"Slatternly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... straggling families of tramps on distant by-roads, looking into the contents of their dreadful bundles, flashing the official bull's eye lantern into the mysterious interior of gypsy caravans, and making ragged men and slatternly women give an account of their wanderings. No limits to which they would not go; how could they fail? She wished their success seemed as inevitable to her mother as it ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... large figure like mine away into trowsers. I felt as if my legs were in the stocks, and kicked them off in disdain—simply remarking—'what fools men are!' So, you don't like my short petticoats? and I hate your long ones. First, because they are slatternly and inconvenient; secondly, because they make your stockings dirty; and thirdly, because they give you the idea that they are intended to conceal crooked legs. So don't say one word ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... where the work of multiplying is carried on so prosperously as in my native island. Mr. Tim had married the girls' waiting-maid, who had been a kind friend of mine in the early times; and I had to go salute poor Molly next day, and found her a slatternly wench in a mud hut, surrounded by a brood of children almost as ragged as those ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the house, which at first she kept neat and pretty, and then let fall into slatternly neglect. She ceased to care for her dress or the child's; the time came when it seemed as if she could scarcely move in the mystery that beset her life, and she yielded to a deadly lethargy which paralyzed all her faculties but ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... pleasure in visions untidy, A wrapper all hole-y, a buttonless shoe, A slatternly matron with nothing to do; And all the ill-luck charged to ominous Friday Can never compare with the ills that ensue On wretched housekeeping and ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... any time and to Julie, who had stared at the rows of slatternly kept backyards until she grew familiar with each battered garbage can, the sight was hateful. The rain had driven even the starved alley cats to cover, and with a sigh forlorn in its wretchedness, she turned from the window and contemplated her nicely ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... with its mundane splendor. And let me urge that impeccable mundane splendor, despite facile arguments to the contrary, is a very real and worthy achievement. It is regrettable, by the way, that the entrances and foyers to these grandiose interiors should be so paltry, slatternly, and inadequate. If the entrances to the great financial establishments reminded me of opera-houses, the entrances to opera-houses ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... playing to that crowd of negroes and Arabs and Egyptians for a night's lodging and the price of a meal. There were four of them, and, so far as I could see, all four were Greeks. Two were evidently man and wife. They were both old, both slatternly and almost in rags; the man a thin, sallow-faced fellow, with grey hair and a black moustache; the woman fat, coarse of face, unwieldy of body. Of the other two, one it seemed must be their daughter, a girl of seventeen, not good-looking really, but ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... wife of a Sussex agricultural labourer called Alliner, she was a stout person, with most peculiar prominent epileptic eyes, such eyes as one usually associates with men of letters or criminals. And yet there was nothing in her. She was just a lazy, slatternly, easy-going body, rather given to drink. Her husband was a thin, dirty, light-hearted fellow, who did his work and offended nobody. Her eldest daughter, a pretty and capable girl, was wild, got into various kinds of trouble, and had to migrate, ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... that was homelike and comfortable passed from our little house. For three days after the funeral the neglected clothes still hung on the line in the back yard, but on the fourth morning a slatternly girl, with red hair and arms, came from the grocery store at the corner, and gathered them in. My little sister was put to nurse with Mrs. Cudlip next door, and when, at the end of the week, President went off to work somewhere in a ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... passing along the canal the other day when the "eclusier" came out of his house and asked me if I would come and look at his child who was frightfully ill—his wife in despair. Without thinking of my little ones at home, I went into the house, where I found, in a dirty, smelly room, a slatternly woman holding in her arms a child, about two years old, who, I thought, was dead—such a ghastly colour—eyes turned up; however, the poor little thing moaned and moved and the woman was shaken with sobs—the father and two older children standing there, not knowing what to do. They told me the ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... A slatternly, miserable, little general servant opened it. No, the foreign gentleman and the little boy were not in, they said they would be back in a few minutes—would the lady step up and wait? She followed the lumpy, untidy figure upstairs to a large attic at the top. It was always let as a studio, ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... to climate, the chef-lieu of the Bouches du Rhne must be called a slatternly beauty; whilst embellishing herself, putting on her jewels and splendid attire, she has forgotten to wash her face and trim her hair! Not in Horatian phrase, dainty in her neatness, Marseilles does herself injustice. Lyons is clean swept, spick and span as a toy town; Bordeaux is coquettish ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... into the apartment where I had discovered all the signs of female inquisitiveness, which I have before detailed. There I discovered a small woman, in a robe equally slatternly and fine, with a sharp pointed nose, small, cold, grey eyes, and a complexion high towards the cheek bones, but waxing of a light green before it reached the wide and querulous mouth, which, well I ween, seldom opened to smile upon the unfortunate possessor of her charms. She, like the Rev. ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... peasants are made of reed and straw; the hay-ricks are mere slovenly heaps, partially thatched; the fences are made up of odds and ends. As for order, the whole place might have been strewn with the debris of a whirlwind and not have looked worse. As a natural consequence of all this slatternly disorder, fire is no uncommon occurrence; and when a fire begins, it seldom stops till it has licked the whole place clean—a condition not attainable ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... and final, his lips stamping the enunciation of each word like the die of a machine. His wife sighed and remained silent. She was a large, stout woman, always dressed slatternly and always tired from the burdens of her flesh, her work, ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... impression created upon her was that some evil charm was over the place, that in the sweet sunlight it lay drugged, that in those rows of slatternly shacks where the sunlight did not enter men either hid in dark secrecy or lay in some unnatural stupour. The whole settlement seemed preternaturally quiet; the fancy came to her that the town had died long ago and that she merely looked on ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... disheartened that he began to dread the thought of returning home to dinner. Clearly, he was a superfluous person in Stillwater. A mortar-splashed hod-carrier, who had seated himself on a pile of brick and was eating his noonday rations from a tin can just brought to him by a slatternly girl, gave Richard a spasm of envy. Here was a man who had found his place, and was establishing—what Richard did not seem able to establish in his own case—a right ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... we inquired the name of the street of a passer-by. We found that we were all right. We now proceeded stealthily along to the lane where Mother McCleary's whisky-shop was situated. I had no difficulty in recognising the old woman, as she had been well described to me. Her stout slatternly figure, her bleared eyes, her grog-blossomed nose,—anything but a beauty to look at. Her proceedings were not beautiful either. Going to the end of the counter where she was standing, ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... Hawkins's dog, which were not satisfactory and they made war on him in concert. This would have interested the citizens but it was too many on one to amount to anything as a fight, and so they commanded the peace and the foreign dog coiled his tail and took sanctuary under the wagon. Slatternly negro girls and women slouched along with pails deftly balanced on their heads, and joined the group and stared. Little half dressed white boys, and little negro boys with nothing whatever on but tow-linen shirts with a fine southern exposure, ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... was more night-like than the depth of summer's night; dim-purple brooded the low skies over the white earth, as Susan rode up to what had been Michael Hurst's abode while living. It was a small farm-house carelessly kept outside, slatternly tended within. The pretty Nelly Hebthwaite was pretty still; her delicate face had never suffered from any long-enduring feeling. If anything, its expression was that of plaintive sorrow; but the soft, light hair had scarcely a tinge of gray; the wood-rose tint of complexion yet ...
— Half a Life-Time Ago • Elizabeth Gaskell
... himself, discovered the merits of Amanda. Then he became markedly attentive. He was a large, fat, curly-headed person with beautiful eyes, a cherished moustache, and an air of great gentility, and when he had welcomed his guests and driven off the slatternly waiting-maid, and given them his best table, and consented, at Amanda's request, to open a window, he went away and put on a tie and collar. It was an attention so conspicuous that even the group of men in the far corner noticed and commented on it, and then ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... next morning and dressed in the room without fire, shivering now as they drew on their stockings, frozen stiff. They had their morning coffee in a chilly room downstairs, where sometimes their slatternly landlady appeared, lugubriously voluble. This morning they ate alone, in silence, and none too happily. Even Annie's buoyant spirits seemed inadequate. A trace of bitterness was in her tone when ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... was five years old. It was all as competent and glossy as this bedroom. It had the best of taste, the best of inexpensive rugs, a simple and laudable architecture, and the latest conveniences. Throughout, electricity took the place of candles and slatternly hearth-fires. Along the bedroom baseboard were three plugs for electric lamps, concealed by little brass doors. In the halls were plugs for the vacuum cleaner, and in the living-room plugs for the piano lamp, for the electric fan. The trim dining-room (with its admirable oak buffet, its leaded-glass ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... A slatternly woman, who had come to the door of the tumble-down house at the sound of the dog's yelps, poured out a volume of vituperation at the girls, most of it, fortunately, being lost in the chugging ...
— The Motor Girls on Waters Blue - Or The Strange Cruise of The Tartar • Margaret Penrose
... evil-smelling, crowded precinct, thronged with people carrying fish on their heads, and lined with fish-shops and fish-stalls, and pervaded with a fishy odor. The footwalk was narrow,—as indeed was the whole street,—and filthy to travel upon; and we had to elbow our way among rough men and slatternly women, and to guard our heads from the contact of fish-trays; very ugly, grimy, and misty, moreover, is Billingsgate Market, and though we heard none of the foul language of which it is supposed to be the fountain-head, yet it has its own peculiarities of ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... with coarse food—black bread, boiled cabbage, bacon, eggs, a great chine from a wild boar, sausages, such as we eat nowadays, and flagons and jars of beer and wine, Along the board sat ranged in the order of the household the followers and retainers. Four or five slatternly women and girls served the others as they fed noisily at the table, moving here and there behind the men with wooden or pewter dishes of food, now and then laughing at the jests that passed or joining in the talk. A huge fire blazed and crackled ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle
... Municipio, a typical square of a provincial town in the South, enclosed by shabby houses and adorned by a couple of stunted date-palms and a battered marble fountain, around which numberless children and some slatternly women noisily converse or dispute. There is an old proverb in the South, that a good housewife has no need to know any thoroughfares save those leading to her church and her fountain, and as conversation cannot well be carried on in the former, it is the daily visits ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... the hacienda has an owner; and with all their indolence, the lounging leperoa outside, and slatternly wenches within, have a master. He is not often at home, but when he is they address him as "Don Faustino." Servants rarely ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... some biscuits which he had asked two grudging curates to bring him, he had eaten nothing since breakfast-time. He sat down at an uncovered wooden table opposite two work-girls and a mechanic. A slatternly ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... opened, and a slatternly-looking woman of sinister aspect appeared at the threshold. Florence took no particular notice of her appearance, but ...
— Ben's Nugget - A Boy's Search For Fortune • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... cheerful announcement, "Smith's Inn—Refreshments for Man or Beast," stood a more modest structure. Brown, unpainted, unclapboarded, it stood by the wayside. Its log walls were stuccoed with mud, and in the wide mouth of the doorway was the brawny housewife, bare-armed, peering from beneath a slatternly red sun-bonnet, while over the doorway the passer-by read the letters in red chalk upon a new ...
— A Sketch of the History of Oneonta • Dudley M. Campbell
... Aurora. Slatternly slavey frock, soiled white apron, cap awry, large slippers tied on with string. (During Act 3: changes to grotesque colored dress: orange blossoms ...
