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More "Housemaid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... has, I think, been misunderstood as though he in some way wanted to see the effect upon the housemaid and make her a judge of his work. If she was an unusually clever, smart girl, this might be well enough, but the supposition commonly is that she was a typical housemaid and ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... other voice grumbled and swore, and the steps of the two men approached more closely, and the heart of the child went pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat, as a mouse's does when it is on the top of a cheese and hears a housemaid's broom sweeping near. They began to strip the stove of its wrappings: that he could tell by the noise they made with the hay and the straw. Soon they had stripped it wholly: that, too, he knew by the oaths and exclamations of wonder ...
— The Nuernberg Stove • Louisa de la Rame (AKA Ouida)
... must array it in all the theatrical properties of a vulgar imagination; he must give to things more imposing proportions, he colours gaudily; Nature for him is ever posturing in the full glare of footlights. Really he stands on no higher level than the housemaid who sees in every woman a duchess in black velvet, an Aubrey Plantagenet in plain John Smith. So I, in common with many another traveller, expected to find in the Guadalquivir a river of transparent green, with orange-groves along its banks, where wandered ox-eyed ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... easily from these numbers.(526) The Queen of Prussia is not dead, as I told you in my last. If you have shed many tears for her, you may set them off to the account of our son-in-law, the Prince of Hesse, who is turned Roman Catholic. One is in this age so unused to conversions above the rank of a housemaid turned Methodist, that it occasions as much surprise as if one had heard that he had been initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries. Are not you prodigiously alarmed for the Protestant interest ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... worst. I saw an instance lately however of a precocious young villain of twelve, who was footboy in a gentleman's family, and his young sister, not fourteen, under-housemaid. His mother, a widow in infirm health, recently imported from Dublin, had brought up her children well, as far as reading and writing went, but had indulged them too much, and beat them so much, that they neither loved nor feared her. The little boy, only twelve, ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... read this, that you cannot read that—that what you lose today you cannot gain to-morrow? Will you go and gossip with your housemaid, or your stable-boy, when you may talk with queens and kings; or flatter yourselves that it is with any worthy consciousness of your own claims to respect that you jostle with the common crowd for entrie ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... was up and off to the kitchen. The hours passed on, and the vision of the night kept constantly recurring to my thoughts. After a while I heard the voices of two women in the entry. In one of them I recognized the housemaid. The other said to her, "Did you know Linda Brent's children was sold to the speculator yesterday. They say ole massa Flint was mighty glad to see 'em drove out of town; but they say they've come back agin. I 'spect it's all their daddy's doings. They say he's bought William too. Lor! how ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... honors, but she refused them all, and would take nothing. All she would take for herself—if the King would grant it—was leave to go back to her village home, and tend her sheep again, and feel her mother's arms about her, and be her housemaid and helper. The selfishness of this unspoiled general of victorious armies, companion of princes, and idol of an applauding and grateful nation, reached but that ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... silence as of death was the sign of his welcome; but a tumult presently arose, and discipline was for a time suspended. I am afraid he had a slight feeling of condescension, as he returned the kind greeting of his old companions.—Raise a housemaid to be cook, and she will condescend ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... surprised to find, seated comfortably on the only chair to be seen, no less a person than the worthy Mrs. Mivers. This good lady in her spinster days had earned her own bread by hard work. She had captivated Mr. Mivers when but a simple housemaid in the service of one of his relations. And while this humble condition in her earlier life may account for much in her language and manners which is nowadays inconsonant with the breeding and education that characterize the wives of opulent tradesmen, so perhaps the remembrance of ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... for some comment from his companion, but none came. John Steele watched the boy; he waved a paper in his hand and called with easy familiarity to a housemaid ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... Mrs. Schwellenberg's occasioned a delay of the journey, and we all retreated back; and when I returned to my room, Miller, the old head housemaid, came to me, with a little neat tin saucepan in her hand, saying, "Pray, ma'am, use this for your eyes; 'tis milk and butter, much as I used to make for Madame Haggerdorn when she travelled in the winter with ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... mind as I locked up my rubies that night. It made him look so like his mother! I went round my fastenings with unusual care. Safe and closets and desk and doors, I tried them all. Coming at last to the bathroom, it opened at once. It was the housemaid's doing. She had evidently taken advantage of my having abandoned the room to give it "a thorough spring cleaning," and I anathematized her. The furniture was all piled together and veiled with sheets, the carpet and felt curtain ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... long as your man, William, and your cook, Parker, and your housemaid, Anne, are around to sort of look after them. I often leave them with our Norah ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Aunt Jo's • Laura Lee Hope
... determined to do things thoroughly. I've mastered all your jealously-guarded secrets and I've allowed the strong wind of a man's intellect to blow through them. I am facing the cook on a new system and am dealing with the tradesmen in a spirit of inexorable resolution. The housemaid is being brought to heel and has already begun not to leave her brushes and dust-pans lying about on the floors of the library and the drawing-room. Stern measures are being taken with the kitchen-maid; and Parkins, that ancient servitor, is slowly being ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 11, 1917 • Various
... from the chairs, the maps from the floor; the chaos of letters, manuscripts, note-books, paper-knives, pipes, matches, photographs, tobacco-jars, & cigar-boxes is gone from the writing-table, the furniture is back where it used to be in the long-ago. The housemaid, forbidden the place for five months, has been there & tidied it up & scoured it clean & made ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... again and laughing, "don't look all that serious. Bring back your brigadier and I'll kiss him on both cheeks while you hold him! But say; suppose that doctor's one of these swabs who serve out number nine pills for shell-shock, broken leg, dyspepsia, housemaid's knee and the creeping itch? Suppose he swears I'm luny? ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid's knee. ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... abundant in a patriarchal way; Madame de Warens had no idea of economy, and with her hospitalities and speculations was ever running more deeply into debt. The household, besides herself and me, consisted of housemaid, cook, and a footman ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... aren't you?" her visitor queried in the friendliest of tones. "You see, I know quite a lot about you already. Lydia told me—Lydia's the housemaid—you'll like her; she's a really nice girl. My name is June Mason—I live here, too, and I hope we will ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... Her first impulse was to make a scene and call the housemaid to witness how Daisy treated her own mother; but immediately she thought how undignified she would appear in the maid's eyes. So she went out ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... virtue of the King's command signed and sealed in his pocket. The belfry-fountain was humming like a swarm of bees as all the chambermaids and goodwives in the street rushed up to fill their pitchers at the very moment when Le Tellier's housemaid happened to ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... morning and before engaging, you were a lady," said the cook, hustling the girl into the hall, "but now being the housemaid, Miss Loach won't be pleased at your touching the ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... the door and silenced the attendant housemaid, I took the precaution of burying the rabbit partially under the eider-down quilt before testing the squeak, so that no noise should reach the children. I am afraid I "mothered" the squeak of that rabbit if I imagined it could reach anywhere so far; it was in reality ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... associating it with a veritable footman, who, upon the occasion of his "Sunday out," may, perchance, be seen in one of the front lower tenements in Belgrave-square, or some such locale, paying violent attentions to the housemaid, and the hot toast, decorated with the order of the handkerchief, to preserve his crimson plush in all its glowing purity. We cannot take leave of this interesting work without declaring our opinion that the composition (of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... afternoon I strolled into Regent's Park and meeting the McMurray's nine-year-old son in charge of the housemaid, around whom seemed to be hovering a sheepish individual in a bowler hat, I took him off to the Zoological Gardens. On the way he told me, with great glee, that his German governess was in bed with an awful sore ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... him into the dim room, where the tall but emaciated form of Elsie Maclean had been dressed for its last long sleep. The housemaid sat at the bedside, and Robert stood at one ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... the same relation to typhoid," said the Doctor, eyeing the other with solemnity, "as housemaid's knee does to sunstroke." ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... As there is housemaid's knee, and painter's colic, so there is millionaire's melancholia. And the Budlongs were enduring the illness without ...
— Mrs. Budlong's Chrismas Presents • Rupert Hughes
... servants from our family circle. Adam was head of the house, general provider, hired-man, stable-boy, head-gardener, coach-man, night-watchman and everything else of the male persuasion on the place; whilst I was cook, laundress, nurse, housekeeper, manicure, stenographer, and general housemaid, as well as the mother of the family—a situation that even though it involved us in no end of hard work, had its compensations. Living off in suburbs as we did, you can have no idea of what a comfort it was to us not to be at the mercy ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... a neighbour, one Francoise Louarne, a domestic servant, supports the idea that Helene resented the presence of Rosalie in the house. Helene said to this witness, "M. Bidard has gone into the country with his housemaid. Everything SHE does is perfect. They leave me here—to work if I want to, eat my bread dry: that's my reward. But the housemaid will go before I do. Although M. Bidard has given me my notice, he'll have to order me out ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... may be conveniently applied to those affections of bursae which result from repeated slight traumatism incident to particular occupations. The most familiar examples of these are the enlargement of the prepatellar bursa met with in housemaids—the "housemaid's knee" (Fig. 113); the enlargement of the olecranon bursa—"miner's elbow"; and of the ischial bursa—"weaver's" or "tailor's bottom" (Fig. 116). These affections are characterised by an effusion of fluid into the sac of the bursa with thickening of ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... A sluggish housemaid exclaimed, when scolded for the uncleanliness of her kitchen, "I'm sure the room would be clean enough if it were not for the nasty sun, which is always showing the ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... didn't cost George much," said Alice. "It did, though; nearly all he had got. But what matters? Money's nothing to him, except for its uses. My own little mite is my own now, and he shall have every farthing of it for the next election, even though I should go out as a housemaid the next day." There must have been something great about George Vavasor, or he would not have been so idolized by such a ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... get in a good word for boxers, but nobody would listen to her except me. It was all Jones, Jones, Jones, and the triumphs of modern medicine. Altogether he sailed through that whole day with flying colors, first with the housemaid, and then afterward at church, where he was the only one that knew what Sunday after Epiphany it was. He made it plainer than ever that he was a model young man and a pattern. Mrs. Matthewman compared him to her departed husband, and talked about old-fashioned ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... felt about Phebe, and much gossip went on behind fans that evening, for those who had known her years ago found it hard to recognize the little housemaid in the handsome young woman who bore herself with such quiet dignity and charmed them all with her fine voice. "Cinderella has turned out a princess," was the general verdict, and Rose enjoyed the little sensation immensely, for she had had many battles to fight ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... in the arrangement of the place. Everything was in the admired disorder of an artist's environment; but Mrs. Maybough insisted upon neatness. Even here Charmian had to submit to a compromise. She might and did keep things strewn all about in her studio, but every morning the housemaid was sent in to sweep it and dust it. She was a housemaid of great intelligence, and an imperfect sense of humor, and she obeyed with unsmiling scrupulosity the instructions she had to leave everything in Miss Charmian's studio exactly as she found it, but to leave it clean. In consequence, this ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... a cook, a step-mother, a housemaid, a church woman, a wet nurse (lots of times I have to wade out in the damp grass to take care of wet chickens and goslins). I have to be a tailoress, a dairy-maid, a literary soarer, a visitor, a fruit-canner, a adviser, a soother, a dressmaker, a hostess, a milliner, a gardener, a painter, a surgeon, ...
— Samantha Among the Brethren, Complete • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... to come. The first of them was a stout boy, with a white top-knot and spectacles. The housemaid brought him in and said, 'Compliments, and at what time was he to be fetched!' Mrs. Alicumpaine said, 'Not a moment later than ten. How do you do, sir? Go and sit down.' Then a number of other children came; boys by themselves, and girls by themselves, and boys and girls ...
— Holiday Romance • Charles Dickens
... sandy hair, a little forward head, and a long thin neck. He stole stamps, and, I suspected, rifled my private letter drawer, and I found him one day on a turn of the stairs looking guilty and ruffled with a pretty Irish housemaid of Margaret's manifestly in a state of hot indignation. I saw nothing, but I felt everything in the air between them. I hate this pestering of servants, but at the same time I didn't want Curmain wiped out of existence, so I had packed him off without unnecessary discussion to Altiora. He was ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... midway in a hasty descent the day before, and, however willing they might have been to obey their mistress's request, they were clearly powerless in the matter, since not even the echo of her voice reached their ears. Peggy searched in a frenzy of impatience, summoned a housemaid to assist her, and turned the contents of drawers and cupboards upside down upon her bed, but no success greeted her efforts. At the end of ten minutes' time she was in a more pitiable plight than before, since every likely place had been explored, ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... the decent tradesman, the small children in the advance; then the citizen and his comely spouse, followed by the grown-up daughters, with small morocco-bound prayer-books laid in the folds of their pocket-handkerchiefs. The housemaid looks after them from the window, admiring the finery of the family, and receiving, perhaps, a nod and smile from her young mistresses, at whose toilet ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... already his anxious mother has sent the housemaid to ask whether he will beg pardon yet, and he has only shaken his head. He is hungry; for he was brought up here immediately after school. But he will not give in, for he is in the right. It is not his fault that the grown- up people cannot understand him. They do not know that what ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... Norman is drawn in. He agrees with Mary that bubbles used to fly over the wall, and that one once went into Mrs. Richardson's garret window, when her housemaid tried to catch it with a pair of tongs, and then ran downstairs screaming that there was a ghost in her room; but that was in Harry's time, the heroic age ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... was the perils of vice that were carefully concealed from them. The gay adventures, the gorgeous dresses, the champagne and oysters, the diamonds and motor-cars, dramatists were allowed to drag all these dazzling temptations before any silly housemaid in the gallery who was grumbling at her wages. But they were not allowed to warn her of the vulgarity and the nausea, the dreary deceptions and the blasting diseases of that life. Mrs. Warren's Profession was not up to a sufficient standard of immorality; ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... o'clock, which was perhaps hardly enough for a young London lady's toilette and breakfast, and then called. A pleasant housemaid answered the bell, and told him that Miss Strange was away, and was not expected ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... Mary ran up the stairs with Mrs. Blythe, stood a moment in the upper hall when the other left her, and then went on to the alcove at the end, which had been fitted up as a little office. There she sat down to wait. Three physicians, personal friends of Dudley Blythe, were in the room with him. The housemaid was running back and forth getting what was necessary, and the next ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... giving notice. And the way she breaks things in her abstraction is awful. Elizabeth's illusions and my crockery always get shattered together. My rose-bowl of Venetian glass got broken when the butcher threw her over for the housemaid next-door. Half-a-dozen tumblers, a basin and several odd plates came in two in her hands after the grocer's assistant went away suddenly to join the silent Navy. And nearly the whole of a dinner service was sacrificed when LLOYD ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 5, 1920 • Various
... that all was ready. Jones the butler had been sent with a note to the City, and the housemaid was sitting with the kitchen-maid, who was recovering ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that the hasty and rapacious Kneller used to send away the ladies who sate to him as soon as he had sketched their faces, and to paint the figure and hands from his housemaid. It was in much the same way that Walpole portrayed the minds oft others. He copied from the life only those glaring and obvious peculiarities which could not escape the most superficial observation. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... above the lock, is a little chalk-mark which some sportive boy in passing has probably scratched on the pillar. The door-steps, the lock, handle, and so forth, are kept decently enough; but this chalk-mark, I suppose some three inches out of the housemaid's beat, has already been on the door for more than a fortnight, and I wonder whether it will be there whilst this paper is being written, whilst it is at the printer's, and, in fine, until the month passes over? I wonder whether ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of which I had obtained a supply, although like most Africans, they only used it in the shape of snuff.) The truth was that after all my marvellings and acute anxieties, also mental and physical exertions, I felt like the housemaid who caused to be cut upon her tombstone that she had gone to a better land where her ambition was to do nothing "for ever and ever." I just wanted to be completely idle and vacuous-minded for at least a month, but as I knew that all I could expect in that line was a single ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... St. Nicholas the marriage was to take place. Early in November the preparations for it began. No such great event could happen without an extraordinary housecleaning; and from garret to cellar the housemaid's pail and brush were in demand. Spotless was every inch of paint, shining every bit of polished wood and glass; not a thimbleful of dust in the whole house. Toward the end of the month, Anna and Cornelia arrived, with their troops of rosy boys and girls, and their slow, substantial ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... any cheering employment on the Sunday. Unfortunately for those under her roof to whom the dissipation and low dresses are not extended, her servants namely and her husband, the compensating strictness of the Sabbath includes all. Woe betide the recreant housemaid who is found to have been listening to the honey of a sweetheart in the Regent's park instead of the soul-stirring evening discourse of Mr. Slope. Not only is she sent adrift, but she is so sent with a character which leaves her little hope of a decent place. Woe betide the ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... the centre; at other times, rolling their heads upon their shoulders with such astonishing velocity, that the eye was dazzled as they flew round and round, their hair radiating and diverging like the thrumbings of a mop, when trundled by some strong-limbed housemaid. Their motions were regulated by the tom-toms, while an old Brahmin, with a ragged white beard, sat perched over the door of the pagoda, and, with a small piece of bamboo, struck upon the palm of his left ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... once," said the Woman of the World. "He said it was because he couldn't help it. It seemed such a foolish answer— the sort of thing your housemaid always tells you when she breaks your favourite teapot. And yet, I suppose it was as sensible as ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... little grimace, but they all left the room together. In the hall a housemaid was speaking at the telephone, and a moment afterwards she laid the receiver down and came ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... took place on this occasion. Mr Selby asked the captain whether he hunted, and gave him some information on the sport of all kinds in the neighbourhood. Miss Selby asked Dora if she liked archery, music, and drawing. Mrs Selby wanted to recommend a housemaid, and advised Mrs Carbonel against ever taking a servant from the neighbourhood. And then they all turned to talk of the evil doings of the parish thieves, poachers, idlers, drunkards, and to warn the Carbonels once more against hoping to improve ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that I shall give you presently. But first I want to go though our joint history, very briefly, just to justify myself if you like. Five-and-twenty years ago, or was it six-and-twenty, I was a boy of eighteen and you were a woman of twenty, a housemaid in my mother's house, and you made love to me. Then my mother was called away to nurse my brother who died at school at Portsmouth, and I fell sick with scarlet fever and you nursed me through it—it would ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... little plump things, With golden bodies and golden wings,— Mere fins for such solidities— Two cupids, in short, Of the regular sort, But the housemaid call'd ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... "It is all strange at first, dear: I know the feeling. But see how cosy we shall be." She threw the door open, and showed a room far more comfortably furnished than any at Wroote or Epworth. The housemaid, who adored Hetty, had even lit a fire in the grate. Two beds with white coverlets, coarse but exquisitely clean, stood side by side—"Though we won't use them both. I must have you in my arms, and drink in every word you have to tell me till you drop off to sleep in spite of me, ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... clapper still— The Landlord quits awhile his till, While Pot-boy, busiest of the bunch, Steals pence for self, and beer for Punch. Look at that window, you may trace At every pane a laughing face. Yon graceful Girl and her smart Lover, And in the story just above her, The Housemaid, with her hair in papers, All finding Punch a cure for vapours. E'en the pale Dandy, fresh from France, Throws on the group an eye askance; Twirls his moustache, and seems to fear That some gay friend may catch him here. The Widowed wretch, who only fed, ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... himself. He advised her to consider her items, and soon saw she was more bewildered than helpless. He knew no more than Arthur on the knotty point of the number of maids, but he was able to pronounce her plan sensible, and her eyes brightened, as she spoke of a housemaid of mamma's who wanted to better herself, and get out of the way of the little ones, 'who were ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Lieutenant de Korte, who was a gentleman, and a man of kindly instincts. This I did, and again my wishes were generously considered. My first act in the cottage home was to cable the United States Secretary of State of my privilege; Betty and my faithful housemaid, Parker, were allowed to be ...
— A Woman's Part in a Revolution • Natalie Harris Hammond
... to the Place to morn: Bess housemaid told me. Lord and Lady——: dash My wigs! I can't think on. But there's a mash O' comp'ny and fine ladies; fit to torn The heads of these young chaps. Why now I'd lay This here gun to an empty powder-horn Sir Reginald ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... all of the things we mention. If so, get the housemaid, or some other person whom he would not suspect, to ask him what he would like best for Christmas, and get that if it is ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... moment of a far-away housemaid who might still, if the local postman had not gone too far, be interested in his fate. On the other hand, he was, by temperament, economical of the truth. "Pennycuik," he said, ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... then pushed me down to the kitchen and the fat scullion-maids, who assured me that, 'in the respectable families they had the honour to live in, they had never even heard of my name.' One young housemaid, just from the country, did indeed receive me with some sort of civility; but she very soon lost me in the servants' hall. I now took refuge with the other sex, as the least uncourteous. I was fortunate ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... two hours after the Elsmeres had left for Dover, a cab drove up to their house in Bedford Square, and Newcome descended from it. 'Gone, sir, two hours ago,' said the housemaid, and the priest turned away with an involuntary gesture of despair. To his dying day the passionate heart bore the burden of that 'too late,' believing that even at the eleventh hour Elsmere would have been granted to his prayers. He might even have followed ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... family is called Scharrer von Arneck, and the father is a retired member of the Board of Mines. The young lady is really his sister, and she is a teacher at the middle school in Brunn. I found all this out from the housemaid. But I went about it in a very cunning way, I did not want to ask straight out, and so I said: Can you tell me who that white-haired old gentleman is, he is so awfully like my Grandfather. (I have never ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl
... of Her Majesty's Opposition, than you are with the prospects of the good and the evil, and the plots of God and the devil, all this winter in your own hearts. You rise early, and make a fight to get the first of the newspaper; but when the minister comes in in the afternoon you blush because the housemaid has mislaid the Bible. Did you ever read of the stargazer who fell into an open well at the street corner? Like him, you may be a great astronomer, a great politician, a great theologian, a great defender of the faith even, and yet may be a stark fool just in ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... just in the middle of a clap of thunder, Mary, the housemaid, opened the dining-room door, and hurriedly said something, but what no one could tell, for her voice was drowned by the ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... duenna did her invaluable service, for if she didn't look handsome in the clothes selected for her, she didn't, as that lady said frankly, look vulgar in them. No longer would you be liable to mistake her for somebody's second-rate housemaid on her day out. The simple diet and the inexorable regularity of her hours also told in her favor, although she herself wasn't as yet aware of the change taking place. Already you could tell that hers was a supple ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... out on the other side of Elbury, where Susan Congleton went to live that was housemaid at the Grange. She says it's such a nice place, and such beautiful organ and singing at church! And what did you say you were to ...
— Friarswood Post-Office • Charlotte M. Yonge
... black and awful, filled her soul at last. The choice seemed to lie between going out as an ordinary servant and starving. Even as a housemaid she would want this not-to-be-got-over reference. In this darkest-hour before the dawn she saw Madame Mirebeau's advertisement for sewing girls, and in sheer despair applied. Tall, handsome girls of good address, were just what madame required, and somehow—it ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... Afterwards I tried to put my bets, as far as I could remember them, down on a large sheet of paper, and I think I got it very nearly right. But I left the paper lying about in the library in a very interesting first edition of Plotinus, I believe, and either the housemaid burned it, or my host threw it into the waste-paper basket. At all events, it was lost, and I have no head for figures, and things got mixed somehow. The book-maker's recollection of the circumstances was not the same as mine. But I began ...
— Punch Volume 102, May 28, 1892 - or the London Charivari • Various
... needn't be away more than about an hour and a half. I don't quite remember how she'd got all she knew about the times of the trains. I think it was from the cook or housemaid at Miss Bogle's, for I know she said one of them came from near Hill Horton, and that she was very good-natured, and liked talking about Margaret's ...
— Peterkin • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... jungle, would have gloated over Tomlinson's collapse when he heard those fatal words! To his credit be it said, the butler had not breathed a word to a soul concerning the scene between father and son. He knew nothing of an inquisitive housemaid, and his tortured brain fastened on Hilton Fenley as the Paul Pry. Unconsciously, he felt bitter against his new master from ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... two sitting rooms, opening into a conservatory. There are six bedrooms, a dining-room, bath room, and housemaid's sink. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 384, May 12, 1883 • Various
... news so it is with the minor events of ordinary life,—birth, death, marriage, accidents, crime. Let me give an illustration. Suppose that in a suburb of London a housemaid has endeavoured to poison her employer's family by putting a drug in the coffee. Now on our side of the water we should write that little incident up in a way to give it life, and put headings over it that would capture the reader's attention in a minute. We ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... to speak of the pain, miss. Them wasps, their sting is very sharp, and even my lady's blue-bag did not remove them at once. And then the show I am, miss, in this respectable house! But that is nothing to what poor cook felt when the toad poisoned the bread. And there was Mary Ann, the second housemaid; Miss Irene caught her and put two spiders down her back. Mary Ann has such a horror of spiders as never was! Then, worst of all, there's poor Miss Frost, such a patient lady, and she has swallowed insects instead of pills. It's too ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... return to London and fix our attention on the dust of its air. Suppose a room in which the housemaid has just finished her work to be completely closed, with the exception of an aperture in a shutter through which a sunbeam enters and crosses the room. The floating dust reveals the track of the light. Let a lens be placed in the aperture to condense the beam. Its parallel ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... remember Annie, do you? She was second housemaid, the best servant I ever had. She was engaged to William, the footman with the curly hair. He is butler now at Barford. She cared for him dreadfully, poor soul. But your father could not bear her because she had a squint, and he never gave me any peace till I parted with her. I ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... to the departing guest: "We have been delighted by your visit; do us the favor to come again," when she sincerely hopes that most any catastrophe may overtake her rather than another visit from this same personage. There are the every-day expressions, 'Not at home,' which the housemaid is instructed to give the caller; and a score of other social lies which in truth deceive nobody, nine times out of ten. Society would lose little and gain much if the polite lie could be banished, and every man say what he thought and speak ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... shoes. Nobody lets thieves into his house. The brave sailor was drowned in the sea. An author writes books, and a writer simply copies papers. We have various servants - a cook, a housemaid, a nurse, and a coachman. (He) who occupies himself with mechanics is a mechanic, and (he) who occupies himself with chemistry is a chemist. A diplomatist we can also call a diplomat, but a physicist we cannot call a "physic," for "physics" ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... Association, by an enormous majority, decided to support him. The Liberals were at first much discouraged, but they have now taken heart again. One of their Canvassers, it seems, has succeeded in making himself a persona grata to a lady who occupies the position of under-housemaid in the establishment of the TUFFANS. Through her he obtained an empty pot of strawberry-jam, lately consumed by the TUFFAN family. This has been fixed upon a long pole, with a placard underneath it, to the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 9, 1892 • Various
... a future through which she must live. How might she best avoid the misfortune of poverty for the twenty, thirty, or forty years which might be accorded to her? What did it matter whom or what she hated? The housemaid probably did not like cleaning grates; nor the butcher killing sheep; nor the sempstress stitching silks. She must live. And if she could only get away from her mother that in itself would be something. Most people ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... dear, ring for some paste," said Emilie, just as the clock struck four; Margaret answered the bell. Margaret was the housemaid, and so far from endeavouring in her capacity to overcome evil with good, she was perpetually making mischief and increasing any evil there might be, either in kitchen or parlour, by her mode of delivering a message. She would be sure to add her mite to any blame that ...
— Emilie the Peacemaker • Mrs. Thomas Geldart
... the chart that recorded the antecedents of Gustave Schnorr, I saw his daughter going through my own folder with the business-like dispatch of a society dowager examining the "character" of a new housemaid. ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... well, miss? Would you like me to make you a cup of tea?" asked Alice the housemaid, noticing that the pudding was unappreciated, and divining that something ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... domestic tyranny offered her by a marriage with her cousin; and, liking him better than any one in the world except her uncle (who was at this time at sea) she went off one morning and was married to him; her only bridesmaid being the housemaid at her aunt's. The consequence was, that Frank and his wife went into lodgings, and Mrs. Wilson refused to see them, and turned away Norah, the warm-hearted housemaid; whom they accordingly took into their service. ...
— A House to Let • Charles Dickens
... some of the great houses have been pulled down and others turned into schools or hospitals, valued only at the rent of the land on which they stand. All this is inevitable. You cannot stop all this any more than Mrs. Partington could stem the Atlantic tide with a housemaid's mop. But ere the flood has quite swallowed up all that remains of England's natural and architectural beauties, it may be useful to glance at some of the buildings that remain in town and country ere they have ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... Then, offering her his arm, he walked with a friendly bow past the servants, who promptly turned and followed him into the entrance-hall, which was furnished with splendid old wardrobes and cases standing around the walls. The housemaid, a pretty girl, no longer very young, whose stately plumpness was almost as becoming to her as the neat little cap on her blonde head, helped her mistress take off her muff and cloak, and was just stooping down to take off her ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... parlour. Up the wall wid him then as fast as he could leg it, an' there if he doesn't go and make his web in a corner of a great big gould pictur' frame. Well, there he sat, the poor fellow, but ne'er a fly at all come next or nigh him, an' by-an'-by in walks the housemaid wid her great big broom, ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... so wore his clothes, and so carried his limbs, and so pronounced his words that he was to be regarded as one entitled to make love to any lady; whereas poor Mr. Spooner was not justified in proposing to marry any woman much more gifted than his own housemaid. Such, at least, were Adelaide Palliser's ideas. "I don't think anything of the kind," she said, "only I want you to go away. I shall go back to the house, and I hope you won't accompany me. If you do, I shall turn the other way." Whereupon she did retire at once, and he was left standing ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... the old fellow to the station," he said, "and as we went along I told him all about the station-master's family, and how I had seen the porter kissing our housemaid, and what a nice fellow he was, with no airs, or affectation about him, and anything I thought would be of interest; but he didn't seem to pay much attention, but walked along puffing his cigar, and once I thought—I'm not certain, but I THOUGHT—I heard him say, 'Well, thank God, that's over!' ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... once. Send for all the servants to-morrow morning, and explain what has occurred. This evening I will make it known to the two girls and Miss Paterson, who must of course be discharged, as we can no longer afford a governess. We must retain only the cook, housemaid, and footman, and a groom to look after the horses until they are sold. Send a letter to Mr. Bates, the auctioneer, to give notice of an early sale of the furniture. You must write to Henry; of course, he can no longer ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... below without a word, and worked like a housemaid. When he came on deck again, his face wore a smile almost of happiness, and his hand caressed one trousers pocket as though ...
— Lady of the Barge and Others, Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... my first place and my last, and I don't think we should have got on in business as we have if it hadn't been for me being for six or seven years with one of the first families in the county. Though only a housemaid, you can't help learning something of their ways. At any rate, you learn what gentlefolks like, and what they can't abide. But the worst of being housemaid where there's a lot of servants kept is, that one or other or all of the men-servants is sure to be wanting ...
— In Homespun • Edith Nesbit
... pronounced his words that he was to be regarded as one entitled to make love to any lady; whereas poor Mr. Spooner was not justified in proposing to marry any woman much more gifted than his own housemaid. Such, at least, were Adelaide Palliser's ideas. "I don't think anything of the kind," she said, "only I want you to go away. I shall go back to the house, and I hope you won't accompany me. If you do, I shall turn the other way." Whereupon ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... sundry ornaments, including vases of dried grasses, and the hand could always be held upon the tiles against which they stood. In a small fireplace within this unique mass of tiles and mortar, the housemaid would place a dozen pieces of coal-cake once or at most twice a day, and after allowing a few minutes for the kindling to set it aglow, would close and lock the triple door, and the fire was made for twenty-four hours. ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... thoroughly English, nor, on the other hand, so bright and cheerful as the modern suburban villa. But it is substantial and roomy within. The weather has given the front a sombre hue, and the windows are dingy, as if they rarely or never knew the care of a housemaid. On the ground floor the windows that would otherwise look on to the street are blocked to almost half their height with a wire blind so closely woven that no one can see in, and it is not easy to see out. The doorway is large, ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... swift glance over her shoulder, fearing her other guests, who were following, might have heard. "Hush, Jimmy," she said. "It sounds so bad. Never say that again, especially before the servants. The rector's housemaid is sister to my parlour-maid, and it would be sure to get round to him. Of course, I know you have been in wild places where there were no churches, and we understand, but others might not. And ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... and silenced the attendant housemaid, I took the precaution of burying the rabbit partially under the eider-down quilt before testing the squeak, so that no noise should reach the children. I am afraid I "mothered" the squeak of that rabbit if I imagined it could reach anywhere so far; it was in reality such a very small one. ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... ladyship would never sanction it. I never thought that of Miss Beachy, I will allow. I always said she was a nice young lady; but evil communications, my lady—we all know what the Bible says. Gentlemen upstairs in her room and her singing to them, and laughing and talking like as no housemaid in the house as valued her ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... PADI for some minutes without interruption, one woman takes a winnowing pan, a mat made in the shape of an English housemaid's dustpan, but rather larger than this article, and receives in it the pounded grain which the other throws out of the ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... she'll do. You would be astonished what a sensible, clever letter she writes; it is only the talking part that I fear. But I do seriously apprehend that Mrs. —- will sometimes conclude that she has a natural impediment in her speech. For my own part, I am as yet 'wanting a situation,' like a housemaid out of place. By the way, I have lately discovered I have quite a talent for cleaning, sweeping up hearths, dusting rooms, making beds, &c.; so, if everything else fails, I can turn my hand to that, if anybody will give me good wages for ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... his dressing-gown and saw the King, he nearly had apoplexy. But the King quickly told his errand and made his friend Primate on the doorstep, with the butler and the housemaid for witnesses. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... A housemaid now came forward with bed candles, to show Miss Carden to her room. Grace was going up, as a matter of course, when Jael, busy helping the footman with her boxes, called after her: "The ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... is drawn in. He agrees with Mary that bubbles used to fly over the wall, and that one once went into Mrs. Richardson's garret window, when her housemaid tried to catch it with a pair of tongs, and then ran downstairs screaming that there was a ghost in her room; but that was in Harry's time, the heroic age ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... Poor dear boy! He must be smothered. I hope he is not dead. Oh! there he is. Has Miss Temple got a page? Does her page wear a feather? My page has not got a feather, but he shall have one, because he was not smothered. Here! woman, who are you? The housemaid. I thought so. I always know a housemaid. You shall take care of my page. Take him at once, and give him some milk and water; and, page, be very good, and never leave this good young woman, unless I send for you. And, woman, good young woman, perhaps you may find an old ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... they did not spend with their offspring in their pew, they kept them indoors behind drawn blinds. His mother kissed young Heriot seldom and severely (with a cold smack like a hailstone), and never permitted him to remain ten minutes in the same room with a housemaid unchaperoned. His father never allowed him to sleep under more than two blankets, and locked the front door at nine o'clock in summer ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... railway sleepers were too large and heavy, and the fence poles were of unequal lengths. Moreover, there was nothing with which to lash them together, for when Raymonde visited the orchard, intending to purloin a clothes-line, she found the housemaid there, hanging up a row of pantry towels, and was obliged to beat a hurried retreat. After much hunting about, the girls at last discovered in a corner exactly what they wanted. It was the door of a demolished shed, ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... the chairs, the maps from the floor; the chaos of letters, manuscripts, note-books, paper-knives, pipes, matches, photographs, tobacco-jars, & cigar-boxes is gone from the writing-table, the furniture is back where it used to be in the long-ago. The housemaid, forbidden the place for five months, has been there & tidied it up & scoured it clean & made it repellent ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the room Mr Beaumont sleeps in I saw his coffin made of cedar wood. He scarcely ever sees a living creature and quite dislikes the sight of a woman. He does everything in the room, which no housemaid ever enters, nor indeed any ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... took the boat for Algiers. Our heads were full of I don't know what. We thought we were clever ones, and should do well in a country like Africa. And so we did at first. We got into a hotel at Algiers. She was housemaid, and I was porter in the hall, and what with the goings and comings—strangers giving us a little when we'd done our best for them—we made some money, and we saved it. And I wish to God ...
— "Fin Tireur" - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... upon going below, had called the housemaid and confided to her that, for good reasons, she had locked Violet in her room and she charged the maid not to let her out ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... a perception of all that had happened since he strolled out of the dining-room of the Central Hotel. He smiled dourly when he remembered the mislaid key. Did it still repose in the bedroom? Or had a housemaid found it, and restored it to a numbered hook in the office? Had not that immaculately dressed clerk said he would find Number 605 "a comfortable, quiet room"? Well, it might be all that, yet Curtis could ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... then Grace, the housemaid, knocked emphatically at the door, and after a due pause entered with a smiling, significant face, ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... goes to Astrardente in the Sabines on the day after to-morrow," said Temistocle. "It is quite sure that she goes, because she has already sent out two pairs of horses, and several boxes of effects, besides the second housemaid and ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... in the middle of her upstairs parlour, critically surveying some re-arrangement of articles with her head to one side, when the housemaid came in with the announcement, "Oh, please ma'am, we know now ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... invitation before he graciously descends. Most of the servants in our street have had the loan of him to be photographed with, and I have but now seen him stalking off for that purpose with a proud little housemaid who is looking up to him as if he were a warrior for whom she ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... with a Latin valentine which I prepared for her on the ensuing 14th of February, and caused to be delivered by the housemaid, in an envelope with an old stamp, and postmarks made with a pen and a penny. The design was very simple; a heart traced in outline from a peppermint lozenge of that shape, which came to me in an ounce of "mixed sweets" from the village ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... with Mrs. Ward's article. She has swept away the greater part of Wace's sophistries as a dexterous and strong-wristed housemaid sweeps away cobwebs with her broom, and saved ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... The scouting of the British Army in South Africa has been compared to a housemaid searching for an escape of gas with a ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... him. I thought he'd get to be fond of me, if only I was near him. He'd taken service here at Stone Farm, and I took a place here as housemaid; but there was only one thing he wanted me for, and that I wouldn't have if he wasn't fond of me. So he went about boasting that I'd run away from home for his sake, and the other thing that was a lie; so they all thought they could do what they liked with me. Kongstrup was just married then, ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... mainly in his own form, were aware of what he meant to do, he got up early and went to Walter's study, hoping to write out the verses there from memory. But he found the study in the possession of the housemaid; chapel-bell rang, and after chapel he went into morning school with the exercise unfinished. For this, he, the only boy in the form who had attempted to do his duty, received a punishment, while the rest ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... force out all women: the female Insurrectionary Force, according to Camille, resembles the English Naval one; there is a universal 'Press of women.' Robust Dames of the Halle, slim Mantua-makers, assiduous, risen with the dawn; ancient Virginity tripping to matins; the Housemaid, with early broom; all must go. Rouse ye, O women; the laggard men will not act; they say, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... pulled off her gloves, her cape and bonnet, and remade the artist's little camp bed as briskly as any housemaid. This mixture of abruptness, of roughness even, with real kindness, perhaps accounts for the ascendency Lisbeth had acquired over the man whom she regarded as her personal property. Is not our attachment to life based on its alternations of good ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... o' black for my shoes now—with your clothes I could get me a housemaid's job easy," Her muffler covered the fact that she had no shirtwaist. Then she added encouragingly: "You'd better get a job quick. There's only one blanket on these beds and clothes run down using them ...
— What's the Matter with Ireland? • Ruth Russell
... concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid's knee. ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... the clothes... The storm still raged... Hour after hour passed away, and the wearied Catherine had heard three proclaimed by all the clocks in the house before the tempest subsided, and she, unknowingly, fell fast asleep. She was awakened the next morning at eight o'clock by the housemaid's opening her window-shutter. She flew to the mysterious manuscript, If the evidence of sight might be trusted she held a washing bill in her hands ... she felt humbled ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... conjectured, the housemaid whom he had called out of the nursery to look for Leon's cane, on finding her master had gone without it, did not hurry back, but stopped talking to some of the other servants for perhaps a quarter of an hour, when she returned to the nursery, and to her ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 357, October 30, 1886 • Various
... afternoon to attend and speak at a dinner in aid of some artists' charity. He and Jan were staying with friends at Teddington; Fay, an aunt and the servants were already at Wren's End—all but Hannah, the severe Scottish housemaid, who remained in charge. She was grim and gaunt and plain, with a thick, black moustache, and Anthony liked her less than he could have wished. But she had been Jan's nurse, and was faithful and trustworthy ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... masculine and the chief feminine—the chief with the ferula, and the chief with the brimstone and treacle—the master and the matron, each of whom had their appendages—the one in the usher, the other in the assistant housemaid. But of this quartette, the master was not only the most important, but the most worthy of description; and as he will often appear in the pages of my narrative, long after my education was complete, I shall be very ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... "Good Woman" heard the news. His quick wit put him up to a plan to serve the poor girl. Early in the morning he took his pack and went through the village up to the Rev. Mr. Horton's. There, under pretence of asking for kettles to mend, he told the most dismal tale to the housemaid. At breakfast-time this was reported to Mrs. Horton. Distress at such a time was sufficient to engage any lady's attention. Mrs. Horton was a frail, tender woman, but earnest in works of charity. The ponies were ordered, and down they drove. The tale was ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... how do I look?" she asks, turning round to face Molly. "Anything like a housemaid?" With a faint laugh that has ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... was at the adjacent village of Logport, in the capacity of housemaid to a trader's wife, who, joining some little culture to considerable conscientiousness, attempted to instruct her charge. But the Princess proved an unsatisfactory pupil to even so liberal a teacher. ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... housemaid of the same name a year or two ago, and it made such a confusion—and when one once gets used to a name it is so hard to change—so she has ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... at the housemaid. 'Yes, yes, my darling, no one likes to hear who is to come after them. Don't you say nothing about it; ain't becoming; but, by and by, see if it don't come so, and if my boy ain't ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... left the gloomy room, and Mrs Thompson, a stout lady, who moved only when she was obliged, turned to the thin, elderly housemaid. ...
— The Dark House - A Knot Unravelled • George Manville Fenn
... to see the men of the 60th when a shell pitched among them to-day. How they regarded it as a busy man regards the intrusion of the housemaid—just a harmless necessary nuisance, and no more. The cattle took the little automatic shells in much the same spirit, but with an addition of wonder—staring at them and snuffing with bovine astonishment. ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... at the chance of escape from domestic tyranny offered her by a marriage with her cousin; and, liking him better than any one in the world, except her uncle (who was at this time at sea), she went off one morning and was married to him, her only bridesmaid being the housemaid at her aunt's. The consequence was that Frank and his wife went into lodgings, and Mrs Wilson refused to see them, and turned away Norah, the warm-hearted housemaid, whom they accordingly took into their service. When Captain Wilson returned ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... one who has never adventured his boat beyond the mouth of the peaceful land-locked harbor is ignorant of the open sea. But in the hard years she had been learning—not only from Presbury and General Siddall, but from the cook and the housemaid, from every creditor, every tradesman, everyone whose attitude socially toward her had been modified by her changed fortunes—and whose attitude had not been changed? Thus, she was now able to appreciate—at least in some measure—Stanley Baird's ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... tell the conservative old lady that the erring housemaid whom she may have judged so severely had greater temptation and a better excuse than did Marguerite, even though she could not get her voice ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... the Place to morn: Bess housemaid told me. Lord and Lady——: dash My wigs! I can't think on. But there's a mash O' comp'ny and fine ladies; fit to torn The heads of these young chaps. Why now I'd lay This here gun to an empty powder-horn Sir Reginald be in love, ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... to hear of universal service and the doing by each man of his first duty to the State, is informed with a bitter loathing of those who, for wretched hire and under wretched conditions, perform those duties for him. Dam did not mind, though he did not enjoy, doing housemaid's work in the barrack-room, scrubbing floors, blackleading iron table-legs and grates, sweeping, dusting, and certain other more unpleasant menial tasks; he did not mind, though he did not like, "mucking-out" stables and scavenging; he could take at their proper value the insults of ignorant ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... in a housemaid, and said she would show me my room. I rose hastily. Miss Planta, who knew everybody present except the clergyman, was now willing to have sat still and chatted ; but nothing short of compulsion Could have kept me in such a situation, and therefore I instantly accompanied the maid; and poor Miss ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... been married and scolded that morning was a groom, aged twenty, and he had met his little wife, she being then seventeen, in the place he was in before he came to us. She was a housemaid there, and must have been a pretty thing, though there were few enough traces of it, except the beautiful eyes, in the little anxious face that I saw for the first time immediately after the wedding, and just before the weary and harassed parson came in to talk ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... think out all this fifty years ago, neither were the tastes of that excellent housemaid, Sarah, quite on a level with those of which I have spoken; but I remember feeling the full comfort of the fact that Sarah's love for friendly gossip was quite as ardent as mine for romantic discovery; that she was disposed to linger quite as long to chat as I to ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... still pondering the unpleasant subject when the housemaid suddenly presented herself at ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... of every volume was now trebled in her eyes. Their furniture was all left behind; and in its stead went some of neat light painted wood which looked to Fleda deliciously countryfied. A promising cook and housemaid were engaged to go with them to the wilds; and about the first of April they turned their ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... sharp, and even my lady's blue-bag did not remove them at once. And then the show I am, miss, in this respectable house! But that is nothing to what poor cook felt when the toad poisoned the bread. And there was Mary Ann, the second housemaid; Miss Irene caught her and put two spiders down her back. Mary Ann has such a horror of spiders as never was! Then, worst of all, there's poor Miss Frost, such a patient lady, and she has swallowed insects instead of pills. ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... letter with the housemaid, went to the office, and spent the day in reading proofs, superintending the execution of orders, and looking after the affairs of the printing-house. He said not a word to David. While youth bears a child's heart, it is capable of sublime reticence. Perhaps, too, Lucien began to dread the ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... inquisitor or Andy, to whom he returned the book when he had gratified his senseless curiosity. Andy withdrew, Furlong retired to rest; and as it was in the grey of an autumnal morning he dressed himself, the paper still remained unobserved: so that the housemaid, on setting the room to rights, found it, and fancying Miss Augusta was the proper person to confide Mr. Furlong's stray papers to, she handed that young lady the manuscript which bore the ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... the great thing, you see, is to keep one's self out of reach of the housemaid's brush. (A pause.) If you're married you can't—always. (Smiling.) Don't you hate to ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... wondering when the Mayor would call him, Tip-Top heard voices on the other side of the wall. He listened closely, and soon found that the housemaid who had driven him away from the Mayor's door was talking to her brother, who had just returned from ...
— Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country • Joel Chandler Harris
... and down and stood on our feet about three times as much as need was; we had talked and laughed and shaken ourselves incessantly; we had put out our heads in the wind and sun as the train flew on; we had tried to waltz between the seats, and had eaten two ounces of "mixed sweets" given us by the housemaid, and deluged each other with some very heavy-scented perfume belonging ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... was the little boy's heart that was bleeding. "Why mayn't I hear her singing? Why don't she ever sing to me—as she does to that baldheaded man with the large teeth?" He gasped out at various intervals these exclamations of rage and grief. The cook looked at the housemaid, the housemaid looked knowingly at the footman—the awful kitchen inquisition which sits in judgement in every house and knows everything—sat on ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... about the same relation to typhoid," said the Doctor, eyeing the other with solemnity, "as housemaid's knee does to sunstroke." ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... an educated woman—a lady—who tried it as a sort of upper housemaid. The work was easy, the pay good, and she never had a harsh word; but they just seemed unconscious of her existence. She said the gentlemen of the house, father and son, would come in and stand before her to have her take their ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... window, and with regard to that a good many useful observations might be, and were, made. She could, from behind a curtain negligently half-drawn across the side of the window nearest the house, have an eye on her housemaid at work, and notice if she leaned out of a window, or made remarks to a friend passing in the street, or waved salutations with a duster. Swift upon such discoveries, she would execute a flank march across ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... so that your only alternative is that of being soaked to the skin, or pitched out, taken up, bled, and carried home in "a state of insensibility." The Spanish proverb, "it never rains but it pours" soon comes to pass, and every street is momentarily washed as clean as the most diligent housemaid could desire. Every little shelter is crowded with solitary, houseless-looking people, who seem employed in taking descriptions of each other for the Hue and Cry, or police gazette. On the pavement may probably be seen some wight who with more than political obstinacy, resolves to "weather ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 332, September 20, 1828 • Various
... abashed. He hung his hat up for himself beside a green-trimmed hat of straw in the wide, rich-toned hall. Through an open door he had a glimpse of a palatial study, book shelves bearing white busts, a huge writing-table lit by a green-shaded electric lamp and covered thickly with papers. The housemaid looked, he thought, with infinite disdain at the rusty mourning and flamboyant tie, and flounced about ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... out as good as gold. Anxiety has kept me at home of late, and I have watched you. You live for others; you are all over the house to serve two suffering women. That is real charity, not sexual charity, which humbugs the world, but not me. You are cook, housemaid, butler, nurse, and friend to both of them. In an interval of your time, so creditably employed, you come and cheer me up with your bright little face, and give me wise advice. I know that women are ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... my own story. I worked six years as farm hand for my rich brother, and then love overtook me. The little housemaid caught me in the net of her golden locks. What a fuss it made in our family! A peasant's pride is as stiff as that of your 'Vous' and 'Zus.' My girl had only a pair of willing hands and a good heart to give to an ugly, pock-marked being like me. My mother (God grant her peace!) caused her many ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... see," continued the sailor, turning down his, "w'en I went to sea that time, I left a wife an' a babby behind me; but soon arter I got out to China I got a letter tellin' me that my Susan was dead, and that the babby had bin took charge of by a old nurse in the family where Susan had been a housemaid. You may be sure my heart was well-nigh broke by the news, but I comforted myself wi' the thought o' gittin' home again an' takin' care o' the dear babby—a gal, it was, called Susan arter its mother. It was at that time I was took by the pirates in the Malay Seas—now ...
— The Garret and the Garden • R.M. Ballantyne
... was looking for her husband and inquired anxiously of a housemaid, "Do you happen to know anything ...
— The New Pun Book • Thomas A. Brown and Thomas Joseph Carey
... here in our own home. It was there [Pointing towards the first door on the right], in the dining-room, that I first came to know of it. I was busy with something in there, and the door was standing ajar. I heard our housemaid come up from the garden, with water for ...
— Ghosts • Henrik Ibsen
... the gods and goddesses, I believed in them all quite seriously, and reconciled them to Christianity, which I believed in too after a fashion, as some greater philosophers have done—and went out one day with my pinafore full of little sticks (and a match from the housemaid's cupboard) to sacrifice to the blue-eyed Minerva who was my favourite goddess on the whole because she cared for Athens. As soon as I began to doubt about my goddesses, I fell into a vague sort of general scepticism, ... and though I went on saying 'the Lord's prayer' at nights and mornings, ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... we were away,' she said, 'and the housemaid put it all in, according to the size of the things, I suppose. Nothing to do with the ...
— The Girls and I - A Veracious History • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... Dempster came at the beginning of March. For then little 'Mamsey' died—died suddenly. The housemaid found her seated motionless in her arm-chair, her knitting fallen down, and the tortoise-shell cat reposing on it unreproved. The little white old woman had ended her wintry age of patient sorrow, believing to the last that ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... Mrs. Miles Merryweather, six children, cook, housemaid and seamstress, two dogs, two cats (at least the basket mewed, so I infer cats), one canary bird, ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards
... novels. I believe I could do it. My love-making would either be rather tame and stiff or too intensely early Victorian. But I should like to swing off into an ecstasy of large turgid words and let my mind hear the mushy housemaid cry, "Isn't that ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... Winstanley. "I'm sure, if you had seen us before our marriage, you would never have guessed from our manner to each other that Conrad and I were engaged. You would not have a lady behave like a housemaid with her 'young man.' I believe in that class of life they always sit with their arms round each other's waists ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... Ferdinand passed to the adjacent supper-table, to join the upper housemaid in a discussion of two subjects that were very near to their hearts, a round of beef and a tureen of pickled cabbage, while Gustavus got up from the what-not in a bemused manner, and proceeded to search dreamily for an armchair. He came upon one by chance in the dining-room, and wheeled ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... that they would flourish, and hang and dangle and wave triumphant in the breeze, to an extent as yet generally undreamed of. And he lamented much the destruction that has heretofore been wrought upon this precious fabric by the housemaid's broom, and insisted upon by foolish women who claimed to be good housewives. Indeed, it was the general opinion that the Doctor's celibacy was in great measure due to the impossibility of finding a woman who would pledge herself to co- operate with him in this great ambition of his life,—that ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... cream; though my mind misgave me as to the latter delicacy, for we had several times been obliged to do without some of our luxuries if they entailed "fetching," as we had no boy to run errands quickly on an emergency and be useful. However, I rang the bell; and when the housemaid, whose temper, since she had been what is curiously termed in servants'-hall language "single- handed," was most trying, entered, I said, "Make some lemonade, Mary, and ask cook to gather some strawberries quickly, and bring ...
— J. Cole • Emma Gellibrand
... as she would have replied to the housemaid (who, indeed, could herself be spied just then, pausing, down the dimness of ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... a wash-stand, a bureau, two chairs and a bed. And such a bed! One mattress about four inches thick over squeaking slats, cotton sheets, so nicely calculated to the size of the bed that the slightest move on the part of the sleeper would detach them from their moorings and undo the housemaid's work; two limp, discouraged pillows that had evidently been "banting," and a few towels a foot long with a surface like sand-paper, completed the fittings of the room. Baths were unknown, and hot water was a luxury distributed sparingly by a capricious ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... house of a friend of mine, a few inches above the lock, is a little chalk-mark which some sportive boy in passing has probably scratched on the pillar. The door-steps, the lock, handle, and so forth, are kept decently enough; but this chalk-mark, I suppose some three inches out of the housemaid's beat, has already been on the door for more than a fortnight, and I wonder whether it will be there whilst this paper is being written, whilst it is at the printer's, and, in fine, until the month passes over? I wonder whether the servants in that house will read ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the polls, sick or well, baby or no baby, servant or no servant, strength or no strength, desire or no desire? If she have cook and housemaid they are to go also, and number her two to one, anyway; probably on election day, which they would make a holiday, they would—as at other crises, of birth, sickness, death, house-cleaning, which should occur in no first-class ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.
... he own the house? No. The people who owned the house had gone to Europe for a year and had rented it furnished. No, Mr. Wynne didn't have a family. He lived there alone except for two servants, a cook and a housemaid. She had never noticed anything unusual about Mr. Wynne, or the servants, or the house. Yes, he went out every day, downtown to business. No, she didn't know what his business was, but she had an idea that he was a broker. ...
— The Diamond Master • Jacques Futrelle
... shame to have exposed his family secrets in that way!" And then a whole circle of myths grow up round the man's story. It is credibly ascertained that I am the man who broke into his house last year, after having made love to his housemaid, and stole his writing-desk and plate—else, why should a burglar steal family-letters, if he had not some interest in them?... And before the matter dies away, some worthy old gentleman, who has ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... her to seek the society of her mother's class; and that class simply would not have her, because she was much poorer than the greengrocer, and, far from being able to afford a maid, could not afford even a housemaid, and had to scrape along at home with an illiberally treated general servant. Under such circumstances nothing could give her an air of being a genuine product of Largelady Park. And yet its tradition made her regard a marriage with anyone within her reach as an ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... anything immediately either for show or use, I was content with keeping samples of all possible patterns in needlework, beads, bugles, horse-hair, etc., for I could not help feeling troubled sometimes about my future destiny; yet I could not bear the idea of being turned into an Abigail or housemaid, and thought that with the above and such like acquirements, with a little notion of music, I might obtain a place as governess in some family where the want of a knowledge of French would be ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... Brigit could have no difficulty in proving that she was not the mysterious lady who visited Orange's lodgings. Having weighed all the disadvantages, Sara now directed her attention to the advantages she could snatch out of the dilemma. At last she hit on a bold plan. She rang a bell and a housemaid answered ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... means magnificent, but was abundant in a patriarchal way; Madame de Warens had no idea of economy, and with her hospitalities and speculations was ever running more deeply into debt. The household, besides herself and me, consisted of housemaid, cook, and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... to get swollen knees, and chilblains and chapped hands. They like to make a fuss about themselves. And to make their employer pay a substitute to do their work. They're all like that. It was just the same before I married. Yes, every housemaid I employ. Contracts these swollen kneeses. They only do it to annoy. Because they know ...
— If Winter Don't - A B C D E F Notsomuchinson • Barry Pain
... accordion, Willy Parker clashed the castanets as well as he could, and they all marched into the house. The table was beautifully spread with flowers and grapes and pretty china. Johnnie took the head, Willy the foot, and Dinah the housemaid helped them all round to sliced peaches ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... afternoon of the twelfth of October the Hamilton house was very still. Mrs. Hamilton had gone into town, the housemaid was taking her "afternoon out," and the cook, who had been kept awake by toothache the night ...
— Glenloch Girls • Grace M. Remick
... disorder of an artist's environment; but Mrs. Maybough insisted upon neatness. Even here Charmian had to submit to a compromise. She might and did keep things strewn all about in her studio, but every morning the housemaid was sent in to sweep it and dust it. She was a housemaid of great intelligence, and an imperfect sense of humor, and she obeyed with unsmiling scrupulosity the instructions she had to leave everything in Miss Charmian's studio exactly as she found it, but ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... no one visible save the housekeeper, who just at that moment, accosted a housemaid, to whom she appeared ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... ordinary decorum were apparently established in the royal household. And the shocking spectacle was daily to be seen, of a young woman, singularly beautiful, atrociously silly, and without common self-respect, styling herself Queen of England, yet exacting no more respect or homage than a housemaid, suffering young men, the most licentious in all England, openly to speculate on the contingency of her husband's death, to talk of it in language the coarsest, as 'waiting for dead men's shoes,' and ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... stood during this scene, feeling shocked and uncomfortable to a degree, he asked Mrs. Melwyn "how long she intended to keep the young lady standing there before she dressed for dinner?" and suggested that the housemaid should be sent for, to show her ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... an enormous majority, decided to support him. The Liberals were at first much discouraged, but they have now taken heart again. One of their Canvassers, it seems, has succeeded in making himself a persona grata to a lady who occupies the position of under-housemaid in the establishment of the TUFFANS. Through her he obtained an empty pot of strawberry-jam, lately consumed by the TUFFAN family. This has been fixed upon a long pole, with a placard underneath it, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 9, 1892 • Various
... He was still less seen than heretofore, kept himself still less in time with the rhythm and racket of the movements called progress in the world without. For many months after his wife's decease the economy of his household remained as before; the cook, the housemaid, the parlour-maid, and the man out-of-doors performed their duties or left them undone, just as Nature prompted them—the vicar knew not which. It was then represented to him that his servants seemed ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... cook, a step-mother, a housemaid, a church woman, a wet nurse (lots of times I have to wade out in the damp grass to take care of wet chickens and goslins). I have to be a tailoress, a dairy-maid, a literary soarer, a visitor, a fruit-canner, a adviser, a soother, a dressmaker, a hostess, a milliner, a gardener, a painter, ...
— Samantha Among the Brethren, Complete • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... George much," said Alice. "It did, though; nearly all he had got. But what matters? Money's nothing to him, except for its uses. My own little mite is my own now, and he shall have every farthing of it for the next election, even though I should go out as a housemaid the next day." There must have been something great about George Vavasor, or he would not have been so idolized by such a girl ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... those who come after you, and who may not have the means of being liberal over and above the prescribed standard. Under no circumstances is a lady called upon by the rules of etiquette to give fees to men servants; the lady's-maid and the housemaid are the only ones she is expected to remember; but if a gentleman visit where only female servants are employed, he should make them a present ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... prospects of the good and the evil, and the plots of God and the devil, all this winter in your own hearts. You rise early, and make a fight to get the first of the newspaper; but when the minister comes in in the afternoon you blush because the housemaid has mislaid the Bible. Did you ever read of the stargazer who fell into an open well at the street corner? Like him, you may be a great astronomer, a great politician, a great theologian, a great defender ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... look like a housemaid among them. How would you feel with a wife of that sort, when the other sort ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... would rather have Craddock, and the town open, than Morgan and stagnation. He came to that conclusion with Morgan's evasion of his direct question. The interests of Peden and his kind were Conboy's interests. He stood like a housemaid with dustpan and broom to gather up the wreckage ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... the early morning my eyes always open on the Governor's handsome Mohammedan servant in spotless white muslin and red head-dress and girdle, bringing a tray with tea and bananas. The Chinese coolie who appears mysteriously attends on me, and acts as housemaid, our communications being entirely by signs. The mosquitoes are awful. The view of the green lawns, the sleeping sea, the motionless forest of cocoa-palms along the shore, the narrow stream and bridge, and the quaint red-tiled roofs of the town, is very charming and harmonious; yet I often ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... atmosphere of America: "I confess Leinster House does not inspire the brightest ideas. By the by, what a melancholy house it is! You can't conceive how much it appeared so when first we came from Kildare. A country housemaid I brought with me cried for two days, and said she thought that she was in a prison." It was at Leinster House that "Lord Edward"—he is to this day always thus known by the people of Ireland, who never think it needful to add his surname—after ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... despair, black and awful, filled her soul at last. The choice seemed to lie between going out as an ordinary servant and starving. Even as a housemaid she would want this not-to-be-got-over reference. In this darkest-hour before the dawn she saw Madame Mirebeau's advertisement for sewing girls, and in sheer despair applied. Tall, handsome girls of good address, ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... when she arrived. The housemaid had gone on about an hour before, and I had watched with delight my little trunk and my toys being packed into the carriage. The maid climbed up and took the seat by the driver, in spite of my mother protesting ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... long list of diseases to which fowls are subject is dispiriting. I am glad they can't read them, or they would have all at once, as J.K. Jerome, the witty playwright, decided he had every disease found in a medical dictionary, except housemaid's knee. Look at ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... slave, such as the nurse we find in the tragedies, may sometimes have corresponded to that description. In other regions it is surely true that to advance in conventional station would often entail a loss in true dignity and happiness. It would seldom benefit a musician to be appointed admiral or a housemaid to become a prima donna. Scientific breeding might conceivably develop much more sharply the various temperaments and faculties needed in the state; and then each caste or order of citizens would not be ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... which had a different air from any other portion of the house, was sacred to his private life. Here, in specially designed compartments, he kept his golf clubs, pipes, and papers. Nothing was touched by anyone except himself, and twice a week by one particular housemaid. Here was no bust of Socrates, no books in deerskin bindings, but a bookcase filled with treatises on law, Blue Books, reviews, and the novels of Sir Walter Scott; two black oak cabinets stood side by side against the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... were all the words the housemaid dared to say so close to the bedroom. And softly, softly Miss Monro stepped down the stairs, into the drawing-room; and there she saw Mr. Livingstone. But she did not know him; she had never ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... "I have seen her; often enough I saw her; for when she was the Lady Roxana I was her housemaid, being a servant, but I did not know her then, nor she me; but it has all come out since. Has she not a maid named Amy?" Note.—The honest Quaker was—nonplussed, and greatly surprised ...
— The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2) • Daniel Defoe
... and playthings, gold and fruit. "To-morrow I will not tremble," thought he; "I will enjoy all my splendor, and I shall hear the story of Humpty Dumpty again, and perhaps Ivede-Avede." And the tree remained quiet and thoughtful all night. In the morning the servants and the housemaid came in. "Now," thought the fir, "all my splendor is going to begin again." But they dragged him out of the room and up stairs to the garret, and threw him on the floor, in a dark corner, where no daylight shone, and there they left ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... door in Hertford Street. They at once perceived that the hall-door was open, and Mrs. Carbuncle, as she crossed the pavement, saw that there were two policemen in the hall. The footman had been with them to the theatre, but the cook and housemaid, and Mrs. Carbuncle's own maid, were with the policemen in the passage. She gave a little scream, and then Lizzie, who had followed her, seized her by the arm. She turned round and saw by the gas-light that Lizzie's face was white as a sheet, and ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... of the two little children, and gave the assistance that Cherry needed, as well as discharging some of the lighter tasks of the housemaid; leaving the heavier ones to Sibby and Martha, a stout, willing, strong young woman, whom Sister Constance had happily found for them, and who was disqualified, by a loutish manner and horrible squint, from the places to which her ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... business, and to it they went manfully. A fairy glazier put in new panes to the shattered windows, fairy carpenters replaced the doors upon their hinges, and fairy painters, with inconceivable celerity, made cupboards and closets as fresh as paint could make them; one fairy housemaid laid and lit a roaring fire, while another dusted and rubbed chairs and tables to a miraculous degree of brightness; a fairy butler uncorked bottles of fairy wine, and a fairy cook laid out a repast of ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... sir, the two maid-servants, Marie the housemaid and Louise the cook, and also Herve the butler; but Herve did not sleep in the chateau last night. He had asked the mistress's permission to go into the village, and she had given it to him on condition that he did not come ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... Yes, and I can see that the pretty child is weary of this wide and pleasant street with the green trees flinging their shade across the quiet sunshine and the pavements and the sidewalks all as clean as if the housemaid had just swept them with her broom. She feels that impulse to go strolling away—that longing after the mystery of the great world—which many children feel, and which I felt in my childhood. Little Annie ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... extraordinary gastronomical episode, as the Count was eagerly helping himself to a slice of venison, a housemaid came in with, "We cannot find madame ...
— The Message • Honore de Balzac
... cotton gown—very neat, I dare say—for an under housemaid; and such thick shoes! She had on a little black straw bonnet, and a kerchief that might have cost tenpence, pinned across her waist instead of a shawl; and she looked altogether—respectable, no doubt, but exceedingly dusty! And she was hanging upon Leonard's ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... overcoat for his simian colleague. Had I foiled her in all of these to be beaten in the end? No, not without a struggle. I scampered downstairs again and, wresting Harriet's bicycle from its owner's hands (Harriet is the housemaid and it was her night out), was soon pedalling furiously ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... home. There's a hat-rack here under the stairway," she continued, as Russell, murmuring some response, came into the hall. "I'm afraid you'll think it's almost TOO informal, my coming to the door, but unfortunately our housemaid's just had a little accident—oh, nothing to mention! I just thought we better not keep you waiting any longer. Will you step into ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... rose, went to the closet, took out her old clothes, and dressed herself in them, and casting scarcely a look on the new clothes or round the sweet little chamber, she stole softly down stairs. She found a housemaid in the hall, who, not knowing the plans of her master and mistress in regard to the little girl, let her out, and she ran swiftly home. She found the cottage door unfastened, for the poor have little fear of burglars. Entering quietly, ...
— Stories of Many Lands • Grace Greenwood
... only contributed the coat and waistcoat, and did not know exactly how he was to lay his hands on the 250 pounds. What with piracy—for we have been told of at least one case in which Alcinous had looted a town and stolen his housemaid Eurymedusa—what with insufficient changes of linen, toping like an immortal god, swaggering at large, and open-handed hospitality, it is plain and by no means surprising that Alcinous is out at elbows; nor can there be a better example ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... three more. You broke that woman's heart. I don't suppose you know that she died last month. You never noticed it, eh? Her precious coachman is living like a lord on the money you and he took from her. Old Burkenday's housemaid has bought a little home in Edgewater—but not from her wages. The two jobs you now have on hand never will be pulled off. The girl in the Banker Watts case has been cornered and has confessed. She is ready to appear against you. McLennan's wife has had the courage to defy your accomplice—that ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... hopeless. Every word you say gives up your case. What's it to do with you whether she likes it or not? I'm not talking of her, but of you. You silly ass, don't you see where you are? You fall in love with a woman and make her your head housemaid. Then you say, Oh, but she likes it. It's not what she likes we're talking about; it's what you can bring yourself to do with her. Wait a bit now. There's more to it. You play about here, there, and all over the shop. Off you go for three months at a time, sky-larking, ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... mind, all at least that he could. And then the housekeeper turned them into a grand room, all covered up in sheets of brown paper, and bade them begin, in a lofty and tremendous voice; and so after a whimper or two, and a kick from his master, into the grate Tom went, and up the chimney, while a housemaid stayed in the room ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... particularly well-disposed reader to appreciate the wit of Browning's retort upon his critics: "You are chimney-sweeps," he sings out in his great voice, "listen! I have invented several insulting nicknames for you. Decamp! or my housemaid will fling the slops in your faces." This may appear to some persons to be genial and clever. It certainly has none of the exquisite malignity of Pope's poisoned rapier. Perhaps it is a little dull; perhaps it is ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
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