were great pals, these two; had been since they met in Portland, five years ago. He was on his way to Stanford, and had seen her doing a singing and dancing act in a wretched vaudeville company. That vision of a girlhood, beset and embattled, the pitifulness of its acquired hardness, had called to his western chivalry and made him her champion. Ever since he had helped and encouraged, his belief and friendship a spur to ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... slept on in the dreamless, heavy sleep of tired girlhood. Of course, not one of the three had had the least intention of doing anything so commonplace as going to sleep; in fact, the very idea had been vaguely irritating. Had they not looked forward to this very thing for months—at least, so it seemed to them—and it was almost impossible for them to ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... eyes and drew the baby closer. It looked like a rose dipped in milk, she thought, this pink and white blossom of girlhood, or like a pink cherub, with its halo of pale yellow hair, finer than ...
— The Bird's Christmas Carol • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... to-day. I remember the two girls talking of it, and Miss Halliday declaring herself "quite old." My dear one, I drink your health in this poor tavern liquor, with every tender wish and holy thought befitting your innocent girlhood! ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... she stood up, folded into a tiny oblong the paper upon which she had been making a few notes, and went slowly to the library door. More deeply stirred than she had been since the days of her passionate girlhood, she turned on the threshold for a look of farewell. But Richard Carter had left the desk, and was kneeling on one knee before his safe; he had forgotten her. Harriet went across the hall, mounted the stairs, and found ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... devotedness of mine. She was still—when the perversity of heart made me not blind—the sweet creature to whom the task of ministering was a pleasure infinitely beyond any other which I knew. But, as she grew up to girlhood, other prospects opened upon her eyes, and other purposes upon those of her parents. At twelve she was carried by maternal vanity into company—sent to the dancing school—provided with teachers in music ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... bowed stiffly, but pledged herself to nothing. She was a tall young woman of about two-and-twenty, with very little of the tender grace of girlhood about her; a young woman who, by right of a stately carriage and a pair of handsome shoulders, might have been called fine-looking. Her features were not unlike her father's; and those eyes and eyebrows of Daniel Granger's, which would have looked so well under a judicial wig, were reproduced ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... Polktown. The Middle-West community where she was born and had lived most of her girlhood was a tender memory to Janice. Her dear mother had died there, and for several years her father and she had lived very close to each other in ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... the next few hours with folded hands, her mind far in the past that was recalled by seeing the name of John Brierly. She lived over again those girlhood years when the world with John in it seemed the most beautiful place on earth. She thought of her mother's failing health, her helplessness, her dependence. She could almost hear her cry, "Don't leave me, Drusilla, don't leave me!" when John went to her and asked that they might ...
— Drusilla with a Million • Elizabeth Cooper
... thought—a marriage with Edward was the condition annexed. The Exile's dream of the home to which he can never return, the Desert Traveller's vision of water which he can never approach, are to them what to me were those words,—a marriage with Edward. Something which in the shadowy dreams of girlhood had hovered in my fancy; something which the terrors and the trials of the last year had crushed and subdued; something which in the feverish excitement of the last months had been dimmed but not destroyed; something ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... by way of relieving a certain awkward tension of silence, took off the waterproof cloak and slung it on her arm. This disclosed her five long brown cable-like curls that hung down her shoulders, reaching below her waist in some forgotten fashion of girlhood. They were Cissy's peculiar adornment, remarkable for their length, thickness, and the extraordinary youthfulness imparted to a figure otherwise precociously matured. In some wavering doubt of her actual years and privileges, Brother Seabright ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Jane Welsh, a brilliant and beautiful girl, descended on her father's side from John Knox and on her mother's from William Wallace. With the spirit of Wallace, she climbed in her girlhood up to places that a boy would have considered perilous. When she was forbidden to take up such a masculine study as Latin, she promptly learned to decline a Latin noun. Carlyle had much trouble in winning ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... was a young girl Henry Carpenter made life almost unbearable for his daughter, but as she emerged from girlhood into womanhood he lost his power over her. The bookkeeper's life was made up of innumerable little pettinesses. When he went to the bank in the morning he stepped into a closet and put on a black alpaca coat ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... dark hair had lost none of its gloss. She took her features one by one, and found no trace of change. Nor, indeed, scrutinised in that way did Stella show any change. It was when you saw her across a room that you recognised that girlhood had gone, and that there was a woman in the full ripeness of ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... it, my dear. The first is good enough for me," the old man laughed. He was thinking what a refreshing little picture his small window framed in. Was it like this his little girl would have looked if she had grown into girlhood? He gazed ...
— Glory and the Other Girl • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... the Puritan woman imbibed from girlhood to old age went further than this; it taught the theory of a personal devil. To the New England colonists Satan was a very real individual capable of taking to himself a physical form with the proverbial tail, horns, and hoofs. Hear what Cotton Mather, one of the ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... thereafter, save on great occasions, received the congregation individually or en masse, in his study at the church. A patriarchal old man, benevolent yet austere, who once, according to a story I had heard in my girlhood, had horsewhipped one of his vestrymen for trifling with the affections of a young married woman in ...
— The Confession • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... her childhood's delight in its clear outline against the sky; she saw the white stones of the old graveyard, next door, glimmer through the shadow cast by the church tower, with the half uneasy, fearful pleasure of her romantic girlhood; she felt about her the solidity and permanency of the old house, her father's and her grandfather's home, with the joy in protected security of her young married life; and through it all there ran ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... pleased with the country that he wrote to his wife to sell her property at once and follow him. Bidding a long farewell to the loving parents who had up to that time stood between her and every trouble, Fanny Osbourne, at an age when most young women are enjoying the care-free life of irresponsible girlhood, took her small daughter Isobel and set forth into ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... the honorable grace of middle life; the hair with a few threads of silver; the soft, fine skin showing some wrinkles about the eyes and two or three light creases across the forehead; the cheeks out of which roundness had vanished, and the lips the scarlet of girlhood, but though both were pale the mouth was still tender and sweet. A womanly woman,—that seemed to him a perfect description of his mother, a woman who had loved three generations, and held by them. Now for his sake she would give up the old ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... on Fanny's engagement with Lord Castleton. When you return from Australia you will still be a young man, she (though about your own years) almost a middle-aged woman, with her head full of pomps and vanities. All girls have a short period of girlhood in common; but when they enter womanhood, the woman becomes the woman of her class. As for me, and the office assigned to me by report, you know what I said when we parted, and—But here J—— comes, ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... than I knew, and with her convulsive clasp of me confirmed my half-formed fears. Then she kissed me, kisses that had no more of girlhood or coquetry or joy or anything but woman's passion to blind and hold and tame. By their very intensity I sensed the tiger in me. And it was the tiger that made her new and alluring sweetness fail of its intent. ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... wept for her vanished childhood, for all her happiness and hope and pleasure forever gone. To console her daughter, the mother told her of a store of beautiful ornaments that she herself had worn in girlhood; they had been given her by the daughters of the Moon and Sun,—gold, ribbons, and jewels. Beautifully arrayed in these long-concealed ornaments, Aino wandered through the fields for many days, bewailing her sad fate. On the fourth day, she laid ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... we have a room in Daland's house. A number of girls are spinning; Senta alone is idle, absorbed in a portrait that hangs on the wall—that of Vanderdecken. From earliest girlhood she has heard his tale and brooded over it; and self-sacrifice being her hobby, she has evidently worked herself up into a morbid state of mind and resolved to "redeem" the unfortunate man should the opportunity occur. This is ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... two daughters, Dora and Annie, had gone to spend the winter months in the west of England, with that lady's mother, who was now far advanced in years, and very desirous of having the company of this her last surviving child, and to feel the cheering influence of lively girlhood in the society of her truly loving ...
— Aunt Mary • Mrs. Perring
... the subject of clothes—of the wedding trousseau! Sarcastic people are wont to say that the tailor makes the man. Were I such a one, I might certainly assert that the milliner makes the bride. As regarding her bridehood, in distinction either to her girlhood or her wifehood—as being a line of plain demarcation between those two periods of a woman's life—the milliner does do much to make her. She would be hardly a bride if the trousseau were not there. A girl married without some such appendage would seem to pass into the condition of a wife ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... Love's drapeau rouge the truth has told! O' er girlhood's yielding barricade Floats the ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... in the old-fashioned porch of her old-fashioned house which opened into an old-fashioned garden in one of the suburbs of Marlborough, shelling peas. Everything about Miss Diana was old-fashioned and sweet. Her hair was dressed as she had been accustomed to wear it in her girlhood, and even the head mantua-maker of Marlborough, ardent worshiper at Fashion's shrine though she was, was forced to bow before her gentle individuality and confess that Miss Diana's taste ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... the individual: it was enough for the body to be, so to speak, an average one, showing him at his fullest development and in the complete enjoyment of his physical powers. The men were always represented in their maturity, the women never lost the rounded breast and slight hips of their girlhood, but a dwarf always preserved his congenital ugliness, for his salvation in the other world demanded that it should be so. Had he been given normal stature, the double, accustomed to the deformity of his members in this world, would ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... donkey of such unusual capacity. Still, she must know, if she knows anything, that a person does not come from America and pay one and fourpence the hour (or thereabouts) merely in order to visit the home of her girlhood, which is neither mentioned in Baedeker nor set down in the local guide-books as a feature ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of Perse resumed his residence in Edelweiss, opening the old palace once more to the world. His daughter, after the death of the Princess, began her extended visits to the home of her girlhood. So long as the Princess was alive she remained away from Edelweiss, reluctant to meet the friend who had banished her husband long before the wedding day in Buda Pesth. Now she came frequently and stayed for weeks at a time, apparently happy during these escapes from life in the great ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... majestic Ville Marie! Spread wide thine ample robes of state; The heralds cry that thou art great, And proud are thy young sons of thee. Mistress of half a continent, Thou risest from thy girlhood's rest; We see thee conscious heave thy breast And feel thy ...
— Thoughts, Moods and Ideals: Crimes of Leisure • W.D. Lighthall
... try to warn our American fathers and mothers of the great danger of the "confession," as the confessional is the stepping stone that leads to Romish abominations, as it is there that the seed of immoral thought is planted and it is there that the purity of girlhood is first tarnished, and if I can arouse Protestant mothers and fathers of this land to these awful sinks of iniquity I will consider that I have been instrumental in helping to obliterate one of the greatest evils ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... enslaving Charles by her opulent charms, the queen of his many mistresses, Frances Stuart was growing to beautiful girlhood, an exile at the French Court, with no dream or care of her future conquest of a king. Her father, a son of Lord Blantyre, had carried his death-dealing sword through many a fight for the first Charles, a distant ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... you," exclaimed Duff Salter, rather angrily, "to maintain a whole family on the servitude of your young body, wearing its roundness down to bone, exciting your nervous system, and inviting premature age upon a nature created for a longer girlhood, and ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... not difficult in a moment of angry feeling for a parent to denounce a disobedient child; but, to banish her at a period of general good-will and hilarity, from the hearth, round which she has sat on so many anniversaries of the same day, expanding by slow degrees from infancy to girlhood, and then bursting, almost imperceptibly, into a woman, is widely different. The air of conscious rectitude, and cold forgiveness, which the old lady has assumed, sits ill upon her; and when the poor girl ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... should never have had any idea. Even now when we go to the Louvre with papa, or to the exhibition of the 1st of May, that special feeling I have about a beautiful piece of sculpture, a good picture, carries me back immediately to Felicia. In my early girlhood she represented art to me, and it corresponded with her beauty. Her nature was a little vague, but so kind, I always felt she was something superior to myself, that bore me to great heights without frightening ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... the winds and waters of the North Sea dealt all too rudely with the fair freshness of her exterior; she grew worn and weather-stained, and it was apparent even to the casual eye of a landsman that she had left her girlhood behind her out on the Nor'-East Rough. Some of the younger trawlers would jeeringly refer to her behind her back as "Auntie," and affected to regard her as an antediluvian old dowager, which of course was mainly due to jealousy. But she still pegged ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... was not without a practical design as to her future. In her determination to accept no further aid from the Balls she had crippled her finances. Back in the inland town where she had spent her girlhood, and where Dr. Macklin had served the community so long, there were those who, in disapproving Sheila's venture into the city, at least had a sense of justice. Some of these critical friends whom the young woman had shrunk from appealing to heretofore, still owed for Dr. Macklin's services; and Sheila ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... was equally pleased with her cousin's having remained so unaffected and looked forward with much pleasure to renewing the girlhood intimacy, and also to meeting the Marquis d'Ochte, of whom his wife spoke so enthusiastically as "my Jean," and the son Philippe. She had some misgivings about the son because the literature of the day does not paint a young Frenchman in particularly desirable colors ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... mother was a washerwoman-widow, in whom Honoria Fraser had interested herself in her Harley Street girlhood. Bertie was the eldest of six, and his father had been a coal porter who broke his back tumbling down a cellar when a little "on." Bertie—he now figured as Mr. Albert Adams in the cricket lists—was ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... Colonel Pavet, "your mother, Madame Sheldon,—it seems strange for me to name her thus, for I never think of her except as Lucie De Latour, as I knew her in her girlhood—has a very excellent prospect of coming into the property that was willed ...
— Army Boys in the French Trenches • Homer Randall
... the nursery, songs for childhood, for girlhood, boyhood, and sacred songs—the whole melody of childhood and youth bound in one cover. Full of lovely pictures; sweet mother and baby faces; charming bits of scenery, and the dear old Bible story-telling ...
— Harper's Young People, June 1, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... gray hair—a trifle whiter, perhaps; the same frank, tender mouth, winning wherever she smiled; the same slight, graceful figure; and the same manner—its very simplicity a reflex of that refined and quiet life she had always led. For hers had been an isolated life, buried since her girlhood in a great house far away from the broadening influences of a city, and saddened by the daily witness of a slow decay of all she had been taught to revere. But it had been a life so filled with the largeness of generous deeds that its returns had brought her the ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... impetuous, nerve-wearing air was much different from the soft, warm winds of the flower-laden South. At night as she lay down to sleep she did not hear the tinkle of music nor the voice of night-singing birds, which in the scenes of her girlhood had been familiar sounds. The moan of the wind in the short, hard grass was different from its whisper in the peach trees, and the shrilling of the coyotes made but rude substitute for the trill of the love-bursting mocking bird ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... Dunstanwolde was surely a happy woman. Having known neither gayety nor luxury in her girlhood, it seemed now that she could give her lord no greater pleasure than to allow him ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the youngest of the three; she was about forty. But she had forgotten, like Jasmina and Saloma, to erase twenty years from the calendar: all three had preserved the youthful charm of their girlhood. ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... other, they came forward and were formally introduced to him by the President. Nine of the fourteen were men, and five were women of ages varying from middle age almost to girlhood. The men were apparently all between twenty-five and thirty-five, and included some half-dozen ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... In girlhood, hide nothing from your mother; do nothing that, if discovered by your mother, would make you blush. When you are married, never conceal anything from your husband. Never allow yourself to write a letter that he may not know all ...
— The King's Daughter and Other Stories for Girls • Various
... become a man wanted to go to such a place. His work in the railroad station had given him some idea of the geography of the country and, although he could not have told whether the woman who had talked so enticingly had in mind her childhood in New England or her girlhood in Michigan, he knew in a general way that to reach the land and the people who were to show him by their lives the better way to form his own life, he must go east. He decided that the further east he went ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... of Brus and his son, now a fine boy of thirteen, were of course amongst the royal guests. Though matron grace and dignified demeanor had taken the place of the blushing charms of early girlhood, the Lady Helen Brus was still very beautiful, and as the niece of the king and wife of such a distinguished baron, commanded and received universal homage. Among the combatants was a youthful knight, of an exterior and bearing so much more polished and graceful ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... that her prolonged absence was likely to be remarked upon, she went across on the day of the murder to see her mother. Merrington did not think that the murder was premeditated. His belief was that when the girl found herself back in the surroundings where she had spent such a happy girlhood in association with Phil Heredith, she was seized with a mad fit of jealousy against her successful rival, and under its influence had rushed upstairs and murdered her. Merrington had also come to the ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... rooms overlooking the dank inner courtyard to the frigid grandeur of their State chambers. Therein it was that Marie Leczinska was wont to instruct her young daughters in the virtues as she had known them in her girlhood's thread-bare home, not as her residence at the profligate French Court had taught her ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... DELICACY OF YOUR YOUTH.—The relations and familiarity of wedded life may seem to tone down the sensitive and retiring instincts of girlhood, but nothing can compensate for the loss of these. However, much men may admire the public performance of gifted women, they do not desire that boldness and dash in a wife. The holy blush of a maiden's modesty is more powerful in hallowing and governing a home than the heaviest armament that ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... hair, and she tore at it so savagely that at last her silky, black tresses clung to her white temples in big, smooth waves. Then she twisted the plaits in a huge coil at the nape of her neck; that was the way she had worn her hair in her girlhood, ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig
... draperies, her face made an attractive picture for the passer-by. Mrs. McAlister's girlhood had passed; a certain girlishness, however, would never pass, and her clear blue eyes had all the life and fire they had shown when, as Bess Holden she had been the leader in most of the pranks of her class at Vassar. ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... in my lap from laughing," Martha said, weeping. "Aaron, do what you will. I can hardly walk home to my Mem to bear a son in my girlhood bedroom. We are like Awduum uuu Ayf, like you said; but the serpent in this Eden ...
— Blind Man's Lantern • Allen Kim Lang
... Terry. I swear it's a trick. I can feel it!" She dropped her hand nervously on the heavy revolver which she wore strapped at her hip, and fingered the gold chasing. Without her gun, ever since early girlhood, she had felt that ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... "advanced"—involves nothing other than adequate recognition of the importance of woman in the most important of all matters. It is true that my primary concern has been to furnish, for the individual woman and for those in charge of girlhood, a guide of life based upon the known physiology of sex. But it is a poor guide of life which considers only the transient individual, and poorest of all in this ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... the head of the table at luncheon, Mrs. Galland, with her round cheeks, her rather becoming double chin, and her nicely dressed hair, almost snow-white now, suggested a girlhood in the Bulwer Lytton and Octave Feuillet age, when darkened rooms were favored for the complexion and it was the fashion for gentlewomen to faint on occasion. She lived in the past; the present interested her only when it aroused some memory. To-day all her ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... made her speech which first indicated a changing mind. " Well, what will be, will be," she murmured with a prolonged sigh of resignation. " What will be, will be. Girls are very headstrong in these days, and there is nothing much to be done with them. They go their own roads. It wasn't so in my girlhood. - We were obliged to pay attention to ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... with him Marie, who blushed and smiled, but to my mind looked more of a grown woman than ever before; one who had left girlhood behind her and found herself face to face with real life and all its troubles. Following her close, very close, as I was quick to notice, was Hernan Pereira. He was even more finely dressed than usual and carried in his hand a beautiful new, single-barrelled rifle, ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... or two respects she was not absolutely perfect. Miss Abingdon, for instance, who always conscientiously encouraged these moods, and censured the General for spoiling Jane, would frequently compare her niece with herself, as she remembered that dim figure of girlhood, and never failed to find cause for unfavourable comparison between the two. From the portraits which she drew it was generally believed that Miss Abingdon must have been born rather a strait-laced spinster of thirty, and have increased in wisdom ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... Mr. Wallace, and had been a constant visitor at his house from the first days of that gentleman's married life. He himself was alone in the world, a confirmed bachelor. He had seen Mildred creep from babyhood into childhood, and bud from girlhood to womanhood. To Mildred he was one of that numerous army of brevet relations known as "gran-pop," "pop," or "uncle." To her he was ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... appeared in Old Chester and said she was going to hire a house, and bring her mother back to end her days in the home of her girlhood, Old Chester displayed a friendly interest; when she decided upon a house on Main Street, directly opposite Captain Price's, it began to recall the romance of ...