— Oh! Susannah! - A Farcical Comedy in Three Acts • Mark Ambient
... last night's round we went into a small house in one of the slums. The husband was out, but the wife and family were all gathered together in the back room. There were five children, ranging in age from ten down to two, and the mother looked the very picture of slatternly discomfort. We asked the usual questions, and I was just turning to go, when I heard a violent fit of convulsive coughing from a dark corner. The mother got up and went to the corner. I couldn't help following, and saw the most miserable spectacle I ever set eyes on. In a sort of ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 25, 1891 • Various
... somewhat emaciated; yet, for the first time in several months, she wore a tight-fitting dress, and her father, unconscious of her crimes, good-naturedly expressed his joy at seeing her 'once more dressed like a Christian lady, and not in the loose and slatternly robes she had so long ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... them—great event which was to take place so soon. Noll overheard one old fish-wife say, "We ben't slick 'nough for new housen; ther'll hev to be great scrubbin' an' scourin' that day, eh, Janet?" to her slatternly daughter-in-law; and the boy mentally prayed that this opinion would gain ground among all the fish-folk. If there was only some one to teach the children, and save them from the utter ignorance which was their parents', ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... morning to night on days not made sacred by the use of the carriage. Now Lotta Luxa was clean in the midst of her work; and one would have thought that the cleanliness of the maid would have shamed the slatternly ways of the mistress. But Madame Zamenoy and Lotta Luxa had lived together long, and probably knew ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope
... brutes of burden. If I had seen in one of those mills (but I did not, though I looked for something of this kind with a sharp eye), the most lisping, mincing, affected, and ridiculous young creature that my imagination could suggest, I should have thought of the careless, moping, slatternly, degraded, dull reverse (I HAVE seen that), and should have been still well pleased to ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... when I arrived at the house. A slatternly, sulky woman opened the door to me. "Oh! I suppose you're another doctor," she muttered, staring at me with scowling eyes. "I wish you were the undertaker, to get her out of my house before we all catch our deaths of her! There! there's the other doctor coming ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... to confab and badger about the old days. She had casually learned that Landy had had to work as a boy, as a youth, and as a young man, that he had accumulated enough so that he could now enjoy the play-days once denied him. Yes, she would change her notes to say: "uncouth verbiage and slatternly dress are often assets in gaining information and are no hindrance in ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... you may take care to be extremely well dressed; that is, as the fashionable people are; this does by no means consist in the finery, but in the taste, fitness, and manner of wearing your clothes; a fine suit ill-made, and slatternly or stiffly worn, far from adorning, only exposes the awkwardness of the wearer. Get the best French tailor to make your clothes, whatever they are, in the fashion, and to fit you: and then wear them, button them, or unbutton them, as the genteelest people ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... ruinous old houses, and startle me by a gaze of wonder or some unintelligible speech addressed to herself. Probably a human being had not been seen in that vicinity for the last month. Sometimes a slatternly servant-girl would appear in the distance, her dress bedraggled with slops, a tub of water on the pavement close by, and a long-handled mop in her hand, with which she seemed to be vigorously engaged in scrubbing the green slime and ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... which she stood was small and cheerless; but it was all they could afford. Bridget frankly hated the ugliness and bareness of it; hated the dingy hotel, and the slatternly servants, hated the boredom of the long waiting for news to which apparently she was to be committed, if she stayed on with Nelly. She clearly saw that public opinion would expect her to stay on. And indeed she was not without some natural pity for her younger sister. There were moments when ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to remark in how many people there is too much resignation. It kills out energy. It is a weak, fretful, unhappy thing. People are reconciled, in a sad sort of way, to the fashion in which things go on. You have seen a poor, slatternly mother, in a way-side cottage, who has observed her little children playing in the road before it, in the way of passing carriages, angrily ordering the little things to come away from their dangerous and dirty play; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... and preserved as diligently and as deftly as if she had never demonstrated a problem in Euclid or heard of Sophocles. In what way had women become unfitted for their sphere by a liberal education? In no way whatever. If some highly educated women are inefficient housekeepers, and slatternly in their persons, so also are many who neither know how to read nor write; just as there are many impracticable, inefficient, and slovenly men who are highly educated, and ignorant men who are also incompetent ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... and had children; but Mrs. Ellerby never went into their cottages, and the shepherd and his wife concluded that it was because in both cases the children were rather puny, sickly-looking little things and were never very clean. The carter's wife, too, was a slatternly woman. One day when Mrs. Ellerby came in to see Mrs. Bawcombe the carter's wife was just going out of the door, and Mrs. Ellerby appeared displeased, and before leaving she said, "I hope, Mrs. Bawcombe, you are not going to mix too freely with your neighbours or ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... at him blankly. She had the feeling that her father was so remote from her that she could hardly see him. She opened her lips to speak, but at that moment the maid—the latest acquisition from the employment agency, a slatternly Irish girl—went through the dining-room on her way to answer the door-bell, and her father's amused comment cut her short. "Lydia, you'll have your guests thinking they're at a lunch counter if you let that girl go on wearing that ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... too, understands the use of the "comforter," for should it roll in the dirty gutter she promptly returns it to its proper place, the baby's mouth. Untidy, slatternly girls, not over-clean, not over-dressed, and certainly not over-fed, we leave them to their ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... New York, where it had been meant to open a physician's office. Only thirteen years old when she left school, she had but little aid beside a steady purpose in preparing for her career. We hear of her slatternly habits; but who would ever guess them, who remembers the quiet, tasteful ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... he came, and after looking at the man's face, changed his tone, quickly enough. The early bird, who had picked up this fine worm, was sent off for a doctor, and the policeman rang and knocked at the door till a slatternly servant girl came down looking more than half asleep. The constable pointed out the contents of the area to the maid, who screamed loudly enough to wake up the street, but she knew nothing of the man; had never seen him at the house, and so forth. Meanwhile the original discoverer had come ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... the boarding-house bell was answered by a rather slatternly maid, who informed the visitor that she guessed Mr. Pearson was in; he 'most always was around lunch time. So Captain Elisha waited in a typical boarding-house parlor, before a grate with no fire in it and surrounded by walnut ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... and the house will still smell fusty and unwholesome. In any case, there must be a cleanly woman to superintend the affairs of the house; and she cannot be made so by Act of Parliament! The Sanitary Commissioners cannot, by any "Notification," convert the slatternly shrew into a tidy housewife, nor the disorderly drunkard into an industrious, home-loving husband. There must, therefore, be individual effort on the part of the housewife in every working man's Home. As a recent writer ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... dogs sniffing at heaps of refuse, a group of tethered horses shivering under thin blankets in the hotel shed, a battered jitney or two stalled before shop and saloon. A Chinaman with a huge bundle upon his head, a slatternly woman brushing the dry, powdered snow from the path, a tawdry one pattering along, her rouged face pitiful in the clear merciless light; red-shirted miners crawling like ants to the yawning shaft-mouths half way up the mountainside.—This was Topaz Gulch on a certain ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... edge of the 'pike, with its gate-pole ready to be lowered by a rope, looking like any other toll place. But the woman was very brisk and Yankee-like, and different from the many slatternly persons who had before taken toll. She said her people came from "down East," but she herself was born in Ohio. She thought the old lady would like a cup of strong tea, and her dinner was just ready, and it did get lonesome eating by a ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... complexion, who showed a most unwelcome curiosity in his customer. As a last fatality, he wore a peaked cap like my own, and turned out to be an ex-sailor. I should have fled at the sight of him had I had the chance, but I was attended to first by a slatternly girl who, I am sure, called him up to view me. To explain my muddy boots and trousers I said I had walked from Esens, and from that I found myself involved in a tangle of impromptu lies. Floundering down an ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... it was not very gay, that life of hers, when one had to rustle for two, cook and work and wash, to say nothing of paying the rent. What odds was it if she was slatternly, dirty, coarse? Was there time to make herself look otherwise, and who was there to be pleased when she was all prinked out? Surely not a great brute of a husband who bit you like a dog, and kicked and pounded you ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... dark and narrow street. Flakes of plaster had fallen from their blank walls, the archways that pierced them were foul and strewn with refuse, and a sour smell of decay and garbage tainted the stagnant air. Here and there a grossly fat, slatternly woman leaned upon the rails of an outside balcony; negroes, Chinamen, and half-breeds passed along the broken pavements; and the dirty, open-fronted wine-shops, where swarms of flies hovered about the tables, were filled with loungers of different ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... went to the window. Logan took a chair. Sam was sitting disconsolately in a corner. It was hard to say to what class of people the house belonged; poor people they were of course; and things looked as if they were simply living there because too poor to live anywhere else. A slatternly woman stared at the intruders; a dirty child crawled over the hearth. Daisy could not endure to touch anything, except with the soles of her shoes. So she stood upright in the middle of the floor; ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... Mrs. Hilary cast her eye about the room at the word, as if she had seen quite enough of it already, and this made Louise laugh again. She was no better in person than the room was, and she felt her mother's tacit censure apply to her slatternly dressing-gown. ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... was a confession of weakness. What was Mrs. Verstage to do? She had three visitors, real gentlemen, in the house. They must be made comfortable; and the new servant, Polly, according to her notion, was a hopeless creature, slatternly, ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... Breakfast over and the bill settled, we speedily shook off as much of the dust of Mrs. Duddy's hotel as could be shaken off, and departed on the most decrepit sidecar that ever rolled on two wheels, being wished a safe journey by a slatternly maid who stood in the doorway, by the wide Mrs. Duddy herself, who realised in her capacious person the picturesque Irish phrase, 'the full-of-the-door of a woman,' and by our friend the head waiter, ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... morning, and leave on the hearth stone a piece of money as a reward behind them. But should the house be dirty, never would the Fairies enter it to hold their nightly revels, unless, forsooth, they came to punish the slatternly servant. Such was the popular opinion, and it must have acted as an incentive to order and cleanliness. These ideas ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... that he could leave the dock early, he made another effort. He stopped before one in a dingy row of small houses, uniformly depressing, in a street that ran into the Commercial Road, and rang the bell, which tinkled aggressively. A slatternly woman, with a bandage round her head and an air of drunken servility, responded to his inquiry for "Mrs. Crichton" by ushering him into a small back parlour, in which a pale girl in black sat with her head bent over a typewriter. She rose, as he came in, a little nervously, and stood, her thin ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... this epigram, as characteristic of the American point of view, than its author intended or would, perhaps, allow. In private life this is seen in the preference shown for diamond earrings and Paris toilettes over neat and effective household service. The contrast between the slatternly, unkempt maid-servant who opens the door to you and the general luxury of the house itself is sometimes of the most startling, not to say appalling, description. It is not a sufficient answer to say that good servants are not so easily obtained in America as ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... the civic museum, entrusted, just now, to the care of a quite remarkably ignorant and slatternly woman. It contains two rooms, whose exhibits are smothered in dust and cobwebs; as neglected, in short, as her own brats that sprawl about its floor. I enquired whether she possessed no catalogue to show where the objects, bearing no labels, had been found. A catalogue was unnecessary, ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... it's rough, but it's clean. We could promise you a clean pan, sir. My missus she's a good one for cleaning; she's not one of them slatternly, good-for-nothing lasses. There's heaps of them here, sir, idling away their time. She's a good girl is my Polly. Why, if that isn't little John a-clambering up the ...
— Christie, the King's Servant • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... still clinging to her hanging udders, and left her only that she might prepare herself for the fight. The old animal merely yawned loudly,—in a man it would be called a laugh,—a yawn that declared her delight in robbery, and with her slatternly tail beat her lean, hollow sides. The mare, seeing that her foe was in no hurry for the combat, came nearer, bowed her head to the earth, and in this manner stepped slowly forward, sniffing at the enemy; when the wolf seemed in the act of springing on her neck she suddenly turned, ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... business. As usual her business was important and imperative; nothing was lightened for her this last day. She drove about from place to place in the hot, slatternly city, putting more than her usual vigour and directness into all she did. It seemed to her that the sunlight burning on the tiles, pouring through the crowded streets, had more than ever a vivid note; and so much spoke to her, came to her, from the profuse and ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... whose unsteady hand would give them a feast to-day and a famine to-morrow. There is deep satisfaction in cooperating with such families to conquer difficulties. There is a deeper satisfaction, however, in turning a sham home into a real one; in teaching the slatternly, irresponsible mother the pleasure of a cleanly, well-ordered home; in helping a man who has lost his sense of responsibility toward wife and children to regain it. Even at the risk of drawing a too gloomy picture, I dwell in this chapter, therefore, ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... himself before the other, and prepared to launch out concerning the futility of life in the Foreign Office; but Constance at that moment interposed to say that tea was waiting. She had herself taken the tea-things from the general servant, who had brought them to the door, and was a slatternly girl, ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... straight from a council school where domestic economy had no place in the curriculum, and from a home in name only. Such an one is usually slatternly and careless in all her ways, has no idea of personal cleanliness, and regards her "mistress" as, more or less, her natural enemy! She is "in service" only under compulsion, and envies those of her schoolmates whose more fortunate circumstances have enabled them to become "young ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... had regarded Mr. Barholm with a spice of disfavor, still could not look with ill-nature upon this pretty girl. The slatternly women nudged each other as she passed, and the playing children stared after their usual fashion; but even the hardest-natured matron could find nothing more condemnatory to say than, "Hoo's noan Lancashire, that's plain as th' nose on a body's face;" or, "Theer is na much on her, at ony rate. Hoo's ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... untidy street, strewn with the refuse from the market waggons and trucks which blocked the way, making all but pedestrian traffic an impossibility—at the piles of empty baskets in the gutter, and the slatternly crowd of loiterers. Then she looked up at ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was opened to Malcolm's knock by a slatternly charwoman, who, unable to understand a word he said, would, but for its fine frank expression, have shut the door in his face. From the expression of hers, however, Malcolm suddenly remembered that he must speak English, and having a plentiful store ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... he will close with us in disdain, and say:—The worthy Socrates asked a little boy, whether the same man could remember and not know the same thing, and the boy said No, because he was frightened, and could not see what was coming, and then Socrates made fun of poor me. The truth is, O slatternly Socrates, that when you ask questions about any assertion of mine, and the person asked is found tripping, if he has answered as I should have answered, then I am refuted, but if he answers something else, then he is refuted and not I. For do you really suppose that any one would admit the memory ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... swept away, for the detachment was composed of about fifty unhappy, thin-looking men in white flannel jackets, sitting about or leaning over the bulwarks, smoking and watching the dock quay where stood a group of slatternly-looking women, staring wearily at the ship; and now and then one of them would wave a hand or a handkerchief to the men in white flannel, a salute as often as not evoking no response, though sometimes a ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... to be a small, slatternly-looking craft, her hull and spars a dingy black, rigging all slack and bleached nearly white, and everything denoting an ill state of affairs aboard. The four boats hanging from her sides proclaimed her a whaler. ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... was a full one, not military, wearing a slatternly sort of uniform but playing well enough as they came up through the thickening dusk, marching close to the eastern curb of ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... "lived like pigs," and their appearance and surroundings justified her mother's repugnance to that form of existence. They were mostly cousins, who inhabited dingy houses with engravings from Cole's Voyage of Life on the drawing-room walls, and slatternly parlour-maids who said "I'll go and see" to visitors calling at an hour when all right-minded persons are conventionally if not actually out. The disgusting part of it was that many of these cousins were rich, ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... state—some scutcheon, some holy or courageous motto, on the lintel. The local antiquary points out where famous and well-born people had their lodging; and as you look up, out pops the head of a slatternly woman from the countess's window. The Bedouins camp within Pharaoh's palace walls, and the old war-ship is given over to the rats. We are already a far way from the days when powdered heads were plentiful in these alleys, with jolly, port-wine faces underneath. Even in the chief ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... made shift to afford better quarters, perhaps, but it was to my original lodging in Bloomsbury that I drove from Waterloo. Some few belongings of mine were there, and I entertained a friendly sort of feeling for my good-hearted but slatternly landlady, and for poor, overworked Bessie, with her broad, generally smutty face, and lingering remains of a Dorset accent. The part of London with which I was familiar had resumed its normal aspect now, and people were going about their ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... slatternly women, but warm-hearted; and when I had managed to arouse the gentleman in khaki and hoist him to his feet (for the cause of his indisposition was plain—and he had slept it off) they called down blessings on ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... barren of grace and variety is just because these fine qualities have not ruled them. The higher graces of civilization halt among us; dainty and finished ways of living give place to common ways, while vulgar tastes, slatternly habits, clouds and despondency reign in the house. Little children under five years of age die in needless thousands because of the dull, unimaginative women on whom they depend. Such women have been satisfied with just getting along, instead of packing everything ...
— Why go to College? an Address • Alice Freeman Palmer
... to Mistress Waynflete that a woman who broke her arm at the church door was a housewifely maiden who became a slatternly housewife after marriage. "There's no fear of Jane doing that," she replied; "she's as good as the guineas she ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... unwomanly, and repugnant to female delicacy and refinement, for a woman to ink the ends of her fingers in handling a pen; for a woman to be what was derisively called a "blue-stocking," or a literary woman. It was thought that nothing but pedantry, nothing but slatternly habits and neglected housekeeping, could come of it. But who would be willing to banish from the literary world to-day such names as Browning, Hemans, Stowe, and Gage? And if I were to fill out the catalogue of names, I might close my speech at the end of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... kingdom. In one place, the Mayers went out very early to the woods, and gathering green boughs, decorated every door with one. A house containing a sweetheart had a branch of birch, the door of a scold was disgraced with alder, and a slatternly person had the mortification to find a branch of a nut-tree at hers, while the young people who overslept found their doors closed by ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... where she sat looking curiously, apathetically at him; her gray hair straggling down on her dirty cotton frock open at the neck over shrivelled yellow skin; soiled old hands hanging carelessly over slatternly garments; stockingless feet stuck into a great tattered pair of men's shoes. Nothing seemed changed since he saw her last save that the hair had been black then, and the skin not so wrinkled. Aunt Sally had been good natured always, ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... offset the flashy supercilious lessons which the city teaches hers; for the city is a careless nurse and teacher, who thinks more of the cut of a coat than of the habit of mind; who feeds her children on colored candy and popcorn, despising the more wholesome porridge and milk; a slatternly nurse, who would rather buy perfume than soap; who allows her children to powder their necks instead of washing them; who decks them out in imitation lace collars, and cheap jewelry, with bows on their hair, but holes in their stockings; who dazzles their ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... yet the heat and heaviness of the night—it was July—prevented me freeing myself as rapidly as I should otherwise have done from the squalid and disagreeable avenues in which I had got entangled. I was just pausing to enquire my way of a slatternly-looking woman, who stood considerably in front of the door of a dirty-looking house in one of the dirtiest lanes I had yet explored, and who, with an apron thrown round her shoulders, to supply, it seemed to me, the absence of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... very near together, and our young adventurer tried the next one. It was quickly opened, and a very slatternly young woman appeared to him with a baby in her arms, and three almost babies hanging to various portions ...
— Three People • Pansy
... landlady, and a famous cook. Kate Kebble, a slatternly girl of sixteen, helped her mother do the work and waited on the table. Chet Kebble, the landlord, was a silent old man, with billy-goat whiskers and one stray eye, which, being constructed of glass, ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... were other landladies—landladies fat and German; landladies lean and Irish; landladies loquacious (regardless of nationality); landladies reserved; landladies husbandless, wedded, widowed, divorced, and willing; landladies slatternly; landladies prim; and all hinting of past estates wherein there had been ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... band-box, and considerably out of patience, is rolled away to the mansion of Sister Slocum, on Fourth Avenue. Instead of falling immediately into the arms and affections of that worthy and very enterprising lady, the door is opened by a slatternly maid of all work-her greasy dress, and hard, ruddy face and hands-her short, flabby figure, and her coarse, uncombed hair, giving out strong evidence of being overtaxed with labor. "Is it Mrs. Slocum hersel' ye'd be seein'?" ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... fish which he saw in the window. There were barrels of oysters, hecatombs of lobsters, a few tremendous-looking crabs, and a tub full of pickled salmon; not, however, being aware of any connection between shell-fish and iniquity, he entered, and modestly asked a slatternly woman, who was picking oysters out of a great watery reservoir, whether he could have a ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... not? The old woman at the lodge, who always piqued herself on being spiteful, and crying down new ways, foretold from the first she would come to no good, and could not forgive her for falsifying her prediction; and Betty Barnes, the slatternly widow of a tippling farmer, who rented a field, and set up a cow herself, and was universally discarded for insufferable dirt, said all that the wit of an envious woman could devise against Hannah and her Alderney; nay, even Ned Miles, the keeper, her next neighbour, ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... of the Kingfisher; but it also eats various kinds of insects, shrimps, and even small crabs. It rears its young in a hole, which is made in the banks of the stream it frequents. It is a slatternly bird, fouls its own nest and its peerless eggs. The nesting hole is bored rather slowly, and takes from one to two weeks to complete. Six or eight white glossy eggs are laid, sometimes on the bare soil, but often on the fish bones which, being indigestible, ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph, Volume 1, Number 2, February, 1897 • anonymous
... villages, but it does not by any means follow that because they are small the inhabitants are badly off. The condition they are found in depends entirely upon the disposition of the inmates. If they are slatternly and dirty, the largest cottages would not ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... the actual denizens! One gazed with a dull, wondering pity at the poor, pale, rickety children; the slatternly, coarse women who never smiled (except when drunk); the dull, morose, miserable men. How they lacked the grace of French deformity, the ease and lightness of French depravity, the sympathetic distinction ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... newcomer took a survey of the labors of a family of ten members, including four or five young children, and, looking, seemed at once to throw them into system, matured her plans, arranged her hours of washing, ironing, baking, cleaning, rose early, moved deftly, and in a single day the slatternly and littered kitchen assumed that neat, orderly appearance that so often strikes one in New England farmhouses. The work seemed to be all gone. Everything was nicely washed, brightened, put in place, and stayed in place: the floors, when cleaned, remained clean; the work was always done, and not ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... doesn't care to go without you. You wouldn't have her like one of those slatternly women you see standing at the corners, with their fists in their sides and their elbows sticking out, ready to talk to anybody that ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... it would be for you to conceive, even if I could describe, the careless desolation which pervaded the whole place; the shaggy unkempt grounds we passed through to approach the house; the ruinous, rackrent, tumble-down house itself, the untidy, slatternly all but beggarly appearance of the mistress of the mansion herself. The smallest Yankee farmer has a tidier estate, a tidier house, and a tidier wife than this member of the proud southern chivalry, who, however, inasmuch as he has slaves, is undoubtedly ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... dust-devils, ankle-deep in desert drift—prototype of Berber in a sandstorm—as comfortless by night as day. But as in nature, so in the handiwork of men, even in the most repulsive shapes it is possible to find some saving feature. De Aar has one—one only. Its saving feature is where a slatternly Jew boy plays host behind the bar of a fly-ridden buffet. Here at prices which, except that it is a campaign, would be prohibitive, you can purchase ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... occupying a very plain and shabby little house, in a contiguous range of others like it, with no prospect but that of an ugly village-street, and certainly nothing to gratify his craving for a tasteful environment, inside or out. A slatternly maid-servant opened the door for us, and he himself stood in the entry, a beautiful and venerable old man, buttoned to the chin in a black dress-coat, tall and slender, with a countenance quietly alive all over, and the gentlest and most naturally courteous manner. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... France!" They waved flags—not the tri-colour, but flags which had been given them in Switzerland. They clung together dazed, women with slatternly dresses, children with peaked faces, men unhappy and unshaven. A woman caught sight of my uniform. "Vive l'Angleterre," she cried, and they all came stumbling forward to embrace me. It was horrible. They creaked like ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... with complacency that the landlord saw his house given over to the destructive caprices of a drunken and uncontrollable mob. He had no means of freeing himself of his guests. When his slatternly wife had complained: "Them miners an' loggers jest louzes up a body's house," he had wagged his head dejectedly and spread his great black-nailed hands. "If that's ther wu'st thing they does hit'll be a plum God's blessin'," he replied. "Ther law p'intedly fo'ces a tavern-keeper ter sleep ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... slatternly maid servant, who drew up the lower corner of her apron crosswise to disguise its dirt, but openly and unashamed, and only to uncover a dress underneath that was quite ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... kissed each other good-by, Alva on the verge of tears, Anita not suggesting any emotion of any sort. "To-morrow—sure," Anita said to her. And she answered: "Yes, indeed—as soon as you telephone me." And so we were off, a shower of rice rattling on the roof of the brougham—the slatternly man-servant had thrown it from the midst of the group ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... with the minimum amount of inconvenience to myself that his circumstances allow. Many folks make what they are pleased to call unconventionality a mere cloak for selfish disregard of the feelings and tastes of others. Bohemianism too often means piggish sloth or slatternly ineptitude. ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... there he almost groaned. One was desolate, deserted, the door swinging from one hinge, the chimney fallen, every paling of the fence gone and the roof of the little barn caved in. Smoke was coming from Steve Hawn's chimney, and in the porch were two or three slatternly negro women. The boy knew the low, sinister meaning of their presence on public works; and these blacks ate, slept, and plied their trade in the home of Mavis Hawn! All the old rebellion and rage of his early years came back to him ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... wife sat in her carriage before this wretched little home and watched that slatternly sister of her husband approach, she rose on a wave of self-appreciation. Haney lost in dignity and power by this association. For the first time in her life the girl acknowledged a fixed difference ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... the old chaise; the heaving horse wheezed as the stern parson gave his loins a thwack with the slackened reins and urged him down the turnpike which led away through the ill-kept fields, from the rambling, slatternly town. Stone walls that had borne the upheaval of twenty winters reeled beside the way. Broad scars of ochreous earth, from which the turnpike-menders had dug material to patch the wheel-track, showed ooze of yellow mud with honeycombs of ice rimming their edges, and supporting a thin film ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... part of the road leading to destruction: but the landlord had some hazy notion on that point. He sat there day and night, and saw the destruction going on. He saw the blear-eyed, fuddled men that came to drown conscience in his stalls, and the slatternly women who came and went. Nevertheless he was a rosy, jocund fellow who appeared to have a good deal of the milk of human kindness about him, and would have looked on you with great surprise, if not scorn, had you told him that he had a hand in murdering souls. Yes! the Red Lion might ...
— Sunk at Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... or harbour, which runs parallel with the sea. A black stain was the hull of a great steamer lying on her side in the mud, but the tapering masts of yachts were beautiful on the sky, and at the end of a row of slatternly houses there were sometimes spars and rigging so strange and bygone that they suggested Drake and the ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... street had apparently at one time been one of some pretensions, but had now fallen upon evil days and become the abode of a number of petty tradesmen, such as cobblers, sellers of fruit and cheap drinks, dealers in second-hand goods of every description, and riffraff generally. It swarmed with dirty, slatternly women, still dirtier half-naked children, lean and hungry-looking dogs, and lazy, hulking men with brass ear-rings in their ears, the rags of tawdry finery upon their bodies, and their sashes perfect batteries ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... De Vac paced the length of this black alley in search of the little doorway of the building he sought. At length he came upon it, and, after repeated pounding with the pommel of his sword, it was opened by a slatternly ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... only just been opened, and was being dusted and swept by two slatternly women with dago complexions, and voices like hyenas. It still reeked of stale ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... that of a slatternly woman of middle age, thin and complaining. She had come suddenly into the kitchen of the Hoover farmhouse and surprised Bessie King as the girl sat resting for a moment ...
— A Campfire Girl's First Council Fire - The Camp Fire Girls In the Woods • Jane L. Stewart
... performing the morning duties of her household may wear a plain loose dress, made high in the neck, and with long sleeves fastened at the wrist. It must not look slatternly, and may be exceedingly beautiful ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... to swell the ranks of the rioters; another half—slatternly women and unkempt children—swarmed in the single street and gazed upward at the heights. Every ledge about the threatened buildings was black with men, men furious with hate and mad with liquor, men needing only determined and resolute leaders ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... deficiency. The laboring man marries; but he marries a woman who can add nothing to the comfort of his home; she supplies him with more mouths to feed, and she spoils that which is to be put into them; she becomes slatternly, feels her own incapacity, and, finding that she can do but little of her duty, soon leaves off trying to do it at all. As her family increases the discomforts of her home increase, and the end is frequently—drunkenness, violence, and appeals to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... marriage gradually reveals himself to be hopelessly selfish, or develops a craving for brandy, or becomes merely brutal and ill-tempered; or whether it is the creature of all angelic gifts and graces who, after her marriage, destroys the romance of domestic life by her slatternly ways, or sinks into the condition of a confirmed sigher, or in time discovers to her husband that he has married a woman comprising in herself, to use the American phrase, nine distinct sorts of a born fool. These discoveries ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... woman with black beady eyes and a red nose, speaking in a sharp voice and rushing up to a pretty slatternly woman in a straw bonnet with a dirty fine ribbon, and a babe at her breast; "you know the person ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... had just paid her for the straw we thought this was going a little too far, and F——, who had a fine taste for sarcasm, waved his coffee-cup eloquently in the direction of the two slatternly girls that were peddling the coffee to the soldiers through the window, and said "What? With all these beautiful daughters," and then continued with a graphic description of ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry
... The news of the landlord's visit had spread from cottage to cottage, awakening a mild excitement throughout the length of the row. The women showed themselves on the steps or on the sidewalks, very slatternly, without corsets, their hair coming down, dressed in faded calico wrappers just as they had come from the laundry tubs or the cook-stove. They bethought them of their various grievances, a leak here, a broken door-bell there, ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... sometimes by steep lanes, sometimes up long flights of stone steps, brought her to the upper road leading to the Moorish castle. This was essentially a native quarter; Spanish was the only language heard from the children who swarmed about the doorways, or their slatternly mothers quarreling over their washtubs, or combing out and cleansing, in a manner that will not bear description, their children's hair. Spanish colour prevailed, ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... or Twenty-sixth. Always the same rows of red-brick or brownstone houses, all alike, the monotony broken only by infrequent warehouses or loft-buildings; always the same doubtful mounting of stone steps, the same searching for a bell, the same waiting, the same slatternly, suspicious landlady, the same evil hallway with a brown hat-rack, a steel-engraving with one corner stained with yellow, a carpet worn through to the flooring in a large oval hole just in front of the stairs, a smell of cabbage, a lack of ventilation. Always the same desire to escape, though ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... by a slatternly servant, who looked at him inquiringly, and not without curiosity. It must be remembered that Dick was well dressed, and that nothing in his appearance bespoke his occupation. Being naturally a good-looking boy, he might readily be mistaken for ...
