"Gentlewoman" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... little later, the same spirit is exhibited by Jane Austen when Madame de Sevigne sought her: Miss Austen suppressed the story-maker, wishing to be taken first of all for what she was: a country gentlewoman of unexceptionable connections. Even Walter Scott and Byron plainly exhibit this dislike to be reckoned as paid writers, men whose support came by the pen. In short, literary professionalism reflected on gentility. We have changed all that with a vengeance and can hardly understand the earlier ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... and desiring the passengers to contribute as they thought proper, being always contented with what they gave them, though sometimes part of it was farthings. Nay, they were so civil that Blueskin and this Levee, once robbing a single gentlewoman in a coach, she happening to have a basket full of buns and cakes, Levee took some of them, but Blueskin proceeded to search her for money, but found none. The woman in the meanwhile scratched him and called him a thousand hard names, ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... graceful charm about them before which the most inveterate bachelor succumbs. The accents of the Siren singers were never so insinuating and caressing as the Munster brogue as it slips off the tongue of a gentlewoman. Blue eyes predominate, but are excelled in lustre by what Froude has been pleased to call "the cold grey eyes of the dark Celt of the south of Ireland." Edmund Spencer, when he was not busy "undertaking" Rapparees, or smoking Raleigh's fragrant weed—"than ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... and proud. In the heaven which I trust to reach, all the sins of my youth and the errors of my age notwithstanding, it is told us there is no marrying and giving in marriage; and this is well, for I do not know how my wives, Montezuma's daughter and the sweet English gentlewoman, would agree together were ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... the family of Onesti, who by the death of his father, and an uncle of his, was left extraordinarily abounding in riches and growing to years fitting for marriage. As young gallants are easily apt enough to do, he became enamoured of a very beautiful gentlewoman, who was daughter of Messer Paolo Traversario, one of the most ancient and noble families in all the country. Nor made he any doubt, by his means and industrious endeavour, to derive affection from her again, for he carried himself like a braveminded gentleman, liberal in his expenses, ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... the frivolous about her. In the frequent informal social gatherings she was always the life of the occasion, but never did her merriment get down to the level of silliness. Without a suspicion of prudishness there was always with her the natural dignity of the true-born gentlewoman. ...
— The Romance and Tragedy • William Ingraham Russell
... prospects of the marriage became less bright, because of the difficulties arising from religion, it would seem that, with a perversity not altogether unexampled, Margaret became more anxious to have it consummated. At least, Francis Walsingham writes to Lord Burleigh: "The gentlewoman, being most desirous thereof, falleth to reading of the Bible, and to the use of the prayers used ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... older country towns in England—of Southampton a little. The appearance of the city is highly picturesque, a word which can apply to none other American towns; and although the place is certainly pervaded with an air of decay, 'tis a genteel infirmity, as might be that of a distressed elderly gentlewoman. It has none of the smug mercantile primness of the northern cities, but a look of state, as of quondam wealth and importance, a little gone down in the world, yet remembering still its former dignity. The northern ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... translator, but may, on the other hand, be the contribution of his predecessor. A fairly common situation, for example, appears in John Capgrave's Life of St. Augustine, produced, as its author says, in answer to the request of a gentlewoman that he should "translate her truly out of Latin the life of St. Augustine, great doctor of the church." Of the work, its editor, Mr. Munro, says, "It looks at first sight as though Capgrave had merely translated an older Latin text, as he did in the Life of St. Gilbert; but no ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... times Maurice Brotteaux had called himself Monsieur des Ilettes and used to give elegant suppers which the fair Madame de Rochemaure, wife of a King's procureur, enlivened with her bright glances,—a finished gentlewoman whose loyal fidelity was never impugned so long as the Revolution left Maurice Brotteaux in possession of his offices and emoluments, his hotel, his estates and his noble name. The Revolution swept them all away. He made ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... indorse that, Fern," replied her mother, gently; "it is apt to turn a cold shoulder to genteel poverty. The hardest lot in life, in my opinion, is the life of a poor gentlewoman." ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... piano and I'm expected to come in and tune it. Slick and smear it over and leave it sounding sicklier and tubbier and more generally disgusting than ever. You might as well take a painted harlot off the streets"—he glared at the ornate extravagance of the case—"and expect to make a gentlewoman of her with one lesson in deportment. I won't tune it. It's better left as it is. ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... most infamous purposes. Female enthusiasts were wrought up to such a violence of agitation, that nature fainted under the struggle, and the pseudo saint seized this opportunity of violating the chastity of his penitent. Such was said to be the case of mademoiselle la Cadiere, a young gentlewoman of Toulon, abused in this manner by the lust and villany of Pere Girard, a noted Jesuit, who underwent a trial before the parliament of Aix, and very narrowly escaped ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... cheek-bones, were closed; the lips were livid; the nose was sharp and pinched; the colorless cheeks were sunken; but the outlines were still delicately drawn and the proportions nobly fashioned. It was, still, the face of a gentlewoman. In the ashen lips, only, was there a sign of life; and they trembled and fluttered in their effort to utter the words that an indomitable spirit ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... the many persons of color whom I visited at Philadelphia, was a woman of singular intelligence and good breeding. A friend was with me. She received us with the courtesy and easy manners of a gentlewoman. She appeared to be between thirty and forty years of age—of pure African descent, with a handsome expressive countenance and a graceful person. Her mother, who had been stolen from her native land at ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... place where folks go to meeting; so I put my hymn-book in my pocket, and walked softly and grave as a minister; and when I came there, the dogs a bit of a meeting-house could I see. At last I spied a young gentlewoman standing by one of the seats which they have here at the doors. I took her to be the deacon's daughter, and she looked so kind, and so obliging, that I thought I would go and ask her the way to lecture, and—would you think it?—she called me dear, ...
— The Contrast • Royall Tyler
... is a reduced gentlewoman," explained Miss Barry. "Her husband was a British officer, and she is very careful what sort of boarders she takes. Anne will not meet with any objectionable persons under her roof. The table is good, and the house is near the Academy, ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... had boasted to Lavretzky that she alone had reared her children; she had dressed Liza like a doll, in the presence of visitors had patted her on the head, and called her, to her face, a clever child and a darling—and that was all: any regular care wearied the lazy gentlewoman. During her father's lifetime, Liza had been in the hands of a governess, Mlle. Moreau, from Paris, and after his death she had passed into the charge of Marfa Timofeevna. The reader is acquainted with Marfa Timofeevna; but Mlle. Moreau was a tiny, wrinkled creature, with ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... SIDONIE KNOBBE appears. She is tall and emaciated and dressed in a badly worn but fashionable summer gown. Her face bears the stigma, of a dissolute life but gives evidence of a not ungentle origin. Her air is curiously like that of a gentlewoman. She talks affectedly and her eyes show addiction to ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... laid aside modesty; otherwise it would be time for me to die, let alone to confess; but sure it cannot be modest of me to ride after a gentleman and take him a letter. And then that was not enough: I heard of a duel,—and what did I do but ride to Scutchemsee Nob, and interfere? What gentlewoman ever was so bold? I was not their wife, you ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... bore away the prize of beauty and grace; for after all, the clothes, however elegant, that are not worn habitually, can only embarrass and cramp the native movements; and, as Mademoiselle Clairon remarks, "she who would act a gentlewoman in public, must be ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... a daughter of the renowned Isabella, who had wrought such great things for Christendom,—promoting the discovery of America, and conquering Granada,—but he was incensed at the mere thought of preferring to her place a private gentlewoman, who would never have been heard of, if Henry had not seen fit to raise her from common life, first to the throne, and then to the scaffold. That was an insult to the whole Austro-Burgundian family, whose dominions rivalled those of the Roman Caesars, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the wife of Governor Bradstreet, with her eight children, had found time for study and writing, and about 1650 had a volume of verse published in London entitled "The Tenth Muse. Several poems compiled with a great variety of wit and learning. By an American Gentlewoman." And she makes this ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... taken towards suppressing the Protestants and their Bible. One of the first martyrs was Robert Barnes, a personal friend of Luther. Much stir was created by the burning, some years later, of a gentlewoman named Anne Askewe and of three men, at Smithfield. The revulsion naturally caused by this cruelty prepared the people for the Protestant rule of Edward. The Bible was also attacked. The translation of 1539 was examined by Convocation ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... of those gay delicate ladies, that valuing herself upon her being a gentlewoman, and that thought it a step below herself, when she married this mechanic thing called a tradesman, and consequently scorned to come near his shop, or warehouse, and by consequence acquainting herself with any of his affairs,[35] or so ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... of Leeds shall marry'd be To a fine young Lady of high Quality How happy will that Gentlewoman be In his Grace of ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... she came back to Linden House from a Brussels pension, she found herself, even in her present trouble, wondering how it was possible that David Verity could be her mother's brother. This coarse-mannered hog of a man, brother to the sweet-voiced, tender-hearted gentlewoman whose gracious wraith was left undimmed in the girl's memory by the lapse of years—it would be unbelievable if it were not true! He was so gross, so tubby, so manifestly over-fed, whereas her mother had ever ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... toward the stairs. Antonia was as perfect as a slim and blue-eyed stalk of flax. She wore the laced bodice and small cap of New Holland. Her exactly spoken French denoted all the neat appointments of her life. This Dutch gentlewoman had seen much of the world; having traveled from Fort Orange to New Amsterdam, from New Amsterdam to Boston, and from Boston with Madame La Tour to Fort St. John in Acadia. The three figures ascended in a line the narrow stairway which made a diagonal ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... which the spectators took in my voyage was so great, that the things I threw down were divided and preserved as our people would relicks of the most celebrated saints. And a gentlewoman, mistaking the oar for my person, was so affected with my supposed destruction, that she died in a ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... had laughed; she was a lady humorously inclined, not to say mischievous. A comic-opera star would have sent her press agent round to see what advertising could be got out of the incident; a prima donna would have appealed to her primo tenore, for the same purpose. A gentlewoman, surely; moreover, she lived within the radius, the official radius of the Madison Square branch of the post-office, for such was the postmark. Common sense urged him to dismiss the whole affair and laugh over it as the Lady in the Fog had done. But common sense often goes about with a pedant's ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... A worthy gentlewoman in Suffolk, who being with child and passing by a butcher who was killing his meat, a drop of blood sprung on her face, whereupon she said her child would have a blemish on its face, and at the birth it was found marked with ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... a gentlewoman worthy of belief, told me that Mr.... White, Lord of Langley's grave was opened forty years after he was buried. He lay in water, and his body not perished, and some old people there remembred him and knew him. He was related to Mrs. Norborne, and her husband's ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... 1806 I had seen all the lower classes of the English clad in something like costumes. The Channel waterman wore the short dowlas petticoat; the Thames waterman, a jacket and breeches of velveteen, and a badge; the gentleman and gentlewoman, attire such as was certainly to be seen in no other part of the Christian world, the English colonies excepted. Something of this still remained, but it existed rather as the exception than as the rule. ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Rhadamanthus, be pleased to file off to the left, and make room for the venerable matron that stands behind you. Old gentlewoman, says he, I think you are fourscore? You have heard the question, what have you been doing so long in the world? Ah! sir, says she, I have been doing what I should not have done, but I had made a firm resolution to have changed ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... that masterly woman, was a distressed gentlewoman. The death of her husband, a warehouse clerk, by acute alcoholic poisoning, seems to have given her her first chance of displaying those strong qualities which ultimately became her chief characteristic. And she was of those to whom ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... a leader, with a pike in his hand, set his back against the gate, and swore that, if he was to die for it the next minute, he would have the life of the first man who should open that gate or set enemy's foot withinside of that place. He said the housekeeper, who was left in it, was a good gentlewoman, and had done him a service, though she did not know him, nor he her. He had never seen her face, but she had, the year before, lent his wife, when in distress, sixteen shillings, the rent of flax-ground, and he would ...
— Richard Lovell Edgeworth - A Selection From His Memoir • Richard Lovell Edgeworth
... matter, gentlewoman? Am I excluded from my own fortress; and by the way of barricado? Am I to dance attendance at the door, as if I were some base plebeian groom? I'll have you know, that, when my foot assaults, the lightning and the thunder are not so terrible as the strokes: brazen gates ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... that he was mine enemy, mistress. Besides, I may have been somewhat unmannerly in my treatment of Master Devereaux, and it behooves me as a gentlewoman to make other recompense ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... specimens of old Brussels are shown in the now discarded "lappets," which when a lace head-piece and lappets were part of every gentlewoman's costume, were actually regulated by Sumptuary Laws as to length. The longer the lappets the ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... "A gentlewoman told an ancient batchelour, who looked very young, that she thought he had eaten a snake: 'No, mistris,' (said he), 'it is because I never {131} meddled with any snakes which maketh me look so young.'"—Holy State, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 39. Saturday, July 27, 1850 • Various
... confessed that by his witchcrafte he did bewitch a Gentleman dwelling neere to the Saltpans, where the said Doctor kept Schoole, onely for being enamoured of a Gentlewoman whome he loued himselfe: by meanes of which his Sorcerye, witchcraft and diuelish practises, he caused the said Gentleman that once in xxiiij. howres he fell into a lunacie and madnes, and so continued one whole hower together, and for the veritie of the same, ...
— Daemonologie. • King James I
... Agnes were as delicate and clearly cut as those of some antique statue, but their habitual expression was one of intense melancholy. Her voice was low and gracious: the voice of a refined and educated gentlewoman. Her hair was black, with here and there a faint silver streak; but the peculiar head-dress of white linen which she wore left very little of it visible. Disfiguring as this head-dress might have been to many people, in her case it served merely to enhance the marble whiteness and transparent ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various
... she, as we learn from Foxe, went into Exeter to visit the heretics in gaol, and in particular to see Agnes Prest before her burning. Mrs. Raleigh began to exhort her to repentance, but the martyr turned the tables on her visitor, and urged the gentlewoman to seek the blessed body of Christ in heaven, not on earth, and this with so much sweet persuasiveness that when Mrs. Raleigh 'came home to her husband she declared to him that in her life she never heard ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... than usual, and treated Marguerite with peculiar affability and sweetness. But Clotilde, at all events, was not slow to perceive that both Marguerite and herself were watched much more closely than they had ever been before by Madame de Bleury, a decayed gentlewoman and distant relative of Madame de Valricour, who had for some years past lived at the chateau, and discharged the multifarious duties of housekeeper, chaperone, duenna, and private secretary to the baroness ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach
... various preparations yet to make. Mac Fane is to go and hire me the empty house tomorrow. It is furnished; but it must be aired, for I would not have her die a paltry catch-cold death. I would treat her like a gentlewoman in every respect but one; and in that I will have as little compassion on her as ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... chance of meeting a different stage waggon, Sir Amyas and his servant having, of course, examined the one they had overtaken in coming down. At every possible resting place on the route was inquiry made, but all in vain; no one had seen such a young gentlewoman as was described, or if some answer inspired hope for a moment, it was dashed again at once. The young gentlewoman once turned out to be the Squire's fat lady, and another time was actually pursued into a troop of strolling players, ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a public career must expect to be treated as public property: what would be an intrusion on a domiciled gentlewoman is a tribute to me. You cannot have celebrity and sex-privilege both.' Thus Ethelberta laughed off the awkward conjuncture, inwardly deploring the unconscionable maternal meddling which had led to this, though not resentfully, for she had too much ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... still. He had been graciously received both by Miss Hamilton and her hostess—a kind-hearted old lady, who spoke Scotch with the pure tone of a gentlewoman, he said—a treat not to be had once in a twelvemonth. She had asked him to go to dinner in the evening, and to bring his friend with him. Robert, however, begged him to make his excuse, as he had an engagement in—a very different ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... wholesome advice, and looked so friendly, that I could not but be convinced it was the best course I could take; so I accordingly prepared letters to the gentlewoman with whom I left my money, and a procuration to the Portuguese captain, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Of York, Mariner, Vol. 1 • Daniel Defoe
... 164. To a Gentlewoman objecting to him his gray hairs. Mr. Hazlitt quotes an early MS. copy headed: "An old man to his younge Mrs.". The variants, as he observes, are mostly for the worse. The poem may have been suggested to Herrick ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... himself to them. They loaded his hands with chains, a dungeon was his abode, and his feet stuck fast in the mire. Murderers and thieves were his companions, yet even among them did he pursue his labors, until God, by means of a pious gentlewoman, who had seen and pitied his ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... from the chair which she had mechanically sunk into while waiting for him to speak, and ceased to be the kindly, generous soul she was, in asserting herself as a gentlewoman who had a contumacious servant to treat with. "You will ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... the door of the apartment opened, and a gentlewoman entered, who, from her resemblance to the General, although her features were soft and feminine, might be immediately recognised as his daughter. She walked up to Cromwell, gently but firmly passed her arm through his, and said to him in a persuasive tone, "Father, this is not well—you have promised ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... much for her. Finely restrained little elderly gentlewoman as she was, she openly broke ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... his wife, interrupting him; "that is just it—Aunt Barbara is quite perfect, a kind of ideal gentlewoman in cultivation, and refinement, and piety, and everything else; but she is, without exception, the most alarming ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... to these anecdotes a charming little story from that well-known book, "Sorrows of a Queen". The writer, Lady de Weary, was an English gentlewoman who was for many years Mistress of the Robes at one of the best known German courts. Her affection for her royal mistress is evident on ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... take possession of the inheritance Tessier. She was a personal friend of Madame Lapierre, and as the Tessiers had exhausted all their money in paying the expenses connected with securing the fortune, she, being a well-to-do gentlewoman, had come to their assistance, and for the last few months had been financing the enterprise on a fifteen per cent. basis. If Madame Lapierre was to receive ten million dollars, then, to be sure, Madame Reddon would have one million five hundred ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... and in common as the confidants of his amours, which certainly were neither suitable to the lustre of his actions nor the grandeur of his life; for Marion de Lorme, one of his mistresses, was little better than a common prostitute. Another of his concubines was Madame de Fruges, that old gentlewoman who was so often seen sauntering in the enclosure. The first used to come to his apartment in the daytime, and he went by night to visit the other, who was but the pitiful cast-off of Buckingham and Epienne. The two confidants introduced ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... of all pretenders to her favor. His ideal husband for Phyllis was not John Millard. He wondered what she could see to admire in the bronzed frontier soldier. He wondered how John could dare to think of transplanting a gentlewoman like Phyllis from the repose and luxury of her present home to the change and dangers and hardships ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... humbler class of Irish but have some intimate associations. Disposing amongst the boys the few shillings I had left in my pocket, I jumped on board the packet-ship Europe, without cross or coin, saving only a couple of luck-pennies, the one an American gold eagle, the present of an amiable gentlewoman; the other a crooked sixpence, suspended by a crimson ribbon, the offering of a fair "maid of the inn," given to me on the very eve of sailing-day with many kind wishes, all ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... "There was a gentlewoman at my house on a visit, and I asked her if she had got the sum of twenty pounds in her pocket, telling her at the same time how much I wanted it. She told me she had not; if she had, I should have it. A few hours after, the same ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... indignant feeling of contempt and impatience at the supineness of their Greek friends seized the engineer, and he proceeded to vent this feeling to Lord Byron in no very measured terms, pronouncing Prince Mavrocordato to be "an old gentlewoman," and concluding, according to his own statement, with the following words:—"If I were in their place, I should be in a fever at the thought of my own incapacity and ignorance, and should burn with impatience ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... exercises to your grateful heart, I can tell you that. A pretty thing, truly! Here I, a poor helpless girl, raised from poverty and distress by the generosity of the best of men, only because I was young and sightly, shall put on lady-airs to a gentlewoman born, the wisdom of whose years, her faithful services, and good management, make her a much greater merit in this family, than I can pretend to have! And shall I return, in the day of my power, insult and haughtiness ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... the inexplicable look of their conqueror, that the eyes of both sunk to the earth, under a feeling of terror and embarrassment. Then Inez recovered herself, and addressing the trapper, she demanded, with the dignity of an offended gentlewoman, though with her accustomed grace, to what circumstance they owed this extraordinary and unexpected visit. The old man hesitated; but clearing his throat, like one who was about to make an effort to which he was little used, he ventured on ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... is small charge, sir; I thank God my father left me wherewithal: if it please you, sir, I have a great mind to this gentlewoman here, ...
— The London Prodigal • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... French doll—movable eyes and separate teeth and all—when he might have gone on his knees to a splendid young lady! And I'd have kept him there to say his prayers, which he's never done before, not since his mother died, poor old gentlewoman, worn out by the gnashings of a tiresome, God-Almighty, wicked old man, and a slip of sin who nothing was too good for. Not in this world, no! But it will be made up to him in the next, by the unquenchable worm—as he'll find ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... tell her I'll make her the best husband in the world, and Lady O'Trigger into the bargain!—But we must get the old gentlewoman's consent—and ...
— The Rivals - A Comedy • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... dripping from the eaves—sixteen hours of rain, not merely audible, but visible for seven days in the week—would be enough to exhaust the patience of Job or Grizzel; especially if Job were a farmer, and Grizzel a country gentlewoman. Never was known such a season! Hay swimming, cattle drowning, fruit rotting, corn spoiling! and that naughty river, the Loddon, who never can take Puff's advice, and 'keep between its banks,' running about the country, fields, roads, gardens, and houses, like mad! The weather ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... one of that numerous class of females, whose society can raise no other emotion than surprise at there being any men in the world who could like them well enough to marry them. She had neither beauty, genius, accomplishment, nor manner. The air of a gentlewoman, a great deal of quiet, inactive good temper, and a trifling turn of mind were all that could account for her being the choice of a sensible, intelligent man like Mr. Allen. In one respect she was admirably fitted to introduce a young lady ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... intimate acquaintance with the couple, you acknowledge the, aptness of the fine distinction. By birth Mrs. Harrington had claims to rank as a gentlewoman. That is, her father was a lawyer of Lymport. The lawyer, however, since we must descend the genealogical tree, was known to have married his cook, who was the lady's mother. Now Mr. Melchisedec was mysterious concerning his origin; and, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... all one; I received not one farthing of assistance from anybody, was hardly asked to sit down at the two sisters' houses, nor offered to eat or drink at two more near relations'. The fifth, an ancient gentlewoman, aunt-in-law to my husband, a widow, and the least able also of any of the rest, did, indeed, ask me to sit down, gave me a dinner, and refreshed me with a kinder treatment than any of the rest, but added the melancholy part, viz., that she would have helped me, but that, ...
— The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2) • Daniel Defoe
... lived quietly together, in spite of the Cardinal Campodonico's objections and arguments, and, little by little, Veronica became quite used to her absolute independence of plan and action, and the idea of taking an elderly gentlewoman for a companion grew more and more distasteful ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... as if, when she dug up again her buried heart, the spot had ceased to be a grave. Yet, in spite of these sentimentalities, I was prodigiously amused by an incident, of which I had not the good fortune to be a witness, but which Mr. Wigglesworth related with considerable humor. A gentlewoman of the town, receiving news of her husband's loss at sea, had bespoken a handsome slab of marble, and came daily to watch the progress of my friend's chisel. One afternoon, when the good lady and the sculptor were in the very midst of the ...
— Chippings With A Chisel (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... his fourth book de Vita Apollonii, hath a memorable instance in this kind, which I may not omit, of one Menippus Lycius, a young man twenty-five years of age, that going betwixt Cenchreas and Corinth, met such a phantasm in the habit of a fair gentlewoman, which taking him by the hand, carried him home to her house, in the suburbs of Corinth, and told him she was a Phoenician by birth, and if he would tarry with her, he should hear her sing and play, and drink such wine as never any drank, and no man should molest him; but she, being fair and ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... tell all whom it may concern that Mabel Hughes, having broken every rule of decent and orderly behavior, and being no longer worthy of the name of gentlewoman, is here arraigned ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... well, sir, but only half the truth. Half gypsy I am, and half gentlewoman. A mongrel, I suppose, that makes; and yet it is well to have good blood in one's veins, even ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... honour the other day of a visit from a gentlewoman (a stranger to me) who seemed to be about thirty. Her complexion is brown; but the air of her face has an agreeableness, which surpasses the beauties of the fairest women. There appeared in her look and mien a sprightly health; and her eyes had too much vivacity to become the language of complaint, ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... Manuel, the nurse, was reliable, she told herself again as she put them on, feeling a moment's gratitude to the woman for trying to keep her "up," even during her "absences," to something approaching the standard a gentlewoman's birth and breeding demanded. Her money, or at least a large part of it, for she did not stop to count it, she found in the despatch-box where she had put it on their arrival in New York, and the key was with others on a ring in the private ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... gentlewoman just arrived from Naples, having a choice secret to prevent infection, which she found out by her great experience, and did wonderful cures with it in the late plague there, wherein there ...
— A Journal of the Plague Year • Daniel Defoe
... appearances of sorrow, the good-natured old man told him, his visit had called him from a scene which had shocked him excessively. 'The first day I came here' said he, 'I was induced by the frequent groans which issued from the next chamber, to enquire who lodged there; I learnt, it was a gentlewoman, who arrived the day before, and was immediately taken so ill that they apprehended her life in danger; and, about two hours ago, the maid of the house ran into my room, begging me to come to her assistance, for the gentlewoman was in such strong fits, she was not able ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... refrain that "she dressed so neat and looked so sweet" was glaringly allusive to her own modish mourning. Alternately flushing and paling, with a hysteric smile hovering round her small reserved mouth, the unfortunate gentlewoman was fain to turn to the window to keep her countenance until it was concluded. She did not ask him to repeat it, nor did she again subject herself to this palpable serenade, but a few days afterwards, as she was idly striking the keys in the interval of a music lesson, ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... and the valet mounts the dickey— That gentleman of Lords and Gentlemen; Also my Lady's gentlewoman, tricky, Tricked out, but modest more than poet's pen Can paint,—"Cosi viaggino i Ricchi!"[666] (Excuse a foreign slipslop now and then, If but to show I've travelled: and what's Travel, Unless it teaches one ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... grieves me, but for the poor wench; she must now cry vale to Lobster pies, hartichokes, and all such meats of mortality; poor gentlewoman, the sign must not be in virgo any longer with her, and that me grieves ...
— The Merry Devil • William Shakespeare
... thirty gentry." And I observe the depth of the groan is nearly in proportion to the quality of the person she commiserates. Thus, a groan for a Comte, a Marquise, or a Priest, is much more audible than one for a simple gentlewoman or a merchant; and the arrival of a Bishop (especially if not one of the constitutional clergy) is announced in a ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... the poor gentlewoman, and not altogether unsuitably, if I were to put her upon furnishing mourning for herself; as it would rouse her, by a seasonable and necessary employment, from that dismal lethargy of grief, which generally ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... capricious, passionate and self-indulgent, she mismanaged her son from his infancy, now provoking him by her foolish fondness, and now exciting his contempt by her paroxysms of impotent rage. She neither looked nor spoke like a gentlewoman; but in the conduct of her affairs she was praiseworthy. She hated and avoided debt, and when relief came (a civil list pension of L300 a year) she spent most of it upon her son. Fairly well educated, she ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... get a gentlewoman to speak to that I can't help speaking to you, Miss Graye, on my fears for Edward; I sometimes am afraid that he'll never get on—that he'll die poor and despised under the worst mental conditions, a keen sense of having been passed in the race ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... a respectable gentlewoman like personage of about fifty-four, of a grave, authoritative and somewhat severe aspect; but with the remains of very extraordinary personal beauty which she had once possessed in an eminent degree. She was somewhat above ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... dimpled chin, a neck and shoulders white as ivory, arms so rounded and white it was a treat to see them. She was of the queenly type—tall, with the promise of a grand womanhood; her white throat was firm, her arms rounded and strong; she was the ideal of an English gentlewoman; her pure, proud face, clear eyes, and sweet lips were beautiful beyond words. When she was dressed that evening for the princess' concert she looked most charming. Lady Cambrey had said truly that among the dark-eyed daughters of Italy she ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... cannot, Guy!" she said, "and if you weren't a silly fool you would not ask me. The future Duchess of Mowbray has to explain her position, whether she is a gentlewoman or a chorus girl. There's plenty of rope for her nowadays. She may be pretty well anything she pleases, but she must be some one. Don't think I am a brute, dear," she added, turning not unkindly to Virginia. "I like your appearance all right, and I dare say ...
— The Governors • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... understood that Sir Tristram was in prison she made as great sorrow as ever made lady or gentlewoman. Then Sir Tristram sent a letter unto La Beale Isoud, and prayed her to be his good lady; and if it pleased her to make a vessel ready for her and him, he would go with her unto the realm of Logris, that is this land. When La ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume II (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... Master Courtier, extremity is not to be used in all offices: say, that a gentlewoman were taken out of her bed about midnight, and committed to Castle Angelo, to the tower yonder, with nothing about her but her smock, would it not show a cruel part in the gentleman-porter to lay claim to her upper garment, pull it o'er ...
— The White Devil • John Webster
... the snow and the low arch of dun vapor—there was the stifling oppression of that gentlewoman's world, where everything was done for her and none asked for her aid—where the sense of connection with a manifold pregnant existence had to be kept up painfully as an inward vision, instead of coming ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... case. The vibrations of the judge's voice had reached the old gentlewoman in the parlour, where Clifford sat ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... sense of their own importance as to lead to the impression in weak minds that they had not only founded that monumental corner-stone of ancestry, but were personally responsible for the Mayflower. This gentlewoman represented to the humorous something more of the element of comedy than she represented to herself. She had been born into a world too narrow and provincial for the development of the powers born with her. She had been an ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... his life! Oh, it was horrible! It was horrible to hear her gasping voice, to see her fair hair falling over my mud-stained boots, to mark her slender little form convulsed with sobs, to feel that it was a woman, a gentlewoman, who thus ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... liquor, fell into a consumption, and died.—Nay, I can tell you more still: there was another, a young woman, and the handsomest in all this neighbourhood, whom he enticed up to London, promising to make her a gentlewoman to one of your women of quality; but, instead of keeping his word, we have since heard, after having a child by her himself, she became a common whore; then kept a coffeehouse in Covent Garden; and a little after died of the French distemper in a gaol.—I could tell you ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... colleges, of that famous university; and more home truths are to be learnt from listening to a noisy debate in an alehouse than from attending a formal one in the House of Commons. An elderly country gentlewoman will often know more of character, and be able to illustrate it by more amusing anecdotes taken from the history of what has been said, done, and gossiped in a country town for the last fifty years, than the best bluestocking of the age ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... downright comfort, and so charming an atmosphere. She had done so much with so little, yet hers were not anxious rooms, like the rooms of so many women of small means. They had space, repose, good cheer, even an air of luxury. It was the home of a gentlewoman who could make a little better than "the best of things." She had even entertained a little, now and then—more of late, now that Peggy's education was complete—but this at the cost of many economies in the right quarter, and many ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... would not be a man of valour to have such words of a gentlewoman! one of their words are more to me than twenty of these russet-coats, cheese-cakes, and butter-makers. Well, I thank God, I am none of these cowards; well, and a man have any virtue in him, I see he shall be ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various |