— An Encore • Margaret Deland
... story. The heroine is as fine a type of girlhood as one could wish to set before our little British damsels ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... monument gardens bloomed in the sunshine, and on the further side of the wall covered with creepers, was the ship-yard, the scene of numberless delightful games. She sighed as she looked at the tall hulks, and watched for the man who, from her earliest girlhood, had owned her heart, whose image was inseparable from every thing of joy and beauty that she had ever known, and every grief her young ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of their parents. Some years ago, when a girl had been confirmed, she was considered officially grown up and marriageable, and entered straight away into the gaieties that are supposed to lead to marriage. But the modern tendency in Germany is to prolong girlhood, and the wife of sixteen is as rare there amongst the educated classes as it ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... relented as to ask her why she could not go without him, and that hurt her, and she said she never would go without him. All the same, when there came an invitation for lunch, from a particularly nice friend of her girlhood, she hesitated and was lost. She had expected, somehow, that it was going to be a very little lunch, but she found it a very large one, in the number of people, and after the stress of accounting for her husband's failure to come ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... makes a natural and affectionate report of Joanna's ordinary life. But still, however good she may be as a witness, Joanna is better; and she, when speaking to the dauphin, calls herself in the Latin report Bergereta. Even Haumette confesses that Joanna tended sheep in her girlhood. And I believe that, if Miss Haumette were taking coffee along with me this very evening (February 12, 1847)—in which there would be no subject for scandal or for maiden blushes, because I am an intense philosopher, and Miss H. would be hard upon 450 years old—she would admit the following ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... pretty shyness of girlhood, Kitty sang one or two little songs in the simple manner she knew. Her voice was full and rich. ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... the impassioned and redundant Bettine to her by an irresistible bond. Their companionship ripened into romantic friendship. Their letters, collected and published by the survivor, compose one of the most original and stimulative delineations of the inner life of girlhood to be met with in literature. To cold and shallow readers, this correspondence will prove an unknown tongue; but those who can appreciate the reflection of wonderful personalities, and the workings of intense sentiment, will prize it ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... fancies, From shadowy shoals of dream, To clothe her in the wistful hour, When girlhood steals from bud to flower. Bring her the tunes of elfin dances, Bring ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... of the occurrence, with the innocent curiosity of girlhood, to the Squire and Mrs. Elderkin (Phil being just now away). The Squire, as he hears it, has passed a significant look across ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... left the room, Mrs Campbell turned her face to the wall, and prayed to God, to guard the motherless child; to guard the toilers on the sea; and then she thought of her girlhood, of her bright, strong, healthy days; and then of her marriage in the ominous Scotch mists, of the sojourning at Malta, of the journeyings to and fro; and chiefly of her husband's love, and of her happy life; and from the depths of her heart she ...
— Wilton School - or, Harry Campbell's Revenge • Fred E. Weatherly
... or less at home. My grandmother, the Duchess of Bedford, was passionately fond of acting, and in my grandfather's time, one room at Woburn Abbey was permanently fitted up as a theatre. Here, every winter during my mother's girlhood, there was a succession of performances in which she, her mother and brothers and sisters all took part, the Russell family having a natural gift for acting. Probably the very name of Charles Matthews ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... peregrinating ghost. He turned quickly and saw Lady Elfrida, half bold, yet half frightened, halting beside a pillar of the chancel. But there was nothing of the dead about her: she was radiating and pulsating with the uncompromising and material freshness of English girlhood. The wild rose in the hedgerow was not more tangible than her cheek, nor the summer sky more clearly cool and blue than her eyes. The vigor of health and unfettered freedom of limb was in her figure from her buckled walking-shoe to her brown hair ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... Lizzie Dangler's prosy platitudes, which some deemed wit—Horner, par exemple—sank into nothingness, and Baby Blake, one of the "gushing" order of girlhood, appeared as a stick, or, rather, a too pliant sapling—her inane "yes's" and lisping "no's" having an opportunity of being "weighed in the balance," and consequently, in my opinion, "found wanting." All were mediocre beside her. Perhaps I was prejudiced; but, now, the remarks ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... social intrigue, Clayton ignored the possible effect of his further presence in Worthington's household as an attractive young man when little Alice, at a bound, passed through the gates of girlhood and became the beautiful Miss Worthington. He had never seen the angel at his side, and yet Ferris, clearer eyed, had conquered in ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... was a young Quakeress, born, I believe, in Philadelphia; but her father and mother died, and she came to South East, to live with her uncle, when she was about eighteen. The story of her girlhood is rather vague; but somehow she fell in love with an English officer, and made a runaway match which turned out better than such affairs usually do; for his relatives received her favorably, and she made her home with them at Temple Court in Yorkshire—doesn't that sound like a book? ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... and then suddenly spread their wings out, without flying, and scraped the grass with them. The elms were quite green already, and the oaks were pushing out thousands of bright emerald leaves. There is a day in every spring when the maiden year reaches full girlhood, and pauses on the verge of woman's estate, to wonder at the mysterious longings that disquiet all her being, and at the unknown music that sings through ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... pointed across the friendly land and promised to take care of her. I had had no fear then that she would ever grow corpulent and florid, and now I found myself asking if my boyish intuition might not have been right, and she fulfilled entirely the promise of her girlhood, defying the insidious generosity of time and the vulgar influence of Rufus Blight. Should I ever know? Should I ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... was even less than a second—Mrs. Vaneman was still in the act of hanging up the receiver when the image materialized in the living room of Dorothy's girlhood home. ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... a verse-maker. Poetry suited my emotions better than prose. The following is one of my girlhood productions. ...
— Retrospection and Introspection • Mary Baker Eddy
... and benevolent she was, timid and sensitive to a degree, gentle, and considerate to all. Do not cavil at her being thus praised—admire and love her whilst you may, she is worthy of it now, in her innocent girlhood; the time will come when such praise would be misplaced. Could the fate that was to overtake his child have been foreseen by the earl, he would have struck her down to death, in his love, as she stood before him, rather than suffer her to enter ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... will have of its liberty!" returned the cousin sarcastically. "After having passed a girlhood of wholesome restraint in the rational society of Europe, you are about to return home to the slavery of American female life, just as you are ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... which had been suppressed by her foster-mother in her girlhood, came back to her in her new home, and it was her delight to express in verse the inspirations of her life amid these new scenes, and to publish these poems in the papers of the East that most sympathized with the cause ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... Carboniferous in the series, are found in their place at the beginning of the northern terraces referred to. The theory is fortified by many evidences supplied by examination of the district, where, more than anywhere else, mother earth has laid bare the secrets of her girlhood. The climax in this extraordinary example of erosion is, of course, the chasm of the Grand Canyon proper, which, were the missing strata restored to the adjacent plateau, would be sixteen thousand feet deep. The layman is apt to stigmatize ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... the room with her swaying, graceful carriage of old days, but with a new dignity and reserve of manner, carrying her lovely head with just a little more pride than in her girlhood, greeting Irving, for all her warm friendliness, like a young queen graciously ready to accept homage from her subjects. She sank into a low chair beside the fire, the flames casting a warm glow over her arms and neck from which ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... beneath the live-oaks on the mountains' flanks or shoulders; in dimly lighted, cedar-sheltered gulches, among tall brakes and lilies; or high up on the canyon walls under the dark and fragrant pines—over all the paths and trails familiar to her girlhood she led him—showing him every nook and glade and glen—teaching him to know, as he had asked, the mountains ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... she saw how it was. The room was a reproduction of her own bedroom at home, only newer and more luxurious. It was almost as if some ghost of herself had been there while she slept—as if her own hand had done everything in a dream of her girlhood wherein ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... grown into the counterfeit presentment of her sister and of all other thin, spare, New England spinsters, it was something of a counterfeit, and underneath was still the faint echo of that wild heart-beat of her girlhood. Having learned the trick of beating and loving and suffering, the poor faithful heart persisted, although it lived on memories and carried on its sentimental ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... mental vision blotting out the well-loved and familiar view of heath and sky and sea. There seemed to be no particular reason why the past should call to her so insistently to-day; there was, so far as she knew, nothing to account for it, nothing had happened to remind her particularly of the girlhood which lay so far behind her, and of bygone days when the hours had been all too short for the ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... side of that sixty square miles of ranch while her father guarded the other. She could handle firearms with speed and accuracy equal to any man on the range, where she had been bearing a man's burden since her early girlhood. ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... he asked, his voice sharp with terror, for this shame and remorse that convulsed her, and made her one with the common weakness of her common womanhood, was something altogether different to the supremacy she had always shown in her proud girlhood. ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... money till he cared for nothing else. My sister, who died believing that I also had turned against her, was forced to marry a man she did not love because he had money. I never knew the man she did love. It was a romance of her girlhood. I was away from home the most of my boyhood years, and she never mentioned his name after the affair was broken off. All I know is that she was deceived and made to believe some cruel story against him. She and her husband came West, where they died. My ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... down among the majestic mountains and the sunny valleys of California and Oregon, had made me acquainted with many persons, some of whom were to me, from the interest they inspired me with, like the friends of my girlhood. Among this select number was Mrs. Anna Greyfield, at whose home among the foot-hills of the Sierras in Northern California, I had spent one of the most delightful summers of my life. Intellectual and ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... particular esteem for the man himself. At first I received no answer to what I said—the company merely surveying me with a kind of sleepy stare. At length a lady, about the age of forty, with a large wart on her face, observed, in a drawling tone, 'That she had not read Byron—at least since her girlhood—and then only a few passages; but that the impression on her mind was, that his writings were of a highly objectionable character.' 'I also read a little of him in my boyhood,' said a gentleman, about sixty, but who evidently, from his dress and demeanour, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... interest in, colonial life; her reiterated asseverations that every experience detailed in this famous novel is substantially true; the assent of all her contemporaries. It must further be remembered that Aphra was writing in 1688, of a girlhood coloured by and seen through the enchanted mists of a quarter of a century. That there are slight discrepancies is patent; the exaggerations, however, are not merely pardonable but perfectly natural. One of Dr. Bernbaum's most crushing arguments, when sifted, seems to resolve itself ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... she got out of bed and stood on her feet. She had not had a maid in her girlhood so she could dress herself, much as she detested to do it. After she had begun however she could not help becoming rather interested because the dress she had worn the day before had become crushed and she put on a fresh one she had ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... tell you. In my early girlhood I knew a young clergyman who was in the habit of occasionally visiting our house. One day he came to bid us good-bye, saying that he was going to a Western city to reside. As he bid me goodbye he gave me a little book. It was a volume of B. F. Taylor's poems, ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... "The Professor", nor, in grace of womanhood, ever surpassed one of the female characters there described. By the time she wrote this tale, her taste and judgment had revolted against the exaggerated idealisms of her early girlhood, and she went to the extreme of reality, closely depicting characters as they had shown themselves to her in actual life: if there they were strong even to coarseness,—as was the case with some that she had met with in flesh and blood existence,—she ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... at last, an impatient longing to die: there had been hours when that girl of thirteen was tempted to do as many women did in those days—to open the door and rush into the street, crying: Vive le roi! in order to end it all. Her girlhood was a continuation of her childhood with less tragic motives of weariness. She had to submit to the ill humor, the exactions, the bitter moods, the tempestuous outbreaks of her father, which had been hitherto somewhat ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... "The Little Minister" and in "Quality Street" I think she is at her best, but above all parts she herself is most adorable. She is just worshipped in America, and has an extraordinary effect—an educational effect—upon all American girlhood. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... She looked over her shoulder. Away back in a half-dug potato field Nora and a knot of labourers were engaged in bitter conflict with the foxy mare on the subject of a bank with a rivulet in front of it. To refuse to jump running water had been from girlhood the resolve of the foxy mare; it was plain that neither Nora's ash plant, nor the stalks of rag-wort, torn from the potato ridges, with which the countrymen flagellated her from behind, were likely to make her change her ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... letter with girls of her own age. Seclusion at this time of life, and the custom of crippling the feet, combine to confine women in the house almost as much as the strictest laws against their appearing abroad; for in girlhood, as they know only a few persons except relatives, and can make very few acquaintances after marriage their circle of friends contracts rather than enlarges as life goes on. This privacy impels girls to learn as much ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... the mazy crush, Ingenuous youth, half timid, and half proud, By girlhood's pity had its claims allow'd, And ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 27, 1893 • Various
... nothing remarkable. But Christina had fulfilled the promise of her girlhood, and developed into a magnificent beauty. Her skin showed the richest, clear, creamy white tints, upon which in her cheeks and lips the carmine lay like rose leaves. Her hair was light brown and abundant, features regular, eyes sweet; she was one ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... incomprehensible, have attached the wolf to the lamb? For the wolf loved the lamb, for the fierce creature adored the feeble one, for, during the space of nine years, the angel had had the monster as her point of support. Cosette's childhood and girlhood, her advent in the daylight, her virginal growth towards life and light, had been sheltered by that hideous devotion. Here questions exfoliated, so to speak, into innumerable enigmas, abysses yawned at the bottoms ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... dear Priyamvada, to see my husband once more, yet my feet refuse to move, now that I am quitting for ever the home of my girlhood. ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... conducted Jurgen, through the changeless twilight of Barathum, like that of a gray winter afternoon, to a quiet cleft by the Sea of Blood, which she had fitted out very cosily in imitation of her girlhood home; and she lighted a candle, and made him welcome to her cleft. And when Jurgen was about to enter it he saw that his shadow was following him into ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... you can—I am dying of remorse. You deceived me, betrayed me, in my girlhood, but I pardoned that, for I loved you more than any other woman ever loved a man. When we met in Ohio, by strange accident, all was reconciled. How happy I was! But when I learned of your perfidy; when I was forced ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... hers! who held me with pure eyes: One hand among the deep curls of her brow, I drank the girlhood of her gaze with sighs: She never sighed, nor gave me kiss ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... to the fingers of this saviour-sister—the poor little, inexperienced, seventeen-year-old bride who was giving up her youth and her girlhood to lay it all upon the shrine of endeavour to bring the radiance of the Star that shone above Bethlehem to reflect its glories upon a ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... paint thee as thou art, Then all thou wert comes o'er my heart— The graceful child in Beauty's dawn Within the nursery's shade withdrawn, Or peeping out—like a young moon Upon a world 'twill brighten soon. Then next in girlhood's blushing hour, As from thy own loved Abbey-tower I've seen thee look, all radiant, down, With smiles that to the hoary frown Of centuries round thee lent a ray, Chasing even Age's gloom away;— Or in the world's ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... crying. He did not know what more to say, so he just sat by. In that half hour of self-accusation, of reaction from terror, of the consciousness of the sympathy of a friend who had saved her from the police, Isabelle closed the chapter of childhood and stepped over into young girlhood. ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... this feeling has but strengthened and matured with time and experience, and to-day, scattered broadcast over the world, are friends of my childhood, my girlhood, and my womanhood, who look upon my life as a tolerably beautiful thing, set apart by a lenient destiny for a perpetual sunshine ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... the New Law. The Sisters of the Congregation are bound to co-operate with the pastors of the Church in the discharge of such duties of charity as come within the spirit of their rule, making, however, a specialty of instructing youth, to which Sister Bourgeois devoted all her energies from girlhood. Her zeal was indeed a consuming fire, for she had no sooner learned that there were pagan tribes to instruct and convert in the New World, than she sought means to go there to assist ...
— The Life of Venerable Sister Margaret Bourgeois • Anon.
... carry you on to the catastrophe in his ruined home or in his penal death. Hood, in his "Bridge of Sighs," brings you into the presence of death, and you gaze, weeping, over the lifeless form of beauty that had once been innocent and blooming girlhood, but from which the spirit, early soiled and saddened, took violent flight in its despair; Crabbe would give us the record of her sins, and connect her end retributively with her conduct. Much is in Crabbe that is repulsive and austere; but he is, notwithstanding, an earnest ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... have thought that it was a vision of the Spirit of the Mountains; Stafford only thought it was the most lovely piece of girlhood he had ever looked at. She did not see him for a moment, all her attention being engrossed by the sheep which were now wandering up the valley; then suddenly, as if she felt his presence rather than saw it, her dark eyes flashed round ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... of embodying in rhythm the full beauty of girlhood is unequalled by any other English poet. Heine alone is his peer in this; but even Heine's imagination dwelt more fondly on the abstract pathos and purity of a maiden than on her individual gaiety and courage. In older women, ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... morbid nature. She is not yet humbled sufficiently. When she is, she will go back, like the Prodigal, and take the forgiveness that is waiting for her. Now, my darling, all this sad talk has made you look pale. You must try and forget it, and go to sleep." But, for the first time in her healthy girlhood, sleep refused to come at Fern's bidding; and she lay restless and anxious, thinking of her friend's tragical story until the gray dawn ushered ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... There was a dignity about her face and figure which became her well, and which she carried as though she knew herself to be in very truth a countess. It was a face which bore well such signs of age as those which had come upon it. She seemed to be a woman fitter for womanhood than for girlhood. Her eyes were brighter than of yore, and, as Harry thought, larger; and her high forehead and noble stamp of countenance seemed fitted for the dress and ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... won my wish—not all of it. They say there is a weak spot in every man's armour; there is always an Achilles' heel. I am no exception. Well, the gods ordained that I, James Sefton, a man who thought himself made wholly of steel, should fall in love with a piece of pink-and-white girlhood. What a ridiculous bit of nonsense! I suppose it was done to teach me I am a fool just like other men. I had begun to believe that I was exceptional, ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... first days of her reign, the Queen's dignity, calm, and knowledge of State affairs astonished her ministers, and were complete proof of the careful training she had received during her girlhood days. Greville, Clerk to the Council, wrote: "She presided with as much ease as if she had been doing nothing else all her life. . . . The gracefulness of her manner and the good expression of her countenance give ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne
... up like one in a stupor of amazement—so dazed and white that I repeated my words. Then, suddenly, she gathered herself into composure like my own, but her poor lips trembled. I saw in her my girlhood long dead. ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... knew, and with her convulsive clasp of me confirmed my half-formed fears. Then she kissed me, kisses that had no more of girlhood or coquetry or joy or anything but woman's passion to blind and hold and tame. By their very intensity I sensed the tiger in me. And it was the tiger that made her new and alluring sweetness fail of its intent. I did not return one of her kisses. Just one ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... able to get along for three or four months. Then people forgot. Tona was no longer the widow of a man lost at sea. She was a pauper ever on hand with the wail for alms. Many doors were at last shut in her face, and old friends of her girlhood, who had always welcomed her with a smile, now looked the other way when ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... separated, and Mary made ready for bed. She took off her cap, and all her lovely hair fell about her. That was another of her contrary ways. She and Constance had been taught to braid it neatly, but from little girlhood Mary had protested, and on going to bed with two prim pigtails had been known to wake up in the middle of the night and take them down, only to be discovered in the morning with all her fair curls in ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... same frank, tender mouth, winning wherever she smiled; the same slight, graceful figure; and the same manner—its very simplicity a reflex of that refined and quiet life she had always led. For hers had been an isolated life, buried since her girlhood in a great house far away from the broadening influences of a city, and saddened by the daily witness of a slow decay of all she had been taught to revere. But it had been a life so filled with the largeness of generous deeds that its ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... to accuse a young person for suffering herself to be deceived, in the desire to escape, at any price, from the condition of girlhood; but such an accusation is only just in the present condition of our manners. At the present day, a young person knows nothing about seduction and its snares, she relies altogether upon her weakness, ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... her rose-winged fancies, From shadowy shoals of dream, To clothe her in the wistful hour, When girlhood steals from bud to flower. Bring her the tunes of elfin dances, ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... that a case of consumption is "advanced"—involves nothing other than adequate recognition of the importance of woman in the most important of all matters. It is true that my primary concern has been to furnish, for the individual woman and for those in charge of girlhood, a guide of life based upon the known physiology of sex. But it is a poor guide of life which considers only the transient individual, and poorest of all in this ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... step out from the sanctuary of their homes, the glamour that girlhood or maternity has thrown around them cast aside, that moment will they cease to rule mankind. Women may agitate until they have obtained political recognition, but will awake from their foolish dream of power, realizing too late what they have sacrificed to obtain ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... gun. Moreover, this story has the bunting to back it up, for the Bedford flag remained in the Page family until presented to the town a century after the close of the war. It is rather a pity that it did not come a little sooner, for an old lady of Page descent confessed that in her giddy girlhood she had irreverently ripped off the silver fringe to make trimming for her ...
— The Little Book of the Flag • Eva March Tappan
... exercise, leaning upon his hand, which in time ploughed a groove in its hard surface. The Amalienborg, a fine tessellated square, contains four Royal palaces, in one of which our Queen Alexandra spent her girlhood. From the windows of these palaces the daily spectacle of changing the guard is witnessed by the ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson
... dances given by the artillery, and one charming, rose-bowered afternoon reception at Angel Island, Lilian had seen nothing of army life and next to nothing of army beaux, until in all the ardor and innocence of sweet, winsome, wholesome girlhood—buoyant, beautiful and in exuberant health and spirits, she was suddenly landed here at this out of the way station in uttermost Arizona, and brought face to face with ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... princely father: bags, bundles, and a heavy cloak. Javanese parents of exalted rank treat their daughters with disdain, the approved discipline of family life consisting in stamping an impression of abject insignificance deeply on the plastic mind of girlhood. Fertile plain and wooded slopes are alike destitute of domestic animals. The sheep was unknown to native races in this pastureless land, and, though introduced by the earliest colonists, is still spoken of as "the Dutch goat," no other term existing ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... were the floors. They were literally oak chambers. And in both rooms the draperies of the beds, chairs, and windows were of white dimity. But in Sophia's, there were many pictures, souvenirs of girlhood's friendships, needlework, finished and unfinished drawings, and a great number of books mostly on subjects not usually attractive to young women. Charlotte's room had no pictures on its walls, and no odds and ends of memorials; and as sewing was to her a ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... was realised. Since childhood she had longed to visit London. As a child her favourite amusement was to make a carriage of a chair, and invite her sisters to ride with her to London "to see bishops and booksellers." Through girlhood to womanhood the desire gathered strength. In 1773 she set off with two of her sisters to pay her ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... you, my father, but a man possessing every repulsive peculiarity which has made the Jew the pariah of the civilized world. Oh, father, dear father, do not barter me for gold! Let me remain your child, your darling; living and dying in the home which your love has made like Eden to my girlhood!" ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... Cornwallis was taken, Jane Mecom heard the Castle thunder again over the sea; and when Rochambeau came to Boston to prepare for the re-embarkation of the French army, she saw her brother's hand behind all these events, and felt like one who in her girlhood had been taken into the counsels of the gods. Her simple family affairs had become ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth
... was Elsie Leander and her girlhood was spent on her father's farm in Vermont. For several generations the Leanders had all lived on the same farm and had all married thin women, and so she was thin. The farm lay in the shadow of a mountain and ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... fair little girl to the dark thin one. Hitherto Anne had been his ideal of gentle girlhood, but in Judy he now found a kindred spirit, a girl with a daring that more than matched his own—a girl who loved the sea—who knew about the sea—who could ...
— Judy • Temple Bailey
... love which will work wonders; and I trust my own, which sprang at a look but only gathered strength and permanence when I found that the soul of the man I loved bettered his outward attractions, making the ideal of my foolish girlhood seem as unsubstantial and evanescent as a ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... a shading of sadness for the lost years of her girlhood in her tone. She did not turn to face him, her head high that way, her chin up, her nose in the wind as if her assurance lay in its warm scents, and her courage came on ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... how all men working or hiding or lost in the wilderness would see sweet faces in the embers and be haunted by soft voices. After all, Kells was human. And she talked as never before in her life, brightly, willingly, eloquently, telling the facts of her eventful youth and girlhood—the sorrow and the joy and some of the dreams—up to the time she had come ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... candidates for fame, where they vie with one another, till they are as unintelligible as the good folks at Babel.' 'Lady Spencer,' said Samuel Rogers, 'recollected Johnson well, as she used to see him often in her girlhood. Her mother, Lady Lucan, would say, "Nobody dines with us to-day; therefore, child, we'll go and get Dr. Johnson." So they would drive to Bolt Court and bring the doctor home with them.' Rogers's Table Talk, p. 10. 'I told Lady Lucan,' wrote Johnson on April 25, 1780, 'how long it was since ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... dainty examples of Tudor and Stuart needlework are to be found the exquisitely embroidered book-covers which date from Queen Elizabeth's girlhood until the time of Charles II. They were always of diminutive size, and many stitches diversify their covering; oftentimes they were liberally embroidered with seed-pearls, and in these instances most frequently this fashion has been their salvation. ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... alas! where is their Alice? Wildly they glance along the rosy ranks of chubby girlhood, but where is ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... her with a masque or play, and a Latin oration spoken by the parson, for whose false quantities, if I'd made 'em in my girlhood, I should have ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... very happy. I don't suppose you men can understand, but a woman wants to marry the man she loves—and yet she is sad at leaving girlhood behind. Now let me see, you take two lumps, don't you? I must not forget that. It makes the waiter stare when a wife can't remember how many lumps of sugar her ...
— The Spirit of Sweetwater • Hamlin Garland
... why not admit it when you know it's true? You know quite well they would make a lovely couple. Just fancy them going up the aisle at St. Satisfax! It would be like mediaeval Kings and Queens." For Sally was still in that happy phase of girlhood in which a marriage is a wedding, et praeterea aliquid, but not much. "But," she continued, "I couldn't give up any of mamma—no, not so much as that—if she was to marry twenty Mr. Fenwicks." As the quantity indicated was the smallest little finger-end ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... could repose in the dear home where my children lived. Children I say, for the tenderest emotions of paternity bound me to Clara. She was now fourteen; sorrow, and deep insight into the scenes around her, calmed the restless spirit of girlhood; while the remembrance of her father whom she idolized, and respect for me and Adrian, implanted an high sense of duty in her young heart. Though serious she was not sad; the eager desire that makes us all, when young, ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... picture of an ivied manor-house, terraced and with an old-world garden lying round about it, where her childhood had been spent and where she had grown to girlhood. He told himself that there must have been a river somewhere near, and he imagined her as stretched upon its banks in the summer shadows. And he thought of the schoolhouse in London, and the little heart-weary child who ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... part of the entertainment, nor did he repulse her. Moments there were undeniably when he had a great tenderness toward her; moments when she lay in his embrace as some pure gift from this haven of darkness and of evil, a fragile helpless figure of a girlhood he idolized. Then, perchance, he loved her as Lois Boriskoff hungered for love, with the supreme devotion, the abject surrender of ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... not a woman to pry into others' secrets, and felt guilty as she fled from the attic, taking the lamp with her. Afterward, as she sat on the narrow piazza, basking in the warm Spring sunshine, she pieced out the love affair of Jane Hathaway's early girlhood ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
... reflections of Marie Louise as she was leaving France. The moment she touched German soil, all the ideas, impressions, feelings of her girlhood, came back to her, and naturally enough; for were there not many instances in the last war, of German women, married to Frenchmen, who rejoiced in the German successes, and of French women, married to Germans, ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... by one who was evidently a late comer, and whose presence appeared to fill the apartment. All the others paled before her, as do the stars when the moon rises among them. She was evidently young, and yet she did not suggest youth. One would almost imagine that she had never had a childhood or a girlhood, but was rather a direct creation of metropolitan society. Her exquisitely turned shoulders and arms were bare, and the diamonds about her neck were a circlet of fire. The complexion of her fair oval face was singularly pure, and the color ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... met me. We heard my uncle's voice, as I shut the door, calling Dudley. He had been waiting, probably, in the adjoining room. I hurried into my chamber, with Milly at my side, and there my agitation found relief in tears, as that of girlhood naturally does. ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... it weakness to weep with those now parting. Never more could those cherished friends meet again; they were going forth, each on a separate mission, and though in after years, greetings might pass between them, the heart would be utterly changed. The unreserved confidence, the warm affection of girlhood passes forever away, when rude contact with the world has chilled trust and child-like faith. And they knew this, though it was felt more fully in ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... three natural children? Dare I repeat to him the history of my youth? Dare I confess that at the age of seven I poisoned my sister, by putting verdigris in her cream-tarts,—that I threw my cousin from a swing at the age of twelve? That the lady's maid who incurred the displeasure of my girlhood now lies at the bottom of the horse-pond? No! no! he is too pure,—too good,—too innocent,—to hear such improper conversation!" and her whole body writhed as she rocked to and fro in a paroxysm ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... well. I spent several years of my girlhood there, with my mother. My mother died ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... over the story of Marjorie's childhood and bring her into her joyous and promising girlhood, but the child's own words about the "other part" that she must have a "good deal" of have changed my mind. Surely God does care for the "other ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... experiences; she forgot herself,—rather she regained a self she had long forgotten. For in the sweet seclusion of this half darkened sanctuary the clinging fripperies of her past slipped from her as a tawdry garment. The petted, spoiled, and vapidly precocious girlhood which had merged into a womanhood of aimless triumphs and meaner ambitions; the worldly but miserable triumph of a marriage that had left her delicacy abused and her heart sick and unsatisfied; the wifehood ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... sketch of gentle feminine weakness; while Antigone is a great portrait of the revoltee, the first appearance indeed in literature of the "new woman," and the place she fills in the drama, and the ideal qualities attributed to her girlhood—alike betray the personal admiration of the poet. In the same way Shakespeare's men of action are mere sketches in comparison with the intimate detailed portrait of the aesthete-philosopher-poet with his sensuous, gentle, melancholy ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... darling, I found most natural, when I feared it most. Love would have had no strangeness in mine eyes, Save from the prejudice which others taught me— They should know best. Yet now this wedlock seems A second infancy's baptismal robe, A heaven, my spirit's antenatal home, Lost in blind pining girlhood—found now, found! [Aside] What have I said? Do I blaspheme? Alas! I neither made these thoughts, nor can ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... gill smiled sweetly, sitting on the low bank with the grace of simple nature and the playfulness of girlhood. She looked up at Lancelot, the self-appointed man, with a bright glance of curious contemplation; and contemplation (of any other subject than self) is dangerously near contempt. She thought very little of ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... answer to what I said—the company merely surveying me with a kind of sleepy stare. At length a lady, about the age of forty, with a large wart on her face, observed in a drawling tone, "That she had not read Byron—at least since her girlhood—and then only a few passages; but that the impression on her mind was, that his writings were of a highly objectionable character." "I also read a little of him in my boyhood," said a gentleman, about sixty, but who evidently, from his dress and demeanour, wished ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... answered Madame de Maufant, kindly; "ever since her mother's death she has been a daughter to me. But a sister is not a mother at the end of the account; and our little one will not be kept a prisoner. She has learned English ideas in her girlhood, passed as you know with our London kinsfolk. Once she is married her husband will find her faithful, in life ...
— St George's Cross • H. G. Keene
... one of her numerous admirers, and it is said that the Louisville belle was so flattered by his attentions that she was in doubt, for a time, which suitor to accept. She was an ambitious young woman, having boasted from girlhood that she would one day be ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... aptitude for music; although an incurable indolence, she gracefully said, had always prevented her from learning the piano. While yet sustaining the name of Jigbee, she had achieved a high reputation in private circles as a merciless judge of music. But her conversation had been, from earliest girlhood, her chief attraction. She possessed the extraordinary faculty of talking with a dozen persons upon a dozen different subjects at ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... all to themselves. She looked over her shoulder. Away back in a half-dug potato field Nora and a knot of labourers were engaged in bitter conflict with the foxy mare on the subject of a bank with a rivulet in front of it. To refuse to jump running water had been from girlhood the resolve of the foxy mare; it was plain that neither Nora's ash plant, nor the stalks of rag-wort, torn from the potato ridges, with which the countrymen flagellated her from behind, were likely to make her change her mind. Farther back still were a few specks, motionless apparently, ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... stood silent before her, her face being bathed in tears. The contour of the child-like forehead and of the small and graceful head was very pleasing. Genji, as he surveyed the scene from without, thought within himself, "If she is thus fair in her girlhood, what will she be when she is grown up?" One reason why Genji was so much attracted by her was, that she greatly resembled a certain lady in the Palace, to whom he, for a long time, had been fondly attached. The ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... these last weeks of her girlhood were almost too happy. She went over several times with her mother and Lady Dighton to Hunsdon, and grew familiar with her future home; she saw the charming rooms that were being prepared for herself, and could ...
— A Canadian Heroine - A Novel, Volume 3 (of 3) • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... placed one hand upon his breast, and inclined his head to the woman, who, to see him, had by this time withdrawn the wimple enough to show the face of one but a short time out of girlhood. Thereupon the acquaintances grasped right hands, as if to carry them to their lips; at the last moment, however, the clasp was let go, and each kissed his own hand, then put its palm ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... was thus alone—and yet not alone, for God was with her— her memory took her back to the sunny days of her girlhood. How bright those halcyon days appeared! She was in fancy again walking amid the green fields and by the hedgerows of dear old England, plucking the daisies from the meadows and listening to the sweet ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... restful peace of happy, innocent girlhood, God called her to her divine work of helpin' to redeem ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... and the winds and waters of the North Sea dealt all too rudely with the fair freshness of her exterior; she grew worn and weather-stained, and it was apparent even to the casual eye of a landsman that she had left her girlhood behind her out on the Nor'-East Rough. Some of the younger trawlers would jeeringly refer to her behind her back as "Auntie," and affected to regard her as an antediluvian old dowager, which of course was mainly due to jealousy. But she still pegged away at her work, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... was sufficient to show that a change had come over these two young women, since the giddy days of their girlhood. Jane was pale, but beautiful as ever; she was holding on her knees a sick child, about two months old, which apparently engrossed all her attention. What would be her system as a mother, might be foretold by the manner in which she pacified the ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... in which she lived. Cicely loved her mother, but she thought of her now with the least little shade of contempt, which she would have been shocked to recognise as such. Why had she been content to bring all the hopes and ambitions that must have stirred her girlhood thus into subjection? What was the range of her life now? Ruling her large house with a single eye to the convenience of her lord and master, liable to be scolded before her children or her household if anything went wrong; blamed if the faults of any one of the small army ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... only studied the proud face for a long while, and knew there was no lovelier person between two seas. For time here had pillaged very sparingly; and if Dame Melicent had not any longer the first beauty of her girlhood, Callistion had nowhere seen a woman more handsome than this ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... to social intrigue, Clayton ignored the possible effect of his further presence in Worthington's household as an attractive young man when little Alice, at a bound, passed through the gates of girlhood and became the beautiful Miss Worthington. He had never seen the angel at his side, and yet Ferris, clearer eyed, had conquered in ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... and you destroy the usefulness of womankind. Tarnish the sacredness of girlhood and you scar the purity of womanhood. Deface the beautiful countenance of chastity, which is found in the bosom of girlhood, and you not only mar the happiness of girlhood, but you deface and obliterate the families ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... the subject of Miss Glover's dress drop. I had heard enough to satisfy me that my first theory was correct. This young woman, beautifully dressed, and with a face from which the rounded lines of early girlhood had not yet departed, held in her possession, probably at this very moment, Mrs. Burton's magnificent jewel. But where? On her person or hidden in some of her belongings? I remembered the cloak in the closet, and thought it wise to assure myself that the jewel was not secreted in ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... delights of losing it. Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn't want to repeat her girlhood—she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... habit. She had seen more than most girls of the shabby side of life, of the perpetual tendency of want to cramp the noblest attitude. Poverty and misfortune had overhung her childhood and she had none of the pretty delusions about life that are supposed to be the crowning grace of girlhood. This very competence, which gave her a touching reasonableness, made Glennard's situation more difficult than if he had aspired to a princess bred in the purple. Between them they asked so little—they knew so well how to make that little do—but they understood also, ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... agreed, much improved in looks, style, and manners by her travels. Her illness had begun the work of fining her down from the bouncing heartiness of her girlhood, and she really was a handsome creature, with dark glowing colouring; her figure had improved, whether because or in spite of her efforts in that way might be doubtful; and she had learnt how to dress ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... on a large velvet chair, conversing with the German ambassador. Never beautiful, she appeared to more advantage in her mature years than in her girlhood, and there was all the dignity of a lifetime of rule in demeanour and gestures, the bearing of her head, and motion of her exquisite hands. Her eyes were like her son's, prominent, and gave the sense of seeing all round at once, and ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... claims to distinction in that the Empress Josephine was born there and that Mme. de Maintenon passed her girlhood on the island as Francoise d'Aubigne. At Fort de France there is a marble statue of the ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... grateful beyond expression for the beautiful art of May Wirth, and devote less enthusiasm to asking of when and how it came about. To have established one's art at the perfect point in one's girlhood, is it not achievement, is it not genius itself? Charming little May Wirth, first equestrienne of the world, I congratulate you for your beautiful presentation, for the excellence of its technique, and for the grace ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... tall, gilded harp that her grandmother had played in her girlhood. The heavy cover had kept it fair and untarnished through all the years it had stood unused. To the child's beauty-loving eyes it seemed the loveliest ...
— The Little Colonel • Annie Fellows Johnston
... public solemnities of the village. Her husband and her daughter composed and bounded her world,—she always talked of them, or of other things as related to them. She had grown an elderly woman, without losing the color of her yellow hair; and the bloom of girlhood had been stayed in her cheeks as if by the young habit of blushing, which she had kept. She was still what her neighbors called very pretty-appearing, and she must have been a beautiful girl. The silence of her inward life subdued her manner, till now she ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... crisis in her life—her going away to school—this world into which she was born had been to Kitty an all-sufficient world. The days of her childhood had been as carefree and joyous, almost, as the days of the young things of her father's roaming herds. As her girlhood years advanced, under her mother's wise companionship and careful teaching, she had grown into her share of the household duties and into a knowledge of woman's part in the life to which she belonged, as naturally as her girlish ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... Lord Castleton. When you return from Australia you will still be a young man, she (though about your own years) almost a middle-aged woman, with her head full of pomps and vanities. All girls have a short period of girlhood in common; but when they enter womanhood, the woman becomes the woman of her class. As for me, and the office assigned to me by report, you know what I said when we parted, and—But here J—— comes, and tells ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Exile's dream of the home to which he can never return, the Desert Traveller's vision of water which he can never approach, are to them what to me were those words,—a marriage with Edward. Something which in the shadowy dreams of girlhood had hovered in my fancy; something which the terrors and the trials of the last year had crushed and subdued; something which in the feverish excitement of the last months had been dimmed but not destroyed; something which survived hope, and ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... did not seem to have many qualities in common with her husband. She had neither the strength of limb nor the agile grace of the mountaineer. This was partly the result of the conditions under which her girlhood had been spent. She was the only child of a dalesman, who had so far accumulated estate in land as to be known in the vernacular as a statesman. Her mother had died at her birth, and before she had attained ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... confidential talk with his old comrade upon future plans and prospects, to the accompaniment of the roaring sea, and a third party was destructive of such intention. Besides, poor May, although exceedingly unselfish and sweet and good, was at that transition period of life when girlhood is least attractive—at least to young men: when bones are obtrusive, and angles too conspicuous, and the form generally is too suggestive of flatness and longitude; while shyness marks the manners, and ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... furtively,—about her. With the years her mother's morbidity waxed, her father's restraint waned. The one became more intensely and frantically devout, the other more frankly pagan. And now, as the child grew, and her mind and heart stood up to meet life and girlhood, each of her parents began to feel towards her the desire of sole possession. She had been brought up a Christian. The father had permitted that. So long as she was an ignorant infant he had felt no anxiety ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... least," said Miss Vavasor, "that you do not love my nephew as he deserves to be loved—or as any woman ought to love the man to whom she has given her consent to be his wife! You have very different ideas from such as were taught in my girlhood concerning the duties of wives! A woman, I used to be told, was to fashion herself upon her husband, fit her life to his life, her thoughts to his thoughts, ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... matter of fact, Mlle. Meunier was considerably Ferrer's senior. Having spent her childhood and girlhood with a miserly father and a submissive mother, she could easily appreciate the necessity of love and joy in child life. She must have seen that Francisco Ferrer was a teacher, not college, machine, or diploma-made, but one endowed with genius ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... shyness of girlhood, Kitty sang one or two little songs in the simple manner she knew. Her voice was full and ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... of the soft touch of silver rain on greening fields, of the incredible delicacy of young leaves, of blossom in field and garden and wood. The whole world bloomed in a flush and tremor of maiden loveliness, instinct with all the evasive, fleeting charm of spring and girlhood and young morning. We felt and enjoyed it all without understanding or analyzing it. It was enough to be glad and young with spring on the ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... been that night! Not for anything that life could offer would she have parted with that one precious romance of her girlhood. She clung to the memory of it as to a priceless possession. And year after year she had gone to the Hunt Ball with that memory ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... womankind. Softly rounded features, vivid colouring, voluptuous curves of form, yet delicacy and refinement in every portion of her anatomy, she breathed love and radiated sympathy. I thought of her as the ideal woman in embryo; and the brightness of her intellect was the finishing touch to a perfect girlhood. I saw her again at twenty-four. She had graduated from an American college and had taken two years in a foreign institution of learning. She had carried away all the honours—but, alas, the higher education had carried away all her charms of person and of temperament. Attenuated, ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... mirthful, innocent girlhood, her smooth forehead unclouded, her eyes gleaming as if with the merriment of ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... nettled at this speech. First, it pained her to have her child's faith shaken in anything, and particularly in her good old friend, the Captain; and next, she felt, with more force than ever she did before, the continual disparaging tone in which Moses spoke of her girlhood. ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... is troubled by snatches of wakefulness; London's grimy, lined face shows new wrinkles of shadow; and new and unexpected clumping of colors in monotone and halftone appear. From the massed-up bulk of things small detached bits stand vividly out: a flower girl whose flowers and whose girlhood are alike in the sere and yellow leaf; a soldier swaggering by, his red coat lighting up the grayish mass about him like a livecoal in an ashheap; a policeman escorting a drunk to quarters for the night—not, mind you, escorting him in a clanging, rushing ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... you will have of its liberty!" returned the cousin sarcastically. "After having passed a girlhood of wholesome restraint in the rational society of Europe, you are about to return home to the slavery of American female life, just as you are ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... of course, and knew that we had very little money. So they provided for him, and gave me funds and sent me to Honduras to spy upon you. Marie, my maid since girlhood, who worshiped my father and knew all the circumstances, went with me. Soon after I reached Honduras, I found that you were selling out with the intention of returning to New ...
— The Brand of Silence - A Detective Story • Harrington Strong
... paused a moment to look at her. Something about Leigh made most people want more than a glance. Tonight, as she stood in the doorway, Virginia could think of nothing but the pink roses that grew in the rose garden of the old Thaine mansion house of her girlhood. A vision swept across her memory of Asher Aydelot—just Thaine's age then—of a moonlit night, sweet with the odor of many blossoms, and the tinkling waters of the fountain in the rose garden, and herself a ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... excellent grace, bore her part in the world she had wished to renounce. After a union of five years, her husband died, and she was left a widow and childless at the age of twenty-two. She returned to the religious ardors of her girlhood, again gave all her thoughts to devotion and charity, and again resolved to be a nun. She had heard of Canada; and when Le Jeune's first Relations appeared, she read them with avidity. "Alas!" wrote the Father, "is there ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... girl Henry Carpenter made life almost unbearable for his daughter, but as she emerged from girlhood into womanhood he lost his power over her. The bookkeeper's life was made up of innumerable little pettinesses. When he went to the bank in the morning he stepped into a closet and put on a black alpaca coat that had become shabby with age. At night when he returned to his ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the distinguished draughtsman, Mr. Arthur Hopkins, who has rarely been surpassed in rendering the simple grace of pretty English girlhood, evolved a joke while shopping with his wife, and straightway illustrated it and sent it on to Punch. It appeared the next week, and was quickly followed by another on the 1st of April. Since then the artist ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... after their ash-cans had been emptied there; and, though she did not know it, Nan Brent bore pitiful resemblance to these outcast flowers. Here, on the reclaimed Sawdust Pile, she had bloomed from girlhood into lovely womanhood—a sweet forget-me-not in the Garden of Life, she had been transplanted into Eden until Fate, the grim gardener, had cast her out, to take root again on the Sawdust Pile and ultimately ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... read Queen Victoria's Letters, which have been published, notice that in her girlhood she was a simple, gentle, innocent girl, not specially clever, but eager to learn, resolved that everything in the government of her country should be explained to her so that she might understand it. It was her duty to know the details of that great government, and ...
— The Canadian Girl at Work - A Book of Vocational Guidance • Marjory MacMurchy
... as he had seen her first at Lady Noel's ball. The small, exquisitely-shaped head drooped slightly to one side, as though the thin, reed-like throat could hardly bear the burden of so much beauty; the lips were slightly parted, and seemed made for sweet music; and all the tender purity of girlhood looked out in wonder from the dreaming eyes. With her soft, clinging dress of crepe-de-chine, and her large leaf-shaped fan, she looked like one of those delicate little figures men find in the olive-woods near Tanagra; ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... arbor. In the midst of this formal and faded pageantry she looked charmingly fresh, youthful, and pretty; and yet the unfortunate woman thought that her attitude and expression at that moment suggested more than her fifteen years of girlhood. Her golden hair still hung unfettered over her straight, boy-like back and shoulders; her short skirt still showed her childish feet and ankles; yet there seemed to be some undefined maturity or a vague womanliness about ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... bounder is always here," Margaret did not seem to hear. Already the food that the "bounder" had given her parched self was too precious to lose. She had begun to live again the stifled memories, the life laid away,—to talk of her girlhood, of her Virginia hills, ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... Carew the men are in a minority as far as minuteness of portraiture goes, and the most elaborate touches are bestowed on the two young girls who act as heroines, for the one is as prominent as the other. Christy and her friend Esther O'Neil present two types of girlhood. Esther, devote and gentle, is a very tender, lovable figure, but there is perhaps more skill shown in the more contradictory character of Christy, a pretty girl addicted to flirting, keenly intelligent and impatient of the restraints and inconsistencies of her religious teaching, yet with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... young housemaids condemned to the exhausting labor of making beds and dusting furniture. The deplorable practice of swilling adulterated malt liquor two or three times a day, begun in early boy and girlhood among English servants, had not in America, as I am convinced it has with us, laid the foundation for later habits of drinking in a whole class of the community, among whom a pernicious inherited necessity for the indulgence is one of its consequences; ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... Puritan woman imbibed from girlhood to old age went further than this; it taught the theory of a personal devil. To the New England colonists Satan was a very real individual capable of taking to himself a physical form with the proverbial ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... name is Betsey Hatch. That is what they called me in my girlhood, but I should hardly know who was meant if I was called ...
— The Young Acrobat of the Great North American Circus • Horatio Alger Jr.
... how it must have been as I marched along from childhood through girlhood into womanhood, while I still clung to my strange ways and peculiar sayings; upsetting of inkstands at school, mud tracking over the carpet in the "best room" at home, unconscious betrayal of mischief plans, etc., etc., ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... eyes, scorned herself, cried "Liver!" and took medicine. She was glued to her books all day, returned late to her lodging, and found herself in tears. She discovered a tenderness, a yearning; she lay awake dreaming of her childhood, of her girlhood, of Vicky, of her father's knee, of Senhouse, her dear, preposterous friend, whose grey eyes quizzed while they loved her. Golden days with him—golden nights when she dreamed over his eager, profuse, interminable letters! All these sweet, seemly things ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... York City residence in 1777, had sprung in part from a powerful longing for the country and in part from a dream which had reawakened strongly her love for the old house of her birth and of most of her girlhood. The peril of her resolve only increased her determination to carry it out. Her parents, brothers, and sisters stood aghast at the project, and refused in any way to countenance it. But there was no other will in the Philipse household able to cope with Elizabeth's. ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... censured have at least been at one touching her marvellous beauty. At the time whereof I write it is not possible that she could be less than forty-six, and yet her figure was slender and shapely and still endowed with the grace of girlhood; her face delicate of tint, and little marked by time—or even by the sufferings to which, in the late king's reign, Cardinal de Richelieu had subjected her; her eyes were blue and peaceful as a summer sky; her hair was the colour of ripe corn. He would be a hardy guesser who ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... her early girlhood. She was curled up, one evening, in the window-seat at the stairhead watching the moon rise over the great trees of the park, when she heard loud voices in the hall below, and peeping down, saw her father strike another man heavily across the mouth. A sudden silence fell, and she ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... an important item, from the fact that women of all ages wear something of the kind. The young girl who has passed from girlhood into matrimony, considers it necessary that some of those little caps made of lace and ribbons and which have such a coquettish look about them, should form part of her trousseau. She is as glad to exercise her new privilege of wearing a cap as an undergraduate is of wearing his cap ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... was on his part of a cold temperament, and disposed to regard the affair merely as a proper way of providing for the natural affections, the Paronsina cared nothing for him personally, and only viewed him favorably as abstract matrimony,—as the means of escaping from the bondage of her girlhood and the sad seclusion of her life into the world outside her grandfather's house. So presently the correspondence fell almost wholly upon Tonelli, who worked up to the point of betrothal with an expense ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... grown to age in girlhood's fleeting years, And has one only task—to bathe its buried love in tears; The all of life that yet remains to me is but its breath; Then tell me, is it meet that I should ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... she might have asked, of blaming any of them now? What was it that they had all gone, all scattered, leaving her broken there at the last? Had not the key clicked in the lock? In that click was the end of it all; in the empty house were the ghosts of her girlhood, her womanhood, her motherhood, her old age, her struggles, her successes, her skill in running her little shop, her courage in riding one family squall after another! The key had clicked in the lock. She moved down the quiet street, sensitive lest the eye of the neighbours should see her, ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... lay planning and thinking. Should he speak to Betty and tell her he loved her? Should he only teach her to think of him, not with the frank liking of her girlhood, so well expressed to him that very day, but with the warm feeling which would cause her cheeks to redden when he spoke? Could he be sure of himself—to do this discreetly, or would he overstep the mark? He would wait and see what the next ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... saying, 'You are losing your looks; the earl will not care for you any more.' Sometimes he brought his friends to see me, 'because I was such a lovely child,' and if they did not agree with him on that point he left without kissing me. Throughout my whole girlhood I was taught nothing but to please him, and the only way to do that was to be pretty. It was the only virtue worth striving for; the others were never thought of when he asked how I was getting ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... might brave it out to others, she was very far from being happy; and now and then she took herself to task, and admitted that all she had, and all she hoped for, would be but a small price to give if she could purchase once more the freedom of her girlhood. ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... performed at eight o'clock in the evening. At seven Rachel stood in her room, fully dressed and alone. She had no bridesmaid, and she had asked her cousins to leave her to herself in this last solemn hour of girlhood. She looked very fair and sweet in the sunset-light that showered through the birches. Her wedding gown was a fine, sheer organdie, simply and daintily made. In the loose waves of her bright hair she wore her bridegroom's flowers, roses as white as a virgin's dream. She was very happy; but her ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... all about her girlhood. She went first to live with a sort of cousin in town, in a house where they took in cards on a tray, and then she came to live with Mrs Black, who took a fancy to her at first. I'd had no boyhood to speak of, so I gave her some of my ideas of what the world ought to be, and ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... starlight and the spirit of flowers, breathed out in odours. The quaint and pretty tune rose and fell, quavered, lilted along as it listed without regard for law and order. It struck Miss Mattie to the heart. Her girlhood, with its misty dreams of happiness, came back to her ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... round of her simple life. As I said, she has lived here in this neighbourhood—oh, sixty years. The country knew her father before her. Out of that past, through the dimming eyes of some of the old inhabitants, I have had glimpses of the sprightly girlhood which our friend must have enjoyed. There is even a confused story of a wooer (how people try to account for every old maid!)—a long time ago—who came and went away again. No one remembers much about him—such things are not important, of course, ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... straightened itself up, the protruding lips had set into a small, neat mouth, the receding chin had come forward, and the vacant eyes were twinkling with mirth. Instead of a half-idiotic, and wholly unattractive, specimen of girlhood, a very charming little personality stood before them. The transformation was so utter that at first the audience simply gaped, then with one accord they exploded into ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... alienated, when the Despensers provoked a quarrel with the queen. Isabella was a woman of strong character and violent passions, with the lack of morals and scruples which might have been expected from a girlhood passed amidst the domestic scandals of her father's household. She resented her want of influence over her husband, and hated the Despensers because of their superior power with him. The favourites met her hostility by an open declaration of warfare. In 1324 the king deprived her of her separate ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... mean?" he asked, his voice sharp with terror, for this shame and remorse that convulsed her, and made her one with the common weakness of her common womanhood, was something altogether different to the supremacy she had always shown in her proud girlhood. ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... day she became a woman! Every one noticed it. Neighbours used to meet her mother in the strasse and say, "Frau Schmidt, your Gretchen is a woman." Frau Schmidt would nod proudly and reply, "Yes, we have seen that; my Peter and I—we are very happy." Thus Gretchen left her girlhood behind her. It was her habit, so Grundelheim tells us, to walk out in the forest with one Hans Breitel, an actor at the municipal theatre. He used to teach her to talk to the birds, and when she besought him ardently to tell her stories of the theatre, he would relate to her the parts he had nearly ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... excuse us, I know. Elizabeth and I—Elizabeth is my daughter, Mr. Kendrick.... But it is Captain Kendrick, isn't it? Of course, I might have known. You look the sea—you know what I mean—I can always tell. My dear husband was a captain. You knew that, of course. And in the old days at my girlhood home so many, many captains used to come and go. Our old home—my girlhood home, I mean—was always open. I met my husband there.... Ah me, those days are not these days! What my dear father would have said if he could have known.... But we don't know ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... you have had the proper feeling to tell your husband that the Captain Rodolphe you met at Pouncefort Court a little while ago is the man with whom you were so deplorably intimate at Valpre in your girlhood, or whether you have had the audacity to pretend that he was ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... window-frame and sent her wearier thoughts upward to the stars; there were the points of light that the Chaldeans watched upon their plains by night, and named with mystic syllables of their weird Oriental tongue,—names that in her girlhood she had delighted to learn, charmed by that nameless spell that language holds, wherewith it plants itself ineradicably in the human mind, and binds it with fetters of vague association that time and chance are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... deep impression upon her heart, was when the men carried out her father in a black box and when, leaving the big house with the wide pillared veranda, she was taken to the chilly North. How terribly vivid was the memory of her miserable girlhood, poverty pressed and loveless, her soul beating like a caged bird against the bars of the cold and rigid discipline of her aunt's well-ordered home. Then came the first glad freedom from dependence when ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
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