— Ragged Dick - Or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks • Horatio Alger
... found himself before a certain door and, remembering its faulty catch, tried it but found it fast. Therefore he knocked, softly at first, but louder and louder until at length the door was plucked suddenly open and a woman appeared, a slatternly creature who bore a ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... to the back door of the house and knocked, and in a few minutes it was opened by a thin-faced, slatternly-looking woman. ...
— Bart Stirling's Road to Success - Or; The Young Express Agent • Allen Chapman
... thieves, versatile rascals ripe for any mischief, and sweated factory workers; here sallow-faced anarchists boldly denounce the existing order of things to their fellows and scheme the millennium. Slatternly women quarrel at the doors, and horse-flesh is ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... Abwees sat about the board of a lumbermen's hotel, filled with house-flies and slatternly waiter-girls, who talked familiarly while they served greasy food. The Abwees were yet sore in their minds at the thoughts of the smelly beds up-stairs, and discouragement sat deeply on their souls. But ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... moving backwards, had now got nearly to the scullery door with her wringing and splashing and wiping; and she had dirtied even her face. As Hilda absently looked at her, she thought somehow of Mr. Cannon's white wristbands. She saw the washing and the ironing of those wristbands, and a slatternly woman or two sighing and grumbling amid wreaths of steam, and a background of cinders and suds and sloppiness.... All that, so that the grand creature might have a rim of pure white to his coat-sleeves for ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... that lay at one side of the hearth. She was a big, brawny, elderly woman with large bony hands, and a face that had hard and heavy features, which were dotted here and there with discolored warts. Her dress was slatternly and somewhat dirty. A soiled linen cap covered a mop of streaky hair, ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... The theatres are all full, but not full of the sort of people who demand excellence. Perhaps it would be unfair to judge the opera by a performance of "Parsifal," that heavily over-dressed story of sentimental religiosity and pedestrian symbolism, but it was done in the most slatternly perfunctory style. The theatre was crowded. But it was a strangely mixed crowd. In lonely grandeur in one of the boxes were three Englishmen in evening dress. In the fifth row of the stalls was a servant-girl who kept asking her neighbours the ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... some old church or parish, or even cathedral, library nowadays may afford a notion of the external aspect of the early book-closet of the English student or amateur. The glass case is conspicuously absent; the shelf on which the volumes are ranged has to our eyes a ragged, slatternly look; and nothing can well be more opposite to modern taste. Yet the feeling for the printed matter between the two covers or behind the paper label was more genuine, may be, and more practical when a handful of volumes, reflecting the personal predilections or requirements ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... houses slatternly or idle would I have given thee, distaff, seeing that thou art a countryman of mine. For that is thy native city which Archias out of Ephyre founded, long ago, the very marrow of the isle of the three capes, a town of honourable men. {153} But now shalt thou abide in the house of a ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... Sally grew slatternly with increasing maternity. She spent her time in a rocking-chair, dipping snuff—a consolation imported from her former home—and lamenting the bad marriage she had made. Rodney ascribed his ill-fortune to unjust neighborly criticism. He farmed a ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... wizened, cadaverous hags with sunken mouths and noses like the beak of a bird of prey; shamefaced female mendicants, their wrinkled chins bristling with hair, their gaze half ironical and half shy; young women, thin and emaciated, slatternly and filthy; and all, young and old alike, clad in threadbare garments that had been mended, patched and turned inside out until there wasn't a square inch that had been left untouched. The green, olive-coloured cloaks and the drab city ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... new mistress of Mellor over matters which, according to her, had been settled generations ago by "the Lord and natur'," Marcella certainly was in no mood to contradict her. She walked through the village on her return scanning everything about her—the slatternly girls plaiting on the doorsteps, the children in the lane, the loungers round the various "publics," the labourers, old and young, who touched their caps to her—with a moody ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Circus he paused awhile, breathing deep and filling out his lungs with fragrance of violets and narcissi, which flower-girls clamoured for him to purchase. He bought a bunch and smiled faintly, contrasting the beautiful significance of the name of the vendor's profession with the slatternly person to whom it was applied. Then onwards he went to Leicester Square where the dazzling lights of music-halls flared and quickened, and scarlet-lipped Folly smiled out upon him from street corners, and beckoned through ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... against whalemen, and which, in the estimation of some already biased minds, might be considered as indirectly substantiated by what has been said of the Frenchman's two whales. Elsewhere in this volume the slanderous aspersion has been disproved, that the vocation of whaling is throughout a slatternly, untidy business. But there is another thing to rebut. They hint that all whales always smell bad. Now how ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... It was a rambling, dilapidated, two-story structure, sadly in need of paint and repairs, and bespeaking occupancy by a family none too well blessed with the better things of existence. They proceeded to the door and rang the bell. A slatternly woman answered their ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... dreary little repast, wondering how I should get through the day, and speculating upon the possibility of my release before nightfall, and I had just concluded that I must make up my mind to face another night with the mosquitos and their hardy allies, when, to my great joy, a slatternly serving-maid came lolloping into the room, and announced that a gentleman styling himself "il Conte di Rosenau" had arrived and demanded to see me instantly. Here was a piece of unlooked-for good fortune! I jumped up, and flew to the door to receive my friend, ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... time accordin' to popular opinion a suffragist wuz a slatternly woman with uncombed locks, dangling shoe strings, and bloomers, stridin' through an unswept house onmindful of dirty children or hungry husband, but the world moves onward and public opinion with it. Suffragists are the best mothers, the best housekeepers, the best ...
— Samantha on the Woman Question • Marietta Holley
... Unnoticed by either the Irishman or Waymark, the door had opened behind them, and there had appeared a little red-faced woman, in slatternly dress. It was Mrs. Tootle. She had overheard almost the whole of O'Gree's vivid comment upon his graphic illustration, in silence, until at length she could hold her peace no longer, and gave utterance ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing |
