"Middle-aged" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... confession should be forced from me!—of winning the heart of any maiden, whether native or Italian; and as for such delicacy of imagination as to work up a lovely damsel out of the withered remnant that forty odd years of Italian life can spare, I can assure my middle-aged friends, (and it may serve as a caveat,) I can lay no claim ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... His middle-aged wife, washing dishes over the wood stove, struck up, "I am bound for de promise land," and he joined in with a firm voice. But neither remembered many ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... largest dowry, by favour of the Lady of Stahrenberg, the strictness of whose household is famous throughout the province. Her person and manners are suitable to mine—no pride, no extravagance. She can bear to work; she has a tolerable knowledge how to manage a family; middle-aged, and of a disposition and capability to acquire what she still wants. Her I shall marry, by favour of the noble Baron of Stahrenberg, at 12 o'clock on the 30th of next October, with all Eferdingen assembled to meet us, and we shall eat the marriage ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... woman in the world, and the one who has the greatest reason for thankfulness! See, here is another precious treasure the Lord has sent me in addition to the many I had before;" and turning, she beckoned to a middle-aged colored woman standing a little in their rear, who immediately came forward bearing an infant of a few ...
— The Two Elsies - A Sequel to Elsie at Nantucket, Book 10 • Martha Finley
... middle-aged Sir Timothy of the latest birthday honours, partner in life of Lady Gruntham, and therefore part possessor of the Gruntham family, was whole owner of an army of chimney stacks which, morning, noon, and night, belched thick oily ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... Jenny. It was a case, here, of "Averill following Averill": his father and grandfather, both second sons, as was the Rector himself, had held the living before him, and had performed the duties of it in the traditional and perfectly respectable way. This one was a quiet middle-aged man, clean-shaven except for two small whiskers. He wore a white tie, and a small gold stud was visible in the long slit of his white shirt-front. He was on very easy terms in this house, in an unintimate manner, and dined here once a fortnight or so, without saying or hearing ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... 1770 Duke Karl began to undergo a change of heart. Wearying at last of life's vanities and frivolities, the middle-aged sinner took up virtue and philanthropy, as if to show mankind that he too could be a benevolent father to his people. The new departure was due in part to the political success of the Estates in curbing his extravagance, ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... Droom v/as middle-aged. His lank body and cadaverous face were constructed on principles not generally accredited to nature as it applies to men. When erect, his body swayed as if it were a stubborn reed determined to maintain its dignity in the face of the wind; he did not walk, he glided. His long square ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... respectful than to call you 'Mamie,'" he responded, lightly; "and many of your admirers are middle-aged men, with a mediaeval style of compliment. I've discovered that amatory versifying wasn't entirely a youthful passion. Colonel Cash is about as fatal with a couplet as with a double-barreled gun, and scatters as terribly. Judge Butts and Dr. Wilson have ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... the painted ceiling, with foreshortened Allegory staring down at his intrusion as if it meant to swoop upon him, and he cutting it dead, Mr. Tulkinghorn has at once his house and office. He keeps no staff, only one middle-aged man, usually a little out at elbows, who sits in a high pew in the hall and is rarely overburdened with business. Mr. Tulkinghorn is not in a common way. He wants no clerks. He is a great reservoir of confidences, not to be so tapped. His clients want ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... in the young season of the year, when the leaves are more delicate and less crowded; and especially in the early morning, when the light is most clear and penetrating. By the way, I do not think any man is compelled to bid good-bye to his childhood: every man may feel young in the morning, middle-aged in the afternoon, and old at night. A day corresponds to a life, and the portions of the one are "pictures in little" of the seasons of the other. Thus far man may rule even time, and gather up, in a perfect being, youth and age ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... to reproduce itself. Hans and his friend did not feel particularly or personally interested in the arrival of the Royal Commissioners, but they were sympathetic, and could not resist surrounding influences. Everywhere they overtook or passed, or somehow met with, cavaliers on the road—middle-aged and young—for old men were not numerous there at that time—all hastening to the same goal, the "city of the settlers," and all had the same tale to tell, the same hopes to express. "Things are going to be put right now. The Commissioners ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... gentleness—so much of truth, ingenuousness, and pure humanity, stamped on a face before. There was the fascination of the serpent there; and the longer I looked, the more pleasing became the countenance, and the longer I wished to protract my observation and delight. He was a middle-aged man—for a judge, he might be called young. His form was manly—his head massive—his forehead glorious and intellectual. His features were finely formed; but it was not these that seized my admiration, and, if I dare so express myself, my actual love, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... same evening, in places where no respectable man ought to go. All art, to this fellow, must have a certain bawdiness, or he cannot abide it. His favorite soprano, in the opera house, is not the fat and middle-aged lady who can actually sing, but the girl with the bare back and translucent drawers. Condescending to the concert hall, he is bored by the posse of enemy aliens in funereal black, and so demands a vocal soloist—that is, a gaudy creature of such advanced ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... receive an answer. I had been downtown, as usual, and on returning found a crowd assembled in front of my lodging-house. A woman had been run over and was being carried into our rooms. In the glimpse I caught of her I saw that she was middle-aged and was wrapped in a long black cloak. Later this cloak fell off, as her hat had done long before, and I perceived that her ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... we marched to where several broad-leaved trees grew in front of a large native house. Not far from the door of this house a fat, middle-aged and angry-looking man was seated on a stool, naked except for a moocha of catskins about his loins and a string of large ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... unfitness for the subordinate commands which I have mentioned, another classification may be made. In an agricultural community (and the greater part of our population was and is agricultural), a middle-aged farmer who had been thrifty in business and had been a country magistrate or a representative in the legislature, would be the natural leader in his town or county, and if his patriotism prompted him to set the example of enlisting, ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... the main group of buildings and to the eastward of them, but Bob ran down to the one into which the man had disappeared. His heart was all aflutter with excitement and expectancy. As he approached the door, it suddenly opened, and there appeared before him a tall, middle-aged man with full, sandy beard and a kindly face. Bob felt intuitively that this was the factor of the Post, and he said ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... of the zenana. As he had expected, the drivers halted their cattle in the shade of the trees; and the women, delighted to enjoy their liberty, alighted from the carts and scattered in the grove. Presently one of them, a middle-aged woman, approached the spot where ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty
... Mrs. Cunningham's "at home" was of no particular interest. The guests were all middle-aged people whom the M.P. had known in his boyhood and Margaret, in her presumptuous youth, thought it would be a very prosy affair, although it had made quite a sensation in quiet little Murraybridge, where people still called an "at home" a party plain ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... cultured. Eternal youth is in her heart, but she has a character gracefully to accept the years that Providence has allotted her and that only serve to make her more lovely. I have no patience with the assumption of extreme youth in the middle-aged, despite the limerick I have taken for ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... attachment to muscles are not excessively prominent, they are well marked, and taken together with the apparently well developed frontal sinuses, and the condition of the sutures, leave no doubt on my mind that the skull is that of an adult, if not middle-aged man. ...
— On Some Fossil Remains of Man • Thomas H. Huxley
... using every procedure that I felt would work. Was it because she was a better hypnotist? Perhaps! However, I'd like to recall at this time our discussion about subconscious responses. I'm inclined to feel that being hypnotized by a middle-aged female nurse created certain favorable unconscious responses which accounted for his going under hypnosis at that time. It created the initial break-through which was needed. I was able to hypnotize him easily at his next appointment, and he acquired self-hypnosis ...
— A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis • Melvin Powers
... her life. She could not remember the time when I had not been her firm friend. Between my first offering of chocolates and my last over a quarter of a century had lapsed. As far as a young woman can know a middle-aged man, she knew me outside in. If she came to me for my sympathy, she knew that she had the right. If she twitted me on my foibles, she knew that I granted her the privilege, with ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... several times. My views spread slowly in England and America; and I am much surprised to find them most commonly accepted by geologists, next by botanists, and least by zoologists. I am much pleased that the younger and middle-aged geologists are coming round, for the arguments from Geology have always seemed strongest against me. Not one of the older geologists (except Lyell) has been even shaken in his views of the eternal immutability of species. But so many of the younger men are turning round with ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... "A pretty-faced, middle-aged lady approached his desk, and I thought that I could see a rather awkward effort at a smile hang around the upper corners of his huge, black beard, as his eye caught her features through his spectacles, and he ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... a very remarkable Instance of the Effects of this Medicine, in the Case of one Gilchrist, a middle-aged Man, by Trade a Taylor; who was admitted into St. George's Hospital the 20th of July, 1763, for an old Flux, which had continued above six Months, and reduced him very low: He had taken a great many Medicines ...
— An Account of the Diseases which were most frequent in the British military hospitals in Germany • Donald Monro
... produced by cutting out the work to mount it on its wood panel, makes a somewhat repellent impression at the first glance. And this is in no way dispersed by studying Elsbeth's traits. But the painting itself is a tour-de-force. By sheer Quality Holbein has invested these portraits,—a middle-aged, coarse-figured, unamiable-looking woman, a very commonplace infant, and a bright-faced boy,—with the prestige inseparable from an achievement ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... was much more like a library than an office. The governor, a middle-aged, red-headed man a trifle inclined to portliness, had been seated in a huge reclining chair facing a teevee screen, but ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... government post for him. Middle-aged ladies were generally ready to befriend Konstantin Diomiditch; he knew well how to court them and was successful in coming across them. He was at this very time living with a rich lady, a landowner, Darya ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... safe. If you are an old man, you shall be my father. If you are a boy, you shall be my son. If your years are as many as mine, you shall be my brother. If you are an old woman, you shall be my mother. If you are a young one, you shall be my daughter. If you are middle-aged, you shall be my wife. So ...
— The Grey Fairy Book • Various
... gold placer owned by two middle-aged Englishmen. They had a small stamp-mill, run by mule power; and a large number of sluice-boxes. They always worked alone, and said they were developing the mine. No one had any idea that they were taking out much ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... nearest of these was the hamlet of Tredannick Wollas, where the cottages of a couple of hundred inhabitants clustered round an ancient, moss-grown church. The vicar of the parish, Mr. Roundhay, was something of an archaeologist, and as such Holmes had made his acquaintance. He was a middle-aged man, portly and affable, with a considerable fund of local lore. At his invitation we had taken tea at the vicarage and had come to know, also, Mr. Mortimer Tregennis, an independent gentleman, who increased ...
— The Adventure of the Devil's Foot • Arthur Conan Doyle
... was a middle-aged man whose curly hair made him the idol of all flappers. He was lazy, uncultivated, and ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... people, all dressed in sheets. Everybody saw at one pitiful glance that these were unfortunate householders, so suddenly roused from oblivion as to forget all their ordinary suburban dignity, probably barely escaping from ruined homes with their lives and a sheet each. There was a very old man, a middle-aged spinster, and then an enormous group of children of ages varying from two months to twenty years, followed by ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... dear gazelle!' quoted Amy, with a merry laugh; and before any more could be said, there entered a middle-aged gentleman, short and slight, with a fresh, weather-beaten, good-natured face, gray whiskers, quick eyes, and a hasty, undecided air in look and movement. He greeted Philip heartily, and the ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Omnibus drivers shouted in crescendo the names of their respective hotels. Poor Honor scarcely knew what to do. Cries of "Royal Hotel," "Windsor House," "Sleigh Miss," deafened her ears on all sides, but great was her relief when a prim middle-aged lady accompanied by a half bashful youth stepped up ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... and are Proof against all Temptations. But These have always been very scarce, and there are no Numbers of them any where, that one can readily go to. It would perhaps be an odious Disquisition, whether, among all the young and middle-aged Women who lead a Monastick Life, and are secluded from the World, there are Any that have, abstract from all other Motives, Religion enough to secure them from the Frailty of the Flesh, if they had an Opportunity to gratify ...
— An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War • Bernard Mandeville
... upstairs. He had noticed the light in the upper windows, and he knew where he would find his wife. Before he reached the nursery, he heard Katherine's voice. The door was a little open, and he could see every part of the charming domestic scene within the room. A middle-aged woman was quietly putting to rights the sweet disorder incident to the undressing of the baby. Katherine had played with it until they were both a little flushed and weary; and she was softly singing to the drowsy child ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... a hundred and fifty children under ten years of age. Some were in the very last stage of suffering, and were mere skeletons. There were comparatively few middle-aged men, showing that they must have either fallen in battle, or escaped the raids made on their villages by the slave-procurers. Some, again, were old women, who would, it might be supposed, from their very worthlessness, have been allowed to remain behind ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... hand, for a letter from Uncle John Rayburn—middle-aged, a bachelor, and an ex-army officer, retired by an incurable injury which did not make him the less the best uncle in the world—could not fail to be welcome. But she had not read a page before she dropped the sheet and stared helplessly and ...
— The Second Violin • Grace S. Richmond
... Cunningham, with that middle-aged air of authority laid over the fire and ability of youth, would be able, no doubt, to enforce his wishes in the matter after finding out the truth about it. But Cunningham did not come; and she remembered from a short experience of ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... left her face, and she was more beautiful than he had remembered, but he now looked at her with the practical as well as the romantic eye, for his middle-aged happiness was to depend largely on this capricious creature, and for an instant he wondered if he had not ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... remarkable fact that, in none of the great sees before the close of the second century, do we find any trace of the existence of a young, or even of a middle-aged bishop. When Ignatius of Antioch was martyred, he was verging on fourscore; Polycarp of Smyrna finished his career at the age of eighty-six; Pothinus of Lyons fell a victim to persecution when he was upwards of ninety; [509:1] Narcissus ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... the Slang Dictionary declares means a lady, and is "Anglo-Indian," is in general use among English Gipsies for aunt. It is also a respectful form of address to any middle-aged woman, ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... sir, anywhere," said Jock, amazed to find the Ogre of old times no venerable seignior, but a man scarce yet middle-aged. ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... man in the village, and done everything a fellow could do, seems to me, but in a little place like this there's absolutely no opening unless somebody dies. The good places are already filled by reliable, middle-aged men who have grown up in them. There's no use trying any longer. Every time I get my hopes up it's only to have them dashed to pieces—shipwrecked, you ...
— Flip's "Islands of Providence" • Annie Fellows Johnston
... were drawn, and only a faint translucence marked the windows and the transom above the door. As she stood there she heard a step behind her, and a man walked by in the direction of the house. He walked slowly, with a heavy middle-aged gait, his head sunk a little between the shoulders, the red crease of his neck visible above the fur collar of his overcoat. He crossed the street, went up the steps of the house, drew forth a ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... banker, the lawyer, and the pastor had made much of her, and now, as an independent woman of means, she stood first in the district. Guests deemed it an honor to have a personal interview with her. The governor of the State and the Supreme Court judges treated her like a private hostess; middle-aged Miss Trotter was considered as eligible a match as the proudest heiress in California. The old romantic fiction of her past was revived again,—they had known she was a "real lady" from the first! She received these attentions, as became her sane intellect and cool temperament, without pride, ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... Wildcat shut the door the Mud Turtle took advantage of his vocal freedom and emitted a strenuous howl. A middle-aged gentleman half way down the car stuck his head through the berth curtains. He called to the Wildcat. "Is she ...
— Lady Luck • Hugh Wiley
... impoverished family, as taxes rose in company with the rise of all values—conferred upon the Clarks some small consideration in Alton and made them feel the dignity and the tragedy of property ownership. John, who was nothing but a seedy, middle-aged clerk, none too careful of his appearance and uneasily aware of his failure, had ample excuse to himself for his shortcomings and willingness to live on a kind Government, because he had been hardly used by fate in the matter of his ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... however, that the untimely fall of the curtain does not greatly trouble us. There is no excitement of plot, no gripping anxiety as to whether this or that pair of lovers will ever reach the altar. Philip O'Donnell and Patrick, his devoted brother, and their caricature relative, the middle-aged Captain Con, all interest us as they abet each other in the affairs of love or politics, or as they discuss their native country or the temperament of the country which oppresses it; but they are chiefly ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... fresh display of ignorance, the native's contempt rose too high for words. He pointed to a middle-aged woman seated on the other side of the oven; and turning to his mates, let them know what an outlandish animal was in the room. Thereat the loud voices stopped, one by one, as the information penetrated the mass; and each ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... to have his trials and his difficulties, and to win through them or not, as the case may be. I am too old now to be a hard-hearted author, and so it is probable that he may not die of a broken heart. Those who don't approve of a middle-aged bachelor country doctor as a hero, may take the heir to Greshamsbury in his stead, and call the book, if it so please them, "The Loves and Adventures of Francis Newbold Gresham ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... so greatly to see it. The irrevocable step being taken, disillusion jumped to our eyes, as the French say, and nearly blinded us. Instead of the goddess we had anticipated, all we saw was, gazing at us out of the pages of an illustrated newspaper, an over-plump, middle-aged "party" with no figure and a fuzzy fringe, who stood smiling in an open French window, and herself completely filling it! The shock to our worship was so intense that it made most of us think several times before spending 7s. ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... acquaintance. But then the difficulty of entering if was very great. She had not sufficient fortune to vie with women who every year spent hundreds on their dress and on their dinner. She was handsome, but she was middle-aged. She had few friends of sufficient distinction to push her forward. And she was a wise woman. She thought it better to live where she enjoyed a good deal of popularity and consideration; where she could entertain in a modest way, where her husband had been well known, and she could glow with ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... 300 men, who had left Tsing-tau by railroad before Austria decided to join her ally in the Far East as well as in Europe, hurried back in small groups and in civilian clothes to escape detection. Squads of the Landsturm, the last reserve, middle-aged men who had left their families and their business in all parts of China joined the ranks and went to drilling in preparation for the hard fighting expected as soon as the invading fleet passed the outer defenses of the harbor. Altogether the defenders mustered three artillery ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... mental characteristics of Franklin Lane gives a picture of the man, without taking into account his temperament, for that colored every hour of his life, and every act of his career. The things that he knew seized his imagination. Even when a middle-aged man he sang, like a troubadour, of the fertility of the soil; he was stirred by the virtue and energy of what he saw and touched; his heart leaped at the thought of the power of water ready to be unlocked for man's use—most happy ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... think it would be better to look up our cartridges. Lafaele has blacked his face in the fashion of a warrior, saying he must be prepared to protect the place. He has a very sore toe, which he thinks is bewitched. He sent for the Samoan doctor, a grave middle-aged man, who announced that a devil, instigated by some enemy, has entered the toe and is now on the point of travelling up the leg, and unless it is checked in time will soon have possession ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... large cloister surrounds their burying-ground. The cloisters are very narrow and very long, and let into the cells, which are built like little huts detached from each other. We were carried into one, where lived a middle-aged man not long initiated into the order. He was extremely civil, and called himself Dom Victor. We have promised to visit him often. Their habit is all white: but besides this he was infinitely clean in his person; ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... man, leaning on the arm of a middle-aged woman, who seems less like his housekeeper than his domestic tyrant, offers an example of the fate of those who have lived in what is commonly called a state of single blessedness. A youth and maturity of pleasure have been followed by an old age ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... melancholy," and "wearing on her head a fantastic cap or turban;"—by No. 11, a bearded man, "wearing a conical Phrygian cap, his mouth wide open," and his expression "obstreperously animated;"—and by No. 12, "a middle-aged or old man, with a snub nose, high forehead, and thin, scrubby hair," we will go on to the fairer examples of ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... a wicked inclination in most people to suppose an old man decayed in his intellects. If a young or middle-aged man, when leaving a company, does not recollect where he laid his hat, it is nothing; but if the same inattention is discovered in an old man, people will shrug up their shoulders, and say, 'His memory ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... firmly around the waist and lifted her down the opposite side of the stile. Pen and Jim followed with a mad scramble. For a moment it looked as if the red-headed woman would murder Sara. But as she looked at his young beauty her middle-aged face was etched ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... of Regina C[oe]li was a middle-aged man with a kindly face, but under the new order ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... when he returned to his native Ithaca, was recognized by nobody." Their kinsfolk had long since given them up for dead; and when the three wayworn travellers arrived at the door of their own palace, the middle-aged men now wrinkled graybeards, the stripling now a portly man, all three attired in rather shabby clothes of Tartar cut, and "with a certain indescribable smack of the Tartar about them, both in air and accent," some words of explanation were needed to prove their identity. ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... noise of shoutings and barking dogs. However, the strange object of the strange-looking stranger in coming to the town, interested some of the wild native boys, and they rushed about to tell it, and in less than five minutes a nice neat-looking middle-aged man stood at my elbow and said he had a good horse and trap and for seven-and-sixpence would drive me to the hill, help me there to find what I wanted, and bring me back in time to catch the conveyance. Accordingly in a few minutes we were speeding out of the town drawn ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... was ten times worse in the confusing shadows. That brought them into a lane darkened by its high hedges, where there was nothing for it but to let Miss Ray tightly grapple her arm, while the songs came further and further on the wind, and Mary felt the conviction that middle-aged spinsters must reckon on being forgotten, and left behind alike by brothers, sisters, ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... virtuous, having devoted to my country a pound of my flesh. I write by lantern light in the tent, there having been no conference tonight on account of rain. Most of the squad are away, exploring the city; but Corder is already abed and sleeping— "as insurance," he said to me, explaining his middle-aged caution. I shall follow him soon. ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... All he knew was that by means of the trumpet attachment they were transmitted through the wooden partition and let loose into the larger air of the studio, where the waves of them had a singular effect on the brains of certain bright young women and sombre young and middle-aged men who were arranged in clasped couples: with the result that the brains of the women and men sent orders to their legs, arms, eyes, and they shifted to and fro in rhythmical movements. Each woman placed herself very close—breast against ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... illness. She had missed them all cruelly, as she had missed many things—her mother, her church, her small gayeties. She had thought at first that Frau Professor Bergmeister might allay her longing for these comfortable, middle-aged, placid-eyed friends of hers. But the Frau Professor Bergmeister had proved to be a frivolous and garrulous old woman, who substituted ease for comfort, and who burned a candle on the name-day of her first husband while her second was safely ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... and a murmur of thanks, took her seat in the recess of the window, where her mother was already sitting. For these two were mother and daughter; a middle-aged, comfortable-looking mother, with a mixture of firmness and good-nature in her face; and a daughter of some sixteen years, rather pale and slender, but active and intelligent in her appearance. Clarice's dark hair was smoothly brushed and turned up in a curl all ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... she laughed from cap to slipper. Mrs. Owen, thus deserted by her reserve, caught the infection and laughed still louder than Aunt Martha. Frank Wallace directly came in with a baritone which chimed well with the soprano of the young girls and the contralto of the middle-aged ladies. And Judge Owen, at last, having satisfied his judicial dignity by keeping his gravity longer than any one else, rung in with a gruff heavy bass that might have been contracted for in the damp ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... many things, Old, middle-aged, and new; Is the new better than the old, More bright, more wise, ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... Baroness doing dans cette galere? what fish did she expect to land out of these very stagnant waters? The game was evidently a deep one. Augustine could trust her; but the sense of walking in the dark betrayed itself in the physiognomy of this spare, sober, sallow, middle-aged person, who had nothing in common with Gertrude Wentworth's conception of a soubrette, by the most ironical scowl that had ever rested upon the unpretending tokens of the peace and plenty of the Wentworths. ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... Turner was also middle-aged. For had not the inscription bearing her name been on that door ever since I was a young boy—perhaps long before ...
— Futurist Stories • Margery Verner Reed
... figures of saints in their original niches. The choir is exquisitely beautiful. A fine new organ is erected, and was well played, and I never heard the cathedral service so well performed to that instrument only before. The services and anthems were middle-aged music, neither too old and dry, nor too modern and light ; the voices subdued, and exquisitely softened and sweetened by ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... middle-aged ease, the picture of a man who has nothing to do more hazardous than to take care of himself. His hands were exceedingly well-kept. His cravat, of a dull blue, was suited to his fresh-coloured face, and, though this is too far a quest for the casual eye, his socks also were blue, an admirable ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... speech!" roared a middle-aged, bold-eyed man, who had suggested the sally from the windows, and from the first had set the younger spirits an example of recklessness. "Hear to him!" He filled a glass of wine and waved it perilously ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... thought it was all up with the meeting—that all was lost in incurable confusion; and yet the gentlemen on the platform looked down upon the raging tempest below with calmness and composure, as a thing of course. Amidst the noise I saw a middle-aged gentleman, rising on the platform, deliberately take off his top-coat, and all was hushed—except at the outskirts of the assembly, where a great trade in talking and tobacco was constantly carried on. This gentleman's name was S.S. Prentiss, ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... mouthfuls, of the best possible ways of ending it. "Water!" but there was none near, and many cried for it who might have got it from the well at Blackfriars Wynd. "Bite the tail!" and a large, vague, benevolent, middle-aged man, more desirous than wise, with some struggle got the bushy end of Yarrow's tail into his ample mouth, and bit it with all his might. This was more than enough for the much-enduring, much perspiring shepherd, who, with a gleam of joy over ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... exalted condition of the youthful mind which is to itself pure wisdom's zenith, but to folk of coarse maturity and tough experience "calf-love," superior as it is to words and reason, must be left to its own course. The settled resolve of a middle-aged man, with seven large-appetited children, and an eighth approaching the shores of light, while baby-linen too often transmitted betrays a transient texture, and hose has ripened into holes, and breeches verify their name, and a ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... that my suggestion for the construction of a great glass flying-cage for living specimens of moths and butterflies started the trouble between these hitherto godly and middle-aged men. That, and the Carnegie Educational Medal were the causes which ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... on the top of his head, without bursting into tears. And yet at times, when we saw him close at hand, he looked quite old. His parched skin, glued to his temples, nourished his thin hair very inadequately. His forehead was polished like that of a middle-aged man. As for his eyes, they had no expression, and strangers often thought he was blind. His mouth alone gave character to his face. His sensitive lips expressed in turn a child-like joy and strange sufferings. The sound of his voice was ...
— Balthasar - And Other Works - 1909 • Anatole France
... daughter of a New York millionaire; she was young, beautiful, and arrogant. Nature gave her youth and beauty; marriage gave her the remaining quality. Was she not Lady Bazelhurst? What odds if Lord Bazelhurst happened to be a middle-aged, addle-pated ass? So much the better. Bazelhurst castle and the Bazelhurst estates (heavily encumbered before her father came to the rescue) were among the oldest and most coveted in the English market. Her mother noted, with unctuous joy, that the present ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... should command.... There followed then the strangest life for me. Lovers in the fullest sense we were and yet it was different from any love that I had ever known. When I ask myself why, in what, it differed I cannot answer. Two old grey middle-aged people who happened to suit one another.... Not romantic.... But I think in the end of it all the reason was that she never revealed herself to me entirely. I was always curious about her, always felt that other people knew ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... you, as a husband, father or brother, ever permit the females under your care to even take the chance of being RECRUITING OFFICERS for these sinks of perdition, THESE ANTE-CHAMBERS OF HELL. These places, dripping with the blood of hundreds and thousands of young and middle-aged men, who, but for their enchantment, might have been good and true men, and have filled honorable graves. These places have broken the hearts of thousands of wives, mothers and: sisters, when they have seen their loved ones bound in the fetters and chains of eternal death. These funnels, through ...
— There is No Harm in Dancing • W. E. Penn
... von Gerhard back home. I've scarcely seen him since I have been here. Famous specialists can't be bothered with middle-aged relatives of their college friends, can ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... ground by a revolution of public opinion only, as England gained in all her civil wars under the Stuarts. I rather believe, too, they will retain the ground gained, because it is defended by the young and the middle-aged, in opposition to the old only. The first party increases, and the latter diminishes daily, from the course of nature. You may suppose, that in this situation, war would be unwelcome to France. She will surely avoid it, if not forced into it by ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... with the stillness of a middle-aged disapproving woman, and looked at her charge. She believed that Alvina was just speaking at random. Yet she dared not check ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... fool she makes of herself!" she thought, as she contemplated her own sylph-like figure and wonderful freshness of complexion in the glass. "Don't I know Charlie Ferrola? he wants her to get him into fashionable life, and knows the way to do it. To think of that stout, middle-aged party imagining that Charlie Ferrola's going to die for her charms! it's too funny! How stout the dear old thing does get, ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... in the ardour of his studies, and his judgment and tastes also perhaps became cooler. The sunshine of the pea-garden faded away from Miss Martha, and poor Bell found himself engaged—and his hand pledged to that bond in a thousand letters—to a coarse, ill-tempered, ill-favoured, ill-mannered, middle-aged woman. ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... ought to be an epistle in commendation of the blessed faith he holds. But it is beyond question that many people who profess to be Christians are like grim Gorgons' heads, warning people off from having anything to do with Christianity. Why should a middle-aged clergyman walk about the streets with a sullen and malignant scowl always on his face, which at the best would be a very ugly one? Why should another walk with his nose in the air, and his eyes rolled up till ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... learnt from their defeat was not thrown away on the rebel party in Ireland. There was, naturally, widespread indignation in England at the spectacle of the youth of Ireland taking its ease at home and earning extravagantly high war-time wages while middle-aged bread-winners in England were compulsorily called to the colours; but the marvellously easy-going disposition of Englishmen submitted to the injustice with no more ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... was a middle-aged man, he told me that nothing in his whole life had made him feel worse than leaving little Arthur behind him, that day. "I can see the poor little fellow now," said he, "just as he looked standing at the gate, ...
— Arthur Hamilton, and His Dog • Anonymous
... was not in his tower, but was sitting by the side of the Ettrick, studying with deepest interest all the sights and sounds of nature which were going on around him. For he loved nature, this studious, quiet, middle-aged man, and the sight of the little minnows darting about in the water, and the trouts hiding under the stones, and the partridges coming whirring across the cornfields, gave him as much pleasure as all the wonderful sights which he ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... Ingham-Baker, blundering into the little feminine snare, "a naval man can scarcely marry. They are always so badly off. I suppose poor Fitz will not be able to support a wife until he is quite middle-aged." ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... When they saw I did not comply, they seemed to consult with one another what was to be done; and then our guide told me to carry them to the Alekee (chief). Accordingly I ordered them to be taken up, and we were conducted by him to a house, wherein were seated, in a circle, eight or ten middle-aged persons. To them I and my pigs being introduced, with great courtesy they desired me to sit down; and then I began to expatiate on the merits of the two pigs, explaining to them how many young ones the female would have at one time, and how soon these would multiply to some hundreds. ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... inruption of coffee and liqueurs until the sacred wine had been in reverent circulation for twenty minutes. Half-way through, warming to his new friend, he rang for a bottle of wood port first known to history in 1823, when it was already a middle-aged wine, and fortified from every ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... condition—with what ardour must she have hailed the advent of what, with all its shortcomings, was a book worth gold. Perhaps she went to Vauxhall with it in her muff, and shook it triumphantly at some middle-aged lady of her acquaintance. Perhaps she lived long enough to see one great novel after another break forth to lighten the darkness of life. She must have looked back on the pompous and lascivious pages of Eliza ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... figure slowly. A middle-aged man, loosely-dressed, hair turning gray, dark-complexioned, with a scar on his cheek, a scar such as a slash with a keen-edged knife might have made. She approached and passed him; she did not look at him; he did not look at her; he appeared to be quite absorbed in absently cutting and fashioning ...
— A Bachelor's Dream • Mrs. Hungerford
... can almost sympathise with a middle-aged grumbler, who, after reading Mr. Palgrave's memoir and introduction, should exclaim, 'Why was there not such an edition of Scott ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... large nor handsome, but it stood in a fine garden and had an air of solid well-being. As soon as they had passed the gates, they were met by a middle-aged woman carrying a child of two years old, an infant of wonderfully hearty appearance. At the sight of its father it chuckled and crowed. Dagworthy took it from the woman's arms, and began a game which looked not a little dangerous; with surprising ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... other? Far from it; but what cannot escape from you inspires you with no haste to obtain it. Josiana wanted to remain free, David to remain young. To have no tie until as late as possible appeared to him to be a prolongation of youth. Middle-aged young men abounded in those rakish times. They grew gray as young fops. The wig was an accomplice: later on, powder became the auxiliary. At fifty-five Lord Charles Gerrard, Baron Gerrard, one of the ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... time, two new inmates were added to the manor house family. Young Cecil Vyvyan, a cousin of Anna's, who was of the same age as herself, and his tutor, Dr. Strickland, a grave, middle-aged Scotch doctor of philosophy. The boy's parents were in India, which caused the widow to suggest to them that he should, for a few years, make his home with her, in order that she might watch over his health, which ...
— Peak's Island - A Romance of Buccaneer Days • Ford Paul
... formed the choir, and behind them were other benches devoted to the use of the Squire's household, whose devotions were screened from the gaze of the common worshippers by no curtain, and who, therefore—maids, middle-aged women, and spruce men-servants—provided a source of interested rumination when heads were raised above the wooden partitions, and bonnets, mantles, and broadcloth could be examined, and ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... opportunities had been neglected in the heyday of his youth. Wealth and lady of limitations in themselves would have been quite enough to cause the Nonconformist Victorian mind to regard a young—or middle-aged—male as likely to represent a fearsome moral example, but these three temptations combined with good looks and a certain mental brilliance were so inevitably the concomitants of elegant iniquity that the results might be ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... been kept gloriously in the little peninsula, though no case was known of any earl's attaining his majority as being already Earl of Cairnforth. The Montgomeries were usually a long-lived race, and their heirs rarely came to their titles till middle-aged ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... clothes, short skirts, knickerbockers, trousers. He might, of course, some day choose a profession which would carry him to some distant land: to an Indian jungle or a West African swamp. But by that time his parents would be middle-aged people. And how would their love be then? Dion knew that now, when Rosamund and he were still young, both less than thirty, he would give a hundred Robins, even if they were all his own Robins, to keep his one Rosamund. That was probably ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... must eat, and the Concordia, being the only restaurant, daily entertained several citizens, besides guests staying in the house. One of these visitants excited my curiosity; he was a middle-aged man of austere countenance; shabby in attire, but with the bearing of one accustomed to command. Arriving always at exactly the same moment, he seated himself in his accustomed place, drew his hat over his brows, and began to munch bread. No word did I hear him speak. As soon as ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... her out of the cathedral and saw the old woman speak to a middle-aged, round-shouldered, ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... according to the age, the sex, and the manners of the walker. It is impossible to mistake a child's patter for the tread of a grown person. The step of the young man, strong and free, differs from the heavy, sedate tread of the middle-aged, and from the step of the old man, whose feet drag along the floor, or beat it with slow, faltering accents. On a bare floor a girl walks with a rapid, elastic rhythm which is quite distinct from the graver step of the elderly woman. I have laughed over ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... trouble. She was impressed. It was quite another matter however, whether he would have been pleased to know that the impression was due to his resemblance to a Spanish conspirator, whose object was to destroy the Monarchy and the Church, as had been the object of the middle-aged conspirator—the girl's father—who had the good fortune to escape from justice. It is probable that if Jean Jacques had known these facts, his story would never have been written, and he would have died in course of time with twenty children and a seat in the legislature; for, in spite of his ardent ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... produce of a garden, every middle-aged person of observation may perceive, within his own memory, both in town and country, how vastly the consumption of vegetables is increased. Green-stalls in cities now support multitudes in a comfortable state, while gardeners get fortunes. ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... these words he ran forward, jumped over the iron hurdle which separated their lawn from the park, nor stopped his quick pace until he reached a middle-aged man of very prepossessing appearance, though certainly not unsullied by the dust, for assuredly the guest had ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... said the old gentleman, now thoroughly determined, by this time looking in the open window of the private office. "Good-morning, sir," stiffly to the middle-aged ...
— Five Little Peppers Grown Up • Margaret Sidney
... have followed, to make sure, roused into an intolerable jealousy at the idea of a secret meeting between Mlle. d'Arency and him, but that I now heard the full melodious voice of the lady herself. Looking around, I saw her on the steps of the church, with her middle-aged companion. At that ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... the cause of his uneasiness. Suddenly a loud bay from a favourite hound that was dozing on the hearth announced the approach of a stranger. Oliver advanced with a quick step into the courtyard, and soon re-entered leading in a middle-sized, middle-aged personage, slightly formed, whose pale and saintly features looked haggard and apprehensive, while his eye wavered to and fro, less perhaps with curiosity ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... the blue soldiers stood watchfully, his hands upon an Enfield rifle. The other, a middle-aged, weather-beaten sergeant-major who had been leaning against the rail, straightened himself and spoke, being now within a few feet of ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... show him in," I said lazily, and a few moments later a tall, smartly-dressed, middle-aged Englishman, in a navy serge yachting suit, entered, and bowing, enquired whether ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... astonishment to mark the Italian's age. For Vergilio Mannetti was an ancient man. He had been tall, but now stooped, and, though not decrepit, yet he needed assistance, and was accompanied and attended by a middle-aged Italian. The traveller displayed a distinguished bearing. He had a brown, clean-shaved face, the skin of which appeared to have shrunk rather than wrinkled, yet no suggestion of a mummy accompanied this physical accident. His hair was still plentiful, and white as snow; ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... with one arm,) there reigns the people that will be like to put you to death for not being a vagrant, for not being a robber, for not being armed and houseless. There is comfort in that,—health, comfort, and strength, to one who is dying from very weariness of that poor, dear, middle-aged, deserving, accomplished, pedantic, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... it seems), and to the comfortably furnished Victorian drawing-room a middle-aged maid-servant in cap and apron brings a lamp, and proceeds to draw blinds and close curtains. To do this she passes the fire-place, where before a pleasantly bright hearth sits, comfortably sedate, an elderly lady whose countenance and attitude ...
— Angels & Ministers • Laurence Housman
... from her forward vision as he replaced his hat. Of himself he was nothing to Alice, except for the gracious circumstance that he had shown strong consciousness of a pretty girl. He was middle-aged, substantial, a family man, securely married; and Alice had with him one of those long acquaintances that never become emphasized by so much as five minutes of talk; yet for this inconsequent meeting she had enacted a little ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... explaining me," Serviss reasoned. "I wish I could hear what she says. It would be amusing to know myself as she sees me. I hope she doesn't think me middle-aged as ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... that of a middle-aged, fine-looking man, his head covered with the fur, ear-lapped cap that Norwegians affect, even in the tropics. The eyes were wide open, the face discolored. In the last gasp of suffocation the set of false teeth had been forced half-way out of his mouth, distorting ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... "will" found herself in a large and lofty room, at the top of which, with his back to the light, sat a most agreeable-looking middle-aged gentleman, who, as they advanced, rose with a politeness that one does not generally expect from officials on a fixed salary, and, bowing, asked them ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... those evenings which are the peculiar glory of the early English summer. It seemed to me that many thousands of people were passing along that road towards the country. Parties of laughing boys and girls pedalled northwards on bicycles, swerving in and out through the traffic. Stout, middle-aged men, with fat, middle-aged women beside them, drove sturdy ponies, or lean, high-stepping horses, in curious old-fashioned gigs. Motor cyclists, young men with outstretched chins and set faces, sped by us, ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... middle-aged money-making lawyer, who bought his legal cap and ink of her, asked her across ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... regards the latter, the Staff officers had reason to be reassured. No living journalist could have reproduced the scientific account of the sighting arrangements given to us in an esoteric yet quite comprehensible language by the high priest of these guns, who was a middle-aged artillery Captain. It lasted about twenty minutes. It was complete, final, unchallengeable. At intervals the artillery Captain himself admitted that such-and-such a part of the device was tres beau. It was. There was only one ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett
... of Fortune, at least the young and middle-aged, are apt to pride themselves a little too much upon their Dress, and consequently to value others in some measure upon the same Consideration. With what Confusion is a Man of Figure obliged to return ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... followed each story with painful interest; I did not ask myself if I believed the dismal tales. I listened, and fear grew upon me—the blind, irrational fear of our nursery days. I am sure most of the other ladies present, young or middle-aged, were affected by the circumstances under which these traditions were heard, no less than by the wild and fantastic character of them. But with them the impression would die out next morning, when the ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... newspaper on the table and disclosed his entire face for the first time. A middle-aged man, he seemed to be, with iron-gray hair and a smoothly shaven, rather handsome face. From his dress he appeared to be a prosperous business man and it was evident that he was a guest of the hotel, for he wandered through the lobby—in which many other ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... hire a middle-aged couple to take care of house and boy. Their name was Mitchell; they were childless and regretted it; they lavished on Jimmy the special love and care that comes ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... A middle-aged man, stiff-set, heavy-jawed, with a strong step, and a short manner; obviously proud, reserved, silent, slightly imperious, self-centred, self-opinionated, well-educated in the kind of knowledge all such men must possess, but narrow ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... the long corridor beyond this that the "stuck-vats" live—puncheons which hold easily some thousand gallons or so, and are of a solemn rotundity calculated to strike awe into the beholder's heart. Here is white constantia, red constantia, young constantia, middle-aged constantia, and constantia so old as to be a liqueur almost beyond price. When it has been kept all these years, the sweetness by which it is distinguished becomes so absorbed and blended as ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... place in the previous year, and in any case was within a few months of the same time. Contrary to the usual Puritan rule, which gave to most men from two to four wives, Sarah outlived her first husband, and married again, when a middle-aged but ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell |
