"Frowsy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... once shining and immaculate kitchen a frowsy head protruded, "Four we should get," whined a nasal voice "it is only that it is on the top floor that we can ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... know much more about the machinery of commerce to-day than I did six weeks ago, and there are a good many men like me—we discovered the machinery of commerce was moved by bills of exchange. I have seen some of them—wretched, crinkled, scrawled over, blotched, frowsy, and yet these wretched little scraps of paper moved great ships, laden with thousands of tons of precious cargo, from one end of the world to the other. What was the motive power behind them? The honour of ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... marshes that had come to have such a charm for us. Evidently, they were beginning to feel that the year was growing old. Greens were sobering into browns, and near the water's edge were tips of silvery white. The frowsy-looking grassy bunches, here and there, were ducking blinds, where hunters soon would be in hiding with their ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... officer whom the messenger saluted as his superior was bare-headed, having evidently just risen from the ground where his rubber cloth and blanket still lay. His dress was wet and begrimed with mud; his hair was frowsy, lying in ropy tangles upon his head and hanging over his brows; and his face was haggard with anxiety and suffering. It was Brigadier-General ——; and here in this solitary wilderness had actually been his bivouac, in company with a few of his staff. Taking what was ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood
... began to think that for once the game would be against me and that I should get to school late. I tried rather desperately a street that seemed a cul de sac, and found a passage at the end. I hurried through that with renewed hope. 'I shall do it yet,' I said, and passed a row of frowsy little shops that were inexplicably familiar to me, and behold! there was my long white wall and the green door that led ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... looked anaemic and consumptive, but the majority were highly coloured and frankly drunk. And if the men were forbidding, the women were appalling. There was no attempt at smartness in their attire; they were dowdy and frowsy, and even the young faces ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... sir; no doubt of it," declared John Ross without a moment's hesitation, while Tom Meeks nodded his frowsy head energetically. ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... book of sketches—'The Imported Bride groom'—confirms. He sees his people humorously, and he is as unsparing of their sordidness as he is compassionate of their hard circumstance and the somewhat frowsy pathos of their lives. He is a Socialist, but his fiction is wholly ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... frowsy street filled with frowsy women and frowsy children. She scowled upon the street cars rumbling by with their frowsy loads. Occasionally she varied the monotony by drawing out her chewing gum to wondrous lengths, holding ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... exclaimed. 'I'm due to go today, but the grouse up in Caithness wanted shootin' so badly that I decided to wangle another day's leave. They can't expect a man to start for the south of England when he's just off a frowsy journey.' ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... two children, picked up his dinner pail and was off. Lydia, her red cheeks redder than usual, smiled at Lizzie, as she dropped the pennies into the pocket of her blouse and stuffed a gray and frowsy little handkerchief on ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... reeking with bad odors, but where the people are industrious and money-getting. In the daytime, as you make your way along the narrow streets, you see them all at work—upon the pavement, oftener than in their dark and frowsy shops; furbishing old clothes, and ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... Very slowly and tortuously do the methods of the profession adapt themselves to the modern conception of an army of devoted men working as a whole under God for the health of mankind as a whole, broadening out from the frowsy den of the "leech," with its crocodile and bottles and hieroglyphic prescriptions, to a skilled and illuminating co-operation with those who deal with the food and housing and economic life of ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... he had not, at a sharp turn in the road, come suddenly upon a horse and cab. The horse was fast asleep when Davy dashed against him, but he woke up with a start, and, after whistling like a locomotive once or twice in a very alarming manner, went to sleep again. He was a very frowsy-looking horse, with great lumps at his knees and a long, crooked neck like a camel's; but what attracted Davy's attention particularly was the word "RIBSY" painted in whitewash on his side in large letters. He was looking ...
— Davy and The Goblin - What Followed Reading 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' • Charles E. Carryl
... contemplative admiration meditating, as I waited for my coolies, who sat moodily under a dilapidated roadside awning, nonchalantly picking out mouldy monkey-nuts from some coarse sweetmeat sold by a frowsy female. Then upwards we toiled in the dark, the weird groans of my exhausted men and the falling of the gravel beneath their sandalled feet alone breaking the hollow's gloom. Uncanny is ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... the men sat up on their frowsy blankets. The thought of provisions seemed to have roused them from their lethargy. Buck's eyes wandered over the faces peering at him out of the murky shadows. The squalor of the hut was painful, and, with the knowledge that ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... sprung up that Mme. de Stael was too wise and witty to be acceptable to Napoleon; and many women repeated with unction that the conqueror of Europe was no match for this frowsy little woman. It is, perhaps, worth while to look into the facts, and to decide whether Napoleon was really of so petty a nature as to feel himself inferior to this rather comic creature, even though at the time many people thought ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... Let them! Amigo mio, I have a life. I have to think, gage, act, concentrate. And when I want time of my own, Shane, I have it. The housewife with her frowsy duties, being kissed perfunctorily on the mat, the man who wears a stilted mask to the world, and before her—lets go.... Ugh! And the mondaine with her boredom ... the hatred in wide houses.... Oh, I know. Sometimes I think ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... said she didn't want to be disturbed when she was readin'?" She indicated Grandmother by an inclination of her frowsy head. ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... other strange positions), which has not a smell familiar to man—that is to say, not one which has been recognised and described—yet seems to be readily "smelt" by the animals of its own kind. The bats—especially the large frugivorous bats—have a very unpleasant, frowsy smell. ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... the beds; those frowsy, creaky, prehistoric wooden concerns, always six or eight inches too short, whose mattresses have not been turned round since they were made. What happens? You clamber into such a receptacle and straightway roll downhill, down into its centre, into a kind of river-bed ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... grimed with the sediment of centuries, colored like old Stilton, and smelling much worse. But where is there another Cottage Grove avenue! Sylvan misnomer! A hideous street, and sordid. A street of flat-wheeled cars, of delicatessen shops and moving picture houses, of clanging bells, of frowsy women, of men who dart around corners with pitchers, their coat collars turned up to hide the absence of linen. One day Fanny found herself at Fifty-first street, and there before her lay Washington Park, with its gracious meadow, its Italian garden, its rose walk, its ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... landing which they were leaving behind them. All looked and saw the burly brute of a man slowly rise to a sitting posture, with his hat off and his frowsy hair in his eyes, as he stared confusedly after the launch speeding up ...
— The Launch Boys' Adventures in Northern Waters • Edward S. Ellis
... tram and the main thoroughfare, and turned into frowsy streets, peopled with frowsy men and women and raucous with the bickering play of frowsy children. It was still daylight. Over London the spring had fluttered its golden pinions, and I knew that ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... it cannot be supposed that such a trifle as the killing of a frowsy friar would be much resented, even had he not taken so bold a measure to obtain his pardon. His petition was granted, of course, as soon as asked; and so it would have been had the indictment drawn up by the Canterbury town-clerk, viz., "That he, the said Robert de Shurland, &c., ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... few days sauntering about Melbourne, swinging a neatly-rolled silk umbrella, smoking very excellent cigars. He passed several frowsy acquaintances of other days, and on two he bestowed small alms. He felt great satisfaction in the fact that none of his former companions recognised Nickie the Kid in the well-groomed, ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... the latter withdrew. The Forcuses were not even customers. Sir Francis and he sat on the magistrates' bench together. "We are on a par, about, now," he said to himself; and he reminded himself he also was now entitled to put a cockade on the frowsy hat of his coachman in the ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... almost empty, waited forlornly in a forlorn and empty part of the huge, resounding ochreish station. Then, without warning or signal, it slipped off, as though casually, towards an undetermined goal. Often it ran level with the roofs of vague, far-stretching acres of houses— houses vile and frowsy, and smoking like pyres in the dank air. And always it travelled on a platform of brick arches. Now and then the walled road received a tributary that rounded subtly into it, and this tributary could be seen curving away, on innumerable brick arches, through the chimneypots, ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... The Speaker and oblige him to placate in private a dozen puzzled and indignant correspondents. For those were days before the beards had stiffened on the chins of some of us who assembled to reform politics, art, literature, and the world in general from a somewhat frowsy upstairs coffee-room in C—' ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... on the same landing were now partly open and blocked with the heads of frowsy inquisitive women. The steamy smell was thicker in the darkness. Mr. Wrenn felt prickly, then angry at ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... a frowsy-haired man in a nightgown staring up from another window and yelling at the parrot. She drew ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... arrived home he found that Helen had been having her troubles, too. Mrs. Finn had disappointed her and sent a frowsy female, who exuded vile whisky and the unpleasant odors ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... clump of elms at the lane-end and watched the travellers. Hence, doubtless, my taste in fashionable head-gear, like this of mine, lately belonging to Swift Nicks, now disposed carefully on the table at my side. I would have wagered it against Joe Braggs' frowsy old milking-cap that the little man was ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... o'clock that morning—about the time that Jack awoke in Cambridge—John Harris, laborer, emerged, very sleepy and frowsy—for he had sat up late last night at the "Spotted Dog"—from the door of a small cottage on the Ely road, in the middle of Grunty Fen. He looked this way and that, wondering whether it were as late as his ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... Still—those frowsy, unlovely hordes of apes and monkeys were so completely lacking in signs of kingship; they were so flighty, too, in their ways, and had so little purpose, and so much love for absurd and idle chatter, that they would have struck us, we thought, as unlikely material. Such traits, ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... return, by telling me the addresses of some people I depended upon finding in Berlin. He proceeded, therefore, into the agonies of bargaining, and was not disappointed in his expectation. At the price of a dollar a-piece we were packed next morning in a frowsy vehicle, tainted with much tobacco-smoke, to which he came with his swollen feet pressed only half-way down into the legs of his best Wellingtons. The ride was long and dull, for there was little prospect to be caught through the small, dirty window; and the air tasted ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... inside the wineshop, where men reclined on frowsy couches. I stumbled over one of them, found an empty place and let myself sink down on it, arranging myself automatically in the sprawl of Dry-towners indoors. In public they stood, rigid and formal, even to eat and drink. Among themselves, anything less than a loose-limbed ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... setting, O'er the wheat fields far away, Streaking all the air with cobwebs At the close of one hot day; And the last rays kissed the forehead Of a man and maiden fair, He with whiskers short and frowsy, She with red and glistening hair, He with shut jaws stern and silent; She, with lips all cold and white, Struggled to keep back the murmur, "Towser ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... the windows open: and in the evening, on their way home, they had to force their way through crowds of bustling, evil-smelling people, cross the thronged and muddy streets, pass a horrible pothouse, that was on the ground floor of the next house, in the door of which there were always fat, frowsy women with yellow hair and ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... ears already ap-palled by the awful silence. Occasionally they scared up a brace of grouse that seemed half benumbed, and hopped about in a melancholy manner under the pines, or a magpie, drawing in its head and ruffling up its feathers against the cold, until it looked frowsy and disreputable. ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... after Nannie, like the cow, was corralled (and we may use this term without reproach, since she had been rampant all day), a small figure slipped from out the house and hastened to the garden. His little face, frowsy as is the manner of his breed, was uplifted, and his saucy little eyes gleamed with fire. He had probably observed that the peas were flourishing and that they were the one living result of Steve's heroic labors, unless perhaps ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... the office; what though the paint had faded and the varnish cracked all over the house! To Margaret Mueller and also to the eldest Miss Morton, who only managed to breathe below her locket when they were under the stars, it was a dream of marble halls, and the frowsy Freddie Kollander and the other waiter who brought in the food on thick, cracked oblong dishes were vassals and ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... stepped aboard the sloop again to reef down and make all taut. Her sailor-soul would not allow her to leave the lapstreak in a frowsy condition. ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... She raised a frowsy head from its pillow, put a dirty hand to her eyes to shade them from the sun entering the darkened room by the open door, smiled fatuously ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... of the dead pines was a large black bear, reared back on his haunches and striking with both paws viciously at some unseen foe. The hair of muzzle, head and paws was matted and plastered with some thick liquid, giving him a curious frowsy appearance. He was evidently in a towering rage but it was also apparent that he was suffering great pain, his ferocious growls being interspersed with long, low, ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... family on board, and the little entrance to the hidden cabin resembled a hole from which men, women, and children came like rabbits out of a burrow. Tough, hardy, barefooted children were everywhere. While we were looking, one frowsy-headed little girl popped up from her burrow in the boat, and, with legs and feet as red as a boiled lobster, ran along the guards like ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... before and many of the passengers were still sleepy-eyed after restless hours in their berths. A good many of them were at breakfast in the dining car, and as there was no parlor car Betty had to take half a section already occupied by a rather frowsy young woman with ...
— Betty Gordon in Washington • Alice B. Emerson
... at 2 a.m. I was awakened from frowsy sleep by a French soldier, laden with baggage, who stumbled headlong into the railway carriage which I was sharing with three other British officers. We were at Amiens. I was last here ten months before, when my Division was coming back from rest to fight a second time upon the ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... on, "I remembered it, too. And I waited for a glimpse of the robber's face. He stepped out, and the constable, with a comrade from inside the chaise, led him to where they hold prisoners for examination. He was all mud-stained, dishevelled, and frowsy: for two seconds, though he didn't notice me, I had a good view of him. And who do you think this ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... exactly propitious. The Dover Road was a byword for its charges; the Via Alba might have been paved with the silver wrung from reluctant and indignant passengers. Smollett characterized the chambers as cold and comfortless, the beds as "paultry" (with "frowsy," a favourite word), the cookery as execrable, wine poison, attendance bad, publicans insolent, and bills extortion, concluding with the grand climax that there was not a drop of tolerable malt liquor to be had from London to Dover. Smollett finds a ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... the other end of the hall, the sound of the scratching of a match. A light appeared under the door of the front room, the door opened a crack, and a frowsy head was thrust out, with a candle held high above it, and eyes that were full of sleep peering into the darkness ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... before a dressing glass, which was kept in position by a mangy hair brush thrust between the frame and its supports. Then, to the girl's wondering astonishment, the woman unpinned and took off her fair curls, revealing a mop of tangled, frowsy, colourless hair, which the wig had concealed. Next, she removed her sober, well-cut costume, also, her silk underskirt, to put on a much worn, greasy dressing-gown. Then, she pulled off her pretty shoes and silk stockings, to thrust her feet into worn slippers, through ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... fix'd on the far end of the room, where Anthony and the brute Settle stood, with a shattered chair between them. Their swords were cross'd in tierce, and grating together as each sought occasion for a lunge: which might have been fair enough but for a dog-fac'd trooper in a frowsy black periwig, who, as I enter'd, was gathering a handful of coins from under the fallen table, and now ran across, sword in hand, ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... was stolen from him. He was too drunk to know or to care. They say that he went from cafe to cafe, paying for wine with verse, and getting it, too! At his heels a crowd of loafers, frowsy women and dogs. His hat gone. His eyes mad. A trickle of wine through his beard. Bellowing. Bellowing again—the untamed centaur ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... don't mean that that's true? Why, dad gives me that much to spend on myself each month," Bess cried. "The poor things! Even if they are frowsy and low, I am sorry for them. But, of course, the shut-down doesn't trouble you, Nan. Not personally, I mean. Your father has had a good position for ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... narration and putting her hands upon his shoulders familiarly.] Yes, and all the schooling I've ever had, Eddie, was at a cheap, frowsy day-school in Kennington, with a tribe of other common, skinny-legged ...
— The 'Mind the Paint' Girl - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur Pinero
... just coming out of the cheap grocery, and had several bundles in her arms, as if she might have been buying bread, and some such things. I knew her just as soon as I set eyes on her, for she wore that same old frowsy red dress, and had a little tad of a shawl pinned over her shoulders. The poor thing looked like a wind'd blow her away, with her thin, pinched face, and ...
— Fred Fenton Marathon Runner - The Great Race at Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... completed, he became a Christian of the Greek church, was baptized with many fine and grand ceremonies, compelled his docile people to do likewise, and, like a true Northman that he was—the great grandson of Rurik of the Baltic wilds—he so impressed his frowsy hordes, half Scythian and half Slav, that now in the hearts of their descendants, in their popular songs and legends, in those concerning Kief especially—a beautiful and pathetic strain of music eight centuries old—he, Vladimir, is still the central heroic figure; once a man, but now a kind of ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... breaking my back and tearing my fingers and the damned wall paper—while the damned frowsy-headed landlady yells and the damned frowsy-headed boarders stick out their heads! And so in the end I get into my steaming hot room and shut the door and fall down on the bed ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... Quebec, most celebrated in our annals by reason of the incidents which attach thereto, one may name the frowsy and tortuous highway which circulates from the foot of Mountain Hill, running for a distance of two hundred feet below the Cape, up to the still narrower pathway which commences west of St. James street and leads to the foot of the hill "de la canoterie;" [107] all will understand we mean ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... the ledge of her half-door, her hair in curl-papers, her face the pale unwholesome pinched oval of most London women of her class. Her bodice was pinned across her chest; she was coarse-aproned, new from the wash-tub or the grate. Not a sign upon her but told of her frowsy round. The stale air of foul lodgment was upon her. I found out indeed this much about her ostensible state, that she was the wife of a cab-driver whose name was Ventris. He was an ill-conditioned, sottish fellow who treated her badly, ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... of impatient disgust he loosed her, and went into the back room. It was empty. He went up the rickety stairs, and, as he had expected, found the door of the bedroom locked. He kicked it open and went into the frowsy room. The child was not in it. He came downstairs and opened the back door. As he did so, he heard a scuttling rustle. The garden was empty, but the rustle he had heard set him exploring the dirty, rag-covered hedge with keen eyes. He saw nothing, and walked down the garden, stooping and peering ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... because of a smoky chimney. There were no lamps, and the sparse candles were obviously grudged. The stewards were dirty and desponding, the serving inhospitable, the cooking dirty and greasy, the food scanty, the table-linen frowsy. There were four French and two Japanese male passengers, who sat at meals in top-coats, comforters, and hats. I had a large cabin, the salon des dames, and the undivided attention of a very competent, ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... are proud. What then? I never said they equal men. A goat (as vain as goat can be) Affected singularity. 10 Whene'er a thymy bank he found, He rolled upon the fragrant ground; And then with fond attention stood, Fixed o'er his image in the flood. 'I hate my frowsy beard,' he cries; 'My youth is lost in this disguise. Did not the females know my vigour, Well might they loathe this reverend figure.' Resolved to smoothe his shaggy face, He sought the barber of the place. 20 A flippant monkey, spruce and ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... fire, seeming disheveled demons of the pit. Like some master imp torturing a pigmy over the flames, old Ben York was kneeling close beside the blaze, holding to the coals a hickory stick, which served as spit for the roasting of a squirrel. The brilliance shone full on the frowsy gray whiskers, and, above them, the blinking, rheumy eyes, so intent on the proper browning of the game. None of the outlaws had a weapon in his grasp—a fact noted with satisfaction by the chief of the raiders, who knew that these ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... the street were Christmas greens. The ship chandlers had them festooned about huge lengths of rusty chains and barnacled anchors and huge coils of hawser, and the tawdry windows of the dram shops were hidden by them. A frowsy woman, with a happy smile upon her face, hurried past with a new doll in her arms. Dan stopped a minute to ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... participation in the row amongst the aforementioned ladies. (Wingy, by the way, is a ratty little one-armed man, whose case is usually described in the head-line, as "A 'Armless Case," by one of our great dailies.) And their pals are waiting outside in the vestibule—Frowsy Kate (The Red Streak), Boko Bill, Pincher and his "piece," etc., getting together the stuff for the possible fines, and the ten-bob fee for the lawyer, in one case, and ready to swear to anything, if called upon. And ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... a long one," she declared, "it shall only be a disguise. I promise you I'll be just as bad as ever in it," and she drew a handkerchief out of her pocket, which had been left there for months and was frowsy, and wiped her own eyes and Diavolo's abruptly, "Your feelings are quite boggy, Diavolo," she said, giving a dry sob herself as she spoke. "You can't touch them at all without coming to water. You ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... they throng'd anon, Gentle, semple, throng'd anon: Souter and tailor, frowsy Nan, The ancient widow young again, ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... the shelf, she presently came to the grocer's shop and found the Caravan sitting in a row on a little bench at the door. The Admiral had the Camel in his lap, and they were all gazing at it with an air of extreme solicitude. It was a frowsy little thing with lumpy legs that hung down in a dangling way from the Admiral's knees, and Sir Walter was busily employed trying to make it drink something ...
— The Admiral's Caravan • Charles E. Carryl
... to deal with," she said, looking him in the eyes;—"a miracle of meekness and patience that is rather certain to turn into a dreadful, frowsy old hausfrau some day. But that's the kind you wanted.... ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... face might fascinate other foolish moths; it had lost its power to dazzle her long, long ago. Perhaps the disenchantment was mutual; for the pretty, rose-cheeked, starry-eyed girl who had captivated his idle fancy had become a dream of the past, and his wife was a pale, sickly, peevish invalid, with frowsy hair and ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... savages, tells them the story of the Christian faith, then to the beat of drum and chant of "Te Deum" receives, one {42} afternoon, twenty naked converts into the folds of the church. Membertou is baptized Henry, after the King, and all his frowsy squaws renamed after ladies of the most ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... finished the door was opened and Pecksniff, looking all shrunken and frowsy and yellow, passed out, never to enter again into the lives of any ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... and men are mingled in it. Hence another fall for the art. Still the least of the witches retains somewhat of the Sibyl. Those other frowsy charlatans, those clownish jugglers, mole-catchers, ratkillers, who throw spells over beasts, who sell secrets which they have not, defiled these times with the stench of a dismal black smoke, of fear and foolery. Satan grows enormous, gets multiplied without end. 'Tis a poor triumph, however, ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... as I loitered there, Fastened on one proletariat pair, With finery frowsy, and oily hair; Oh, what a surprise! "SALLIE" and "BILL" were the names they flung Frankly abroad with unreticent tongue, Lounging and staring where graciously hung ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 3rd, 1891 • Various
... passage in my new Fugue in A minor, which was being transferred so flowingly from my own brain on to the score when it interrupted me. But for all that, I have a shrewd suspicion that I shall bear its unmusical torture as long as it lasts, and eventually send away the frowsy foreigner, who no doubt is playing it, happy with a fairly ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... gray-white walls which would some day be the grand cathedral. The space about it looked like the studio of a giant artist; piles of marble scattered here and there gave the half-formed temple the air of a frowsy, ill-dressed child; and the mass rising to the sky resembled a cloud that might suddenly melt into the ether. He had seen the great temples of the world, yet found in this humbler, but still magnificent structure an element ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... "My Old Pal," who is balancing a large bundle of sticks on her head. Across the way is a Whistler etching; Whistler did not happen to etch it; but it is a Whistler etching all the same. You look up a frowsy little courtyard, the walls of which are more graceful than plumb, and you see a horse's head sticking out into the etching. Also, across the way the "k" has dropped out of steak on the window of a chop-house. The public-houses down this way, ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... It wasn't his bodily shape that puzzled me, though that was queer enough, but his occupation that staggered me. He was a long, thin, spider-shaped article that seemed to have run to seed—all stalk with a frowsy top, for his hair was long an' dry an' fly-about. I'm six-futt one myself, but my step was a mere joke to his stride! He seemed split up to the neck, like a pair o' human compasses, an' his clo's fitted so tight that he might have passed for a ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne
... verge of a new era, in which Exclusionism must be overthrown, it will avail thee not to call us base-born and frowsy peasants. ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... It was a tiny cupboard of a room in a tenement. They sat upon their bed to eat, and they hid their soiled dishes beneath it. Dirty children screamed upon the avenue in front, and frowsy-headed women and wolfish men caroused in the saloon below. Yet here there came to them the angel with the flame-tipped wings, and here they dreamed their dream ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... to support her at home, but for all that she is a working girl. She is never idle. She is studying or sewing or helping about the home part of the day. She is romping or playing or swinging out of doors the other part. She is never frowsy or untidy or lazy. She is never rude or slangy or bold. And yet she is always full of fun and ready for frolic. She does not depend upon a servant to do what she can do for herself. She is considerate toward all who serve her. She is reverent to the old and thoughtful ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... morning came, however, my plans for the day suddenly underwent an alteration; for as I sat in my frowsy lodgings at a rather later breakfast than usual, devouring my doubtful eggs, munching my tough toast, and sipping my cold coffee, with an advertisement page of the Shipping Gazette propped up before me on the table, the following advertisement ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... up stairs and made her afternoon toilette, then got out her embroidery and came down to her accustomed rustic arm-chair, smilingly conscious of the perfection of all that pertained to herself, from the soft ringlets on her broad forehead, so different from the stiff, frowsy crimps of the country-girls, to the small Newport ties with their cardinal-red bows, the only bright color about her. She was just beginning to wonder what kept the doctor so long, when, raising her eyes from a reverie which had been almost a nap, she saw him driving by at a fast trot, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... Germany. I had never lingered in that land which, on the whole, is so singularly barren of memorable manifestations of generous sympathies and magnanimous impulses. An ineradicable, invincible, provincialism of envy and vanity clings to the forms of its thought like a frowsy garment. Even while yet very young I turned my eyes away from it instinctively as from a threatening phantom. I believe that children and dogs have, in their innocence, a special power of perception as far as spectral apparitions ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... than human beings. By eight the full steam power is on, to judge by the swift turning, the strong resistance of the spools. Not one of the women near me but is degrading to look upon and odourous to approach. These creatures, ill clad, with matted, frowsy hair and hands that look as though they had never, never been washed, smell like the byre. As for the children, I must pass them by in this recital. The tiny, tiny children! The girls are profane, contentious, foul-mouthed. There is much partisanship and cliqueism; ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... noticed it in your between-dances saunterings?—smooth-hewn pyramids of crystal ice, embowered in ferns and palms, and lit up from behind by some device which makes them glow a lovely rose-color all over—that man deserves a prize, I protest, for an inspiration that hardly could be expected from the frowsy atmosphere of lawyers' chambers. It will be morning, pale and gray, before the last volunteers see the last ladies to their carriage, and betake themselves bedward with ears ringing with half a dozen waltz tunes, and pleasantly oblivious for the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... sent out their white things to be done; she only did the coloured things, so we had to pay a couple of bob extra a week to have our "biled" rags and collars sent out and done; and after the first week they bore sad evidence of having been done on the premises by one of the frowsy daughters. But we paid all the same. And, good Lord! if she keeps the best table in town, we are curious to see the worst. When you go down to breakfast you find on the table in front of your chair a cold ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... suicide was a daily occurrence for fourteen years. Three months after the du Bousquier marriage society remarked, not without astonishment, that the linen of the chevalier was frayed and rusty, that his hair was irregularly combed and brushed. With a frowsy head the Chevalier de Valois could no longer be said to exist! A few of his ivory teeth deserted, though the keenest observers of human life were unable to discover to what body they had hitherto belonged, ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... minds to extenuate the shortcomings of the place and to extol rather than dispraise it. One does not like to maltreat even a resort when it is down. But as we draw up the hill and see the black surroundings and enter the frowsy, dismal street, the desire to extol vanishes and even the possibility of extenuating becomes doubtful. The carriage pauses, while two of us who have hurried ahead examine the two hotels reputed best; each is equally uninspiring, and the ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... die from sheer ennui. They'll use our banners to boil their fat puddings in, they'll roast oxen in the highways, and after our girls have married them they'll turn them into kitchen wenches with frowsy skirts and ankles ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... in keeping myself awake I drove over the two hundred odd miles of wet roads which separated us from London, and just before nine o'clock next morning I left the car in Wardour Street and walked with the stranger to the frowsy house in Providence Court, where to my great surprise Gerald Tracy opened the door. He laughed at my astonishment, but with a gesture indicative of ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... we remember what an effect clothes have in inciting to personal cleanliness. Let a woman, for instance, don an old soiled or worn wrapper, and it will have the effect of making her indifferent as to whether her hair is frowsy or in curl papers. It does not matter whether her face or hands are clean or not, or what sort of slipshod shoes she wears, for "anything," she argues, "is good enough to go with this old wrapper." Her walk, her manner, the general trend of her feelings, will ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... suspected, she frequently wore. On Saturday, a half-day, upon which all the girls wore their best clothes to the office, if they had matinee or shopping plans for the afternoon, Miss Cottle often appeared with her frowsy hair bunched under a tawdry velvet hat, covered with once exquisite velvet roses, and her muscular form clad in a gown that had cost its original owner more than this humble relative could earn in a year. Miss Cottle's gloves were always expensive, and always dirty, and her elaborate silk ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... standing, a frowsy-headed young man, whose face was still shining from the severe friction of a coarse roller-towel, which hung behind the door, entered the room, and saluting the detective familiarly, proceeded to comb his hair before a cracked mirror that hung behind the desk. After he ...
— The Burglar's Fate And The Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... else. Are these two facts related to each other? Is the positive piggery of the lowest stratum of our fellows part of the price we pay for glorious freedom as guaranteed by our "British Constitution"? and do we not pay very dearly then? Must the masses be frowsy to be free? ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... least is amiss. A flowing, serrated, milky beard, with a touch of gold around the mouth; an aquiline nose; deep set blue eyes canopied with shaggy brows; a forehead broad and high; a dome a little frowsy but not guilty of a hair—the Prophet Jeremiah! Only one thing, a clay pipe which he seldom took out of his mouth except to empty and refill, seemed to take from the prophetic solemnity of the face. Otherwise, he is as grim and sullen as the Prophet. ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... you. 'I wonder what has become of him,' I said to myself." He did not remember my name, or perhaps he had never known it, so I had to introduce myself afresh. The contrast between his flashy clothes and my frowsy, wretched-looking appearance, as I saw ourselves in the mirrors on either side of me, made me sorely ill at ease. The brilliancy of the gaslight chafed my nerves. It was as though it had been turned on for the express purpose of illuminating my disgrace. ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... aromatic fragrance, refreshing as the scent of vinegar, into the long, unfloored room, which certainly needed something of the kind. It reeked with stale tobacco-smoke, the smell of cookery, and the odors of frowsy clothes. A row of bunks, filled with spruce twigs and old brown blankets, ran down one side of it, a very rude table down the other, and a double row of men with bronzed faces, in dusty garments, sat about ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss |
