"Stepmother" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 1610, and his early days would have been wretched enough, if his elastic spirits had allowed him to give way to misery. His father was a good-natured, weak-minded man, who on the death of his first wife married a second, who, as one hen will peck at another's chicks, would not, as a stepmother, leave the little Paul in peace. She was continually putting her own children forward, and ill-treating the late 'anointed' son. The father gave in too readily, and young Paul was glad enough to be set free from his unhappy home. There may be some excuse ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... descendants sojourners only, whose fathers have come from another country; but they are the children of the soil, dwelling and living in their own land. And the country which brought them up is not like other countries, a stepmother to her children, but their own true mother; she bore them and nourished them and received them, and in her bosom they now repose. It is meet and right, therefore, that we should begin by praising the land which ...
— Menexenus • Plato
... if they like it better?" Lvov said, with his beautiful smile, touching her hand. "Anyone who didn't know you would think you were a stepmother, not a true mother." ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... looked at her through those haunted eyes—a little boy, terrified and forsaken. "Oh, I have no right to soil you with it. But I came back to tell some one about it—I had to, I had to. I had to wait until father and Audrey went away. I knew they'd hate to see me—she was my stepmother, you know, and she always loathed me, and he never cared. In East Africa I used to stay awake at night thinking that I might die, and that no one in England would ever care—no one would know how I had loved her. It was worse ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... shook her head. "Her own mother was dead and her stepmother wouldn't let her come. She had young children of her own. Last month she tried to end it all. She won't be here much longer. The doctor says she'll hardly live six months. If we can get her in ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... a way out of these troubles. He had been commissioned by an old lady of Leipzig, called Fraulein Leplay, a rich and very miserly old maid, to find a cheap lodging in Paris for her and for his stepmother, with whom she intended to travel. As our apartment, though not spacious, was larger than we actually needed, and had very quickly become a troublesome burden to us, we did not hesitate for a moment ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... national hatred of France for England. Beaumarchais, in a later day, had given it back its true poetry by adapting it for the French theatre and putting it into the mouth of a page, who pours out his heart to his stepmother. Just now it was simply the air that rose and fell. There were no words; the plaintive voice of the singer touched ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... mother, as well as a girl, but only a stepmother, and apparently a detail; for the girl has the money and the strength of will. The two are stopping in a pension near Madame de Blanchemain's house. The girl is a Miss McNamarra, with freckles and no figure, but engaged to an officer, and consequently sympathetic. ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... too, they seem to renounce all authority and make final appeal to the inward witness of the Holy Spirit;[13] and yet Protestantism would be mistaken in seeking its ancestors among them. No, they desired to die as they had lived, in the communion of that Church which was as a stepmother to them and which they yet loved with that heroic passion which some of the ci-devant nobles brought in '93 to the love of France, governed though she was by Jacobins, and poured ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... Contessina Emilia Viviani, whom, accompanied by Pacchiani, Claire, then Mary, and then Shelley, visited at the Convent of Sant' Anna. This beautiful girl, with profuse black hair, Grecian profile, and dreamy eyes, placed in the convent till she should be married, to satisfy the jealousy of her stepmother, became naturally an object of extreme interest to the Shelleys. Many visits were paid, and Mary invited her to stay with them at Christmas. Shelley was convinced that she had great talent, if not genius. Shelley and Mary sent her books, and Claire ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... I'm a doddering old fool," he said, "but, by gad, Tony, the most sensible thing I ever did in my life was to marry Bridie Ma-lone! If you're wise you'll take on your stepmother as housekeeper here and general manager after I'm gone. Not that I'm thinking of going. I'm seventy-two. You know that, Tony. But living as I do now, without a single thing to bother me, I'm good for another twenty years—or thirty. In fact, I don't ...
— Lady Bountiful - 1922 • George A. Birmingham
... soothing effect upon his nerves that a cat's purring has upon some people's. He began to think that he should be fortunate if he could win her, for his own sake. Yesterday he had looked upon her more as a possible stepmother for Molly; to-day he thought more of her as a wife for himself. The remembrance of Lord Cumnor's letter gave her a very becoming consciousness; she wished to attract, and hoped that she was succeeding. Still they only ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... do something to help her brother—a paragraph in Fashion, he could get one in. For fear of wounding her he did not ask if her brother was a decorative painter, employed by a firm, or an artist who exhibited pictures. Her father had married again. She did not like her stepmother, and that had determined her to go ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... her opinion was asked before making peace or war. But when a few months had passed the king began to have doubts as to whether the minister's choice had really been a wise one, and he noticed that his children lived more and more in their palace and never came near their stepmother. ...
— The Crimson Fairy Book • Various
... she's twenty-six. She certainly is not more than three years your senior, a mere nothing, if you wish to make her Mrs. Holbrook;" and Guy's dark eyes scanned curiously the doctor's face, as if seeking there for the secret of his proud young stepmother's anxiety to visit plain Mrs. Conner that afternoon. But the doctor only laughed merrily at the idea of his being father to Guy, his college chum and ...
— Aikenside • Mary J. Holmes
... Your Imperial Majesty must receive the assurance of the many qualities of mind and heart that distinguish the latter. What might seem the exaggerated affection of a father cannot be suspected from the pen of a stepmother. Be sure, my brother, that my happiest days will be those that come to you in consequence of the alliance that is about to unite us. Accept the friendship and high esteem with which I am Your Imperial Majesty's affectionate sister ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... what I said," replied her stepmother, nonchalantly, "and you are his murderess, girl, quite as much as though you had plunged a dagger in his heart. Your elopement caused him to have a terrible hemorrhage. He knew all the details about it in less than an hour's time, learning from one of the servants how you stole out ...
— Mischievous Maid Faynie • Laura Jean Libbey
... an amiable stepmother-in-law!" he called after her. "I'll be careful about proposing ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... proposed to take his friend to Audley Court, but had a letter from his cousin Alicia, saying that her stepmother had taken into her head that she was too ill to entertain, though in reality there was ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... looking vaguely and wistfully into the fire. 'How unfortunate all this is—that horrid, horrid old man. But supposing he had asked you to marry him—he wasn't nice, but you are older than I, and if you had married him you would have become, in a way, my stepmother. But what a charming stepmother! Oh, how ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... "He ran over my stepmother, then brought her home. I let him in. We were engaged next day. Here's the ring, one and one-half carats, white!—now, what ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... which he had already ruled over in the time of his father Egbert. Ethelwulf died a few months afterwards, leaving Kent to Ethelbert, his second surviving son. The following year, to the horror and indignation of the people of the country, Ethelbald married his stepmother Judith, but two years afterwards died, and Ethelbert, King of Kent, again united Wessex to his own dominions, which consisted of Kent, Surrey, and Sussex. Ethelbert reigned but a short time, and at his death Ethelred, his next brother, ascended the throne. Last ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... is left with a cruel stepmother, who has a daughter who is bad-tempered and disagreeable, and extremely jealous of her. She becomes the Cinderella of the house, is ill-treated and beaten, but submits patiently. At last the harsh stepmother is urged by her daughter to get rid of her. It is winter, in the month ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... am perishing!" she said in French, dropping down before Orlov, and laying her head on his knees. "I am miserable, I am exhausted. I can't bear it, I can't bear it. . . . In my childhood my hateful, depraved stepmother, then my husband, now you . . . you! . . . You meet my mad love with coldness and irony. . . . And that horrible, insolent servant," she went on, sobbing. "Yes, yes, I see: I am not your wife nor your friend, but a woman you don't respect because she has become ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... visiting his house. To which the latter answered simply, "Yes." He did not, however, really like the Prince's visit, and was reluctantly telling his fellow attendants that, owing to a certain circumstance which had taken place at Iyo-no-Kami's[47] residence, his wife (Ki-no-Kami's stepmother) had taken up her abode with him that very evening, and that the rooms ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... daughter." And the prince inquired of the messenger, saying, "The son of which of the princes is it?" And he replied to him, "It is the son of an officer, who has come as a fugitive from the land of Egypt, fleeing from before his stepmother when she had children." Then the chief of Naharaina was exceeding angry; and he said: "Shall I indeed give my daughter to the Egyptian fugitive? Let him go back whence he came." And one came to tell the youth, "Go back to the place thou camest from." ...
— Egyptian Literature
... to have been the cruel stepmother rather than the mother of many animals, and in some cases not the stepmother, ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... her confidant and gossip, he knew his next step of promotion would necessarily be to the degree of her lover; and in that belief resolved to play the same game with Mademoiselle Wilhelmina, whose complexion was very much akin to that of her stepmother; indeed they resembled each other too much to live upon any terms of friendship or even decorum. Fathom, in order to enjoy a private conversation with the young lady, never failed to repeat his visit every afternoon, till at length he had the pleasure of finding her disengaged, ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... till long after the slaves had lighted the three-branched silver lamps that Demetrius appeared. His stepmother received him kindly and began to talk on indifferent subjects; but he replied with ill-disguised impatience, for he had not come to chatter and gossip. She fully understood this; but it pleased her to check and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... have preferred his remaining in the first or second stages of behaviour; for his violent love puzzled and frightened her. Her uncle neither helped nor hindered the love affair, though it was going on under his own eyes. Frank's stepmother had such a variable temper, that there was no knowing whether what she liked one day she would like the next, or not. At length she went to such extremes of crossness that Alice was only too glad ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... for a man to marry his wife's mother or his father's wife, because to him they are in the position of a mother, though in this case too our statement applies only after the relationship has finally terminated; otherwise, if a woman is still your stepmother, that is, is married to your father, the common rule of law prevents her from marrying you, because a woman cannot have two husbands at the same time: and if she is still your wife's mother, that is, if her daughter is still married to you, you cannot marry her because you cannot ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... dream, I never could entirely settle. The circumstance was this. I had been cutting up some caper or other —I think it was trying to crawl up the chimney, as i had seen a little sweep do a few days previous; and my stepmother who, somehow or other, was all the time whipping me, or sending me to bed supperless, —my mother dragged me by the legs out of the chimney and packed me off to bed, though it was only two o'clock in the afternoon of the 21st ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... home in distrust and excitement. A few low murmurs from Hepworth, bursts of grief from Lady Clara, and dead silence on the part of Rachael Closs, attended the first disagreement that had ever set the stepmother and daughter in opposition. ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... obvious that it is now generally forgotten. If God is a Father, it is the soul that chooses Him; if Nature is a mother, it is the man who chooses to regard her as such, since to the greater number it is well known she seems but a stepmother, and a cruel one at that. Elective affinities, chosen kindred!—"tell me what company you keep, and I will tell you who you are" (what you are worth). How many artist waifs one sees nowadays! lost souls, who choose to be nobody's children, and think they can teach themselves all they ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... care; the whole household squalid, cheerless, and utterly void of elevating inspirations... Only when the family had "moved" into the malarious backwoods of Indiana, the mother had died, and a stepmother, a woman of thrift and energy, had taken charge of the children, the shaggy-headed, ragged, barefooted, forlorn boy, then seven years old, "began to feel like a human being." Hard work was his early lot. When a mere boy he had to help in supporting the family, either on his father's ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... power as emperor. The worst character is given to Zeno by the national historians. His conduct was so vile, and his government so discredited by irruptions of the Huns on the Danube, and of Saracens in Mesopotamia, that his wife's stepmother Verina, the widow of Leo I., conspired against him, and was able to set her brother Basiliscus on the throne. Zeno took flight; Basiliscus was proclaimed emperor. He declared himself openly against the ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... seems to set as severe tasks as the wicked stepmother in the fairy tales," said Mr. Cross. "She decrees that you are each to be given a small box of peas and beans and buttons mixed together, and that you are to sort them before you start to run the race. Will you please all kneel on ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... once a little brother who took his Sister by the hand, and said, "Since our own dear mother's death we have not had one happy hour; our stepmother beats us every day, and, when we come near her, kicks us away with her foot. Come, let us wander forth into the wide world." So all day long they travelled over meadows, fields, and stony roads. By the evening they ...
— Grimm's Fairy Stories • Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
... was pretty good to me when I was a boy. She dried my mop of hair for me once so my stepmother would not know I'd been in swimming. Tell her I sent the cream to her. Say, you were right about Miss M'ri making the best cream in the country. It used to be a chronic pastime with her. That's how I guessed what you had when you said ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... can expect you would have both of us. Love is covetous; I must have all of you; heart for heart is an equal trick. In short, I am younger, I think handsomer, and am sure I love you better. She has been my stepmother these fifteen years: You think that is her face you see, but it is only a daubed vizard; she wears an armour of proof upon it; an inch thick of paint, besides the wash. Her face is so fortified, that you can make no approaches ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... generous and let you have it for nothing. She told me she thought she recognized you, but until she heard the name, she supposed she must be mistaken; that it was only a remarkable resemblance between my stepmother's maid and a girl who'd run away under very peculiar circumstances from the house of a friend of hers. What do ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... hardy and rather quarrelsome. Thord their father had married in his old age, and his then wife was not the mother of these two. She was very much against her stepsons, especially Thorbjorn, because he was intractable and headstrong. One day when he was playing at "tables", his stepmother came up and saw that he was playing at "hnettafl"; they played with big peg pieces. She considered that very lazy of him and spoke some words to which he answered hastily. She took up the piece and struck him on the cheek bone with ...
— Grettir The Strong - Grettir's Saga • Unknown
... Cymbeline, king of Britain, describes her own condition at the beginning of the story. The theme of the long and complicated tale that follows is her fidelity under this affliction. Neither her father's anger, nor the stealthy deception of the false stepmother, nor the base lust of her brutish half-brother Cloten, nor the seductive tongue of the villainous Italian Iachimo, her husband's friend; nor even the knowledge of her own husband's sudden suspicion of her, and his instructions to have her slain, shake in the least ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... human relations, especially with children. In Cinderella the child is held by the unkind treatment inflicted upon Cinderella by her Stepmother and the two haughty Sisters. He notes the solicitude of the Mother of the Seven Kids in guarding them from the Wolf. In the Three Bears he observes a picture of family life. A little child, on listening to The Three Pigs for the first time, was overwhelmed by ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... stood a little awkwardly, before the boy went in to say good-bye to his stepmother and go off with his father to ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... to meet Alma and her stepmother at Leipzig, at a Gewandhaus concert. He was invited to go with them to hear the boys' motet at the Thomaskirche; and with this intercourse began the change in their relations from mere acquaintance to something ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... Redfields. Traitorous as it seemed, it was a great relief—a joy—to know that her own mother, her real mother, had been "nice." "She must have been nice or Lize would not have said so," she reasoned, recalling that her stepmother had admitted her ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... that had been used for years by their mothers and grandmothers to amuse the children, and had always been known in the country. There was the little girl and the wolf, and the sleeping beauty, and the wicked stepmother, and the girl whom the prince knew by her tiny foot, and many, many more. The shipwrecked guests wondered much, and at last came to the conclusion that they and their hosts were distant cousins; for they remembered hearing from some aged men that ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 34, July 1, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... I shouldn't grieve if that stepmother of yours drank herself to death. O Lord, when I see what you have to go through I am ashamed of myself. But you were made one way and I ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... godmother, who never forgot anybody, had not packed me into a carriage with some of the ladies who were accompanying Mademoiselle. That lady had a suit of her own, and went about quite independently of her father and her stepmother, who, though a Princess of Lorraine, was greatly contemned and ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... arrival, when my father told us in the morning, that, from the actions of the horses, he perceived there were Indians lurking about in the woods, and he said to me, "John, you must not go out of the house to-day." After giving strict charge to my stepmother to let none of the little children go out, he went to the field, with the negroes, and my elder brother, to ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... He lived in a dormitory uptown, but I used to see him in the restaurant, and then fairly often we had dates after I got off work. He has people out in the Midwest somewhere—a father and a stepmother. He was always sour and close-mouthed about them, even before he got thrown out of NYU. Now he ...
— It's like this, cat • Emily Neville
... found many powerful opponents, who, not understanding the nature of the newly-born babe, strove to strangle it. But the infant grew into a healthy child in spite of its cruel stepmother, and cried so loudly and talked so strangely that the world was forced to listen to its utterances. These were regarded with distrust and aversion by the theologians of the day, for they were supposed to be in opposition ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... said that if Pedro was not absolutely the most cruel of men, he was undoubtedly the greatest blackguard who ever sat upon a throne, and King Juan was far from meriting similar condemnation. Sibyl de Foix, his stepmother, had exercised so strange and wonderful a power over his father, that when Juan came to the throne he was more than eager to turn upon this enchantress and make her render up the wide estates which the late king had been prevailed upon to leave to her. It is actually asserted that ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... respectability. Respectability's his god—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Always has been. He'd sacrifice everything to respectability—except the lovely Lobley. It's not respectable in a respectable family for a girl to leave home on account of her stepmother. And so he's in a state, if you please!... If he wanted to carry on with Mrs. Lobley, let him carry on with her. But no! That's not respectable. He's just got ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... experiment of bringing together two families for once succeeded. Mr. Smith's two eldest daughters, Jean and Janet, fervent in piety, unwearied in kind deeds, were well qualified both to appreciate and to attract the stepmother; and her son, on the other hand, seems to have found immediate favour in the eyes of Mr. Smith. It is, perhaps, easy to exaggerate the ready-made resemblances; the tired woman must have done much to fashion ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... practically what I am, isn't it? (Whimsically) I've never been a stepmother before. (Persuasively) Couldn't you let me be proud ...
— Second Plays • A. A. Milne
... to quit the house, and wait for him outside. He, in return, begged me most urgently to allow myself to be introduced to Lady Edbury, the stepmother of Lord Destrier, now Marquis of Edbury; and, using conversational pressure, he adjured me not to slight this lady, adding, with more significance than the words conveyed, 'I am taking the tide, Richie.' ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was the second son of an English nobleman. A German lady was his first wife, and my mother. Left a widower, he married for the second time; the new wife being of American birth. She took a stepmother's dislike to me—which, in some degree at least, I ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... that sent me these books for another purpose. But there ye shall read—in Asser and the Saxon Chronicles—how that the old Queens of Saxondom, when that they were humble or were wives coming after the first, sat not upon the throne to be crowned and sacred, but—so it was with Judith that was stepmother to King Alfred, and with some others whose names in this hurry I may not discover nor remember in my mind—they were, upon some holidays, shewn to the people as ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... with Cousin Moodey the history of Rebekah's courtship, and then prayed over it, and over his own wooing. Madam Rogers and Madam Leverett much congratulated him, and his daughter Judith visited her prospective stepmother. But alas! the lady was coy and averse ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... altogether. The dining-room, a big sparsely furnished room, had doors both front and back, and looked on the yard behind as well as on the garden. The table was laid for a substantial tea. Mrs. Warner, Bessie's stepmother, a good-looking woman of thirty, was at the head of the table with the tea-pot in her hand, but the children had left their places and clustered round her; two other girls of sixteen and eighteen were clinging to one another ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... mothers to stubborn daughters, intimating they will come under the hands of a stepmother, who, it is likely, will not ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... by themselves in an inner room, and from a small court-yard between these apartments, the dishes were served to both tables. Don Balthazar de Castillo, uncle to the bride, acted as usher of the hall at this entertainment. I came to the house towards the end of supper, to attend my father and stepmother home at night. I went to the upper end of the hall, where the governor sat, who was pleased to make me sit down on the chair beside him, and reached me some comfits and sweet drink, with which boys are best pleased, I being then fourteen ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... times—and she told me lamentable things. She was absolutely alone in London, and hadn't had sufficient food for weeks; had sold all she could of her clothing; and so on. Her home was in Birmingham; she had been driven away by the brutality of a stepmother; a friend lent her a few pounds, and she came to London with an unfinished novel. Well, you know, this kind of thing would be enough to make me soft-hearted to any girl, let alone one who, to begin with, was absolutely my ideal. When she began to express ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... was by no means devoid of gratitude, though her pride and prejudice were hard to conquer. Expressions of gratitude and affection toward their young stepmother were far less frequent from her than from her brother and sister, but were perhaps all the more valued because ...
— Elsie's New Relations • Martha Finley
... At forty a man is a fool or a farmer, or both; at fifty the pull of the land is mighty; at sixty it has full possession of him; at seventy it draws him down with other forces than that which Newton discovered, and at eighty it opens for him and kindly tucks the sod around him. Mother Earth is no stepmother, but warm and generous to all, and I think a fellow is lucky who comes to her for long years of bounty before he is compelled ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... His stepmother said of him: "He read everything he could lay his hands on, and when he came across a passage that struck him, he would write it down on boards, if he had no paper, and keep it before him until he could get paper. Then he would copy it, look at it, commit it to ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... interest; and the philology generally, both grammar and criticism, was singularly narrow, uninteresting, and useless. Of what conceivable advantage can it have been to any human being to know the name of the mother of Hecuba, of the nurse of Anchises, of the stepmother of Anchemolus, the number of years Acestes lived, and how many casks of wine the Sicilians gave to the Phrygians? Yet these were the dispicable minutiae which every schoolmaster was then expected to have at his ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... me while I have such a noble humbug as this to contemplate. Ah! and here she is as Siebel. What a goddess! Just look at her. Adorable! There, this shall stand upon my table, and the other shall be hung in my bedroom. Then, my dear Zoe, you will be safe from a stepmother. For I am your father now. Please ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... brought you where none may hear what I wish to say to you. I am Mave, the daughter of the king of Erin. By the magic arts of my cruel stepmother I was changed into a trout, and cast into this lake a year and a day before the evening when you restored me to the waters the second time. If you had not done so the first night the otter brought me to you I ...
— The Golden Spears - And Other Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... enough. This astounding stepmother had been her humble but faithful friend. Lightfoot was a ruling woman spirit wherever she was, and she knew it, though she bowed at all times to the rule of strength as the only law. Nevertheless she knew how to get her own way. With Moonface, everything was easy for her and she found ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... his set or circle, and he felt out of place and embarrassed. He had not meant this: a mere afternoon of pleasant walking with Arabella, that was all he had meant. He did not stay longer than to speak to her stepmother, a simple, quiet woman without features or character; and bidding them all good night plunged with a sense of relief into the track over ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... however, had not gone to sleep, for very hunger, and so they overheard what the stepmother said to their father. Grethel wept bitterly, and said to Hansel, "What will ...
— My Book of Favorite Fairy Tales • Edric Vredenburg
... and of possessing a wolf-skin; he charged him also with having accompanied him on one occasion, when he attacked and ate a girl in the village of Grilland, whom he had found tending a flock of geese. He said that his stepmother was separated from his father. He believed the reason to be, because she had seen him once vomit the paws of a dog and the fingers of a child. He added that the Lord of the Forest had strictly forbidden him to bite the thumb-nail of his left hand, which nail was thicker and longer ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... but heartless and an utter snob. I suppose men are often blind to these hateful qualities before marriage; doubtless a clever, unscrupulous woman is able to hide her faults when she has the main chance in view. My stepmother was a good deal younger than my father, and I dare say on the whole made him, socially at any rate, a fairly good wife. Her one idea was social aggrandizement at any cost, and I unhappily was to fall a victim ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... grew older, and the stepmother made Martha do all the work of the house. She had to fetch the wood for the stove, and light it and keep it burning. She had to draw the water for her sisters to wash their hands in. She had to ...
— Old Peter's Russian Tales • Arthur Ransome
... brought the grandfather's second family, for the first time, into close as well as friendly contact with the first. Mr. Browning had always remained on outwardly friendly terms with his stepmother; and both he and his children were rewarded for this forbearance by the cordial relations which grew up between themselves and two of her sons. But in the earlier days they lived too far apart ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... his hounds, or give sugar to his horse; but I assure you that I never partook of his sweetmeats or his smiles, and at this hour I thank him for it. The education which he gave me hardened the affections, and it is the best service which a father can render his son. Life is a hard stepmother, my dear Gilbert; how many smiles have you seen pass over her brazen lips! Besides, I have particular reasons for not treating Stephane with too much tenderness. He seems to you to be unhappy, he will be so forever if I do not strive to discipline his inclinations ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... peculiar one. Distantly connected with Lord Hilton's family on the mother's side, she was the daughter of the late Lord Glendarroch, and step-daughter to Lady Hilton, who had become Lady Hilton within a year after Lord Glendarroch's death. Lady Alice, then quite a child, had accompanied her stepmother, to whom she was moderately attached, and who had been allowed to retain undisputed possession of her. She had no near relatives, else the fortune I afterwards found to be at her disposal would have aroused contending claims to ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... followed his father's marriage, John's stepmother's brother came to live with the family; and the influence of this stepuncle, whose name was Ed, was as bad or worse than Will's or Charley's could ever have been; for Ed was older and wiser, and knew much more ...
— How John Became a Man • Isabel C. Byrum
... over, when the stepmother's bad temper began to show itself. She could not bear the goodness of this young girl, because it made her own daughters appear the more odious. The stepmother gave her the meanest work in the house to do; she had to scour the dishes, tables, etc., and to scrub the floors ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... the time he reached the top of the stairs. The only time he had ever been out of Panama was whilst he made a short visit to Lima, the wonders of which he used to chant unceasingly. But the continual cause of my annoyance—I fear I must write disgust—was the stepmother of mine host, a large fat dirty old woman. She had a pouch under her chin like a pelican, while her complexion, from the quantity of oil and foul feeding in which she delighted, was a greasy mahogany. She despised the unnatural luxuries of knives and forks, constantly devouring her ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... has turned manufacturer under the restoration. He has a grown-up daughter, Pauline, and a second wife named Gertrude, the latter still a young, handsome woman, with a ten-year-old son, the little Napoleon. Though they are outwardly on good terms, the stepmother and stepdaughter nevertheless hate each other. They are in love with the same man, Ferdinand, the manager of the general's works. On this hatred the entire interest of the play turns. Ferdinand really loves Pauline; but he has formerly been engaged to Gertrude, who jilted him to ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... their mild, kindly stepmother, who, on her side, was as devotedly attached to them as if they had been her own children. The Count noted this mutual attachment, which time only served to strengthen, and it filled his heart with joy and gratification. The family was, indeed, a happy one, and even the servants ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... Crowned Heads. "This year 1740," says he, "though the weather throughout Europe had been extraordinarily fine," or fine for a cold year, "had already witnessed several Deaths of Sovereigns: Pope Clement XII., Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia, the Queen Dowager of Spain [Termagant's old stepmother, not Termagant's self by a great way]. But that was not enough: unfathomable Destiny ventured now on Imperial Heads (WAGTE SICH AUCH AN KAISER-KRONEN): Karl VI., namely, and Russia's great, Monarchess;"—an audacity to be remarked. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... have remained much longer, for in that quiet life the advance of one's years was not likely to be noticed. I am sure Miss Edgeworth looked no older to me when I left her than when I first saw her. But she was obliged to go into England to nurse her sick stepmother, and after her departure the place had no attractions for me, and ...
— The Vizier of the Two-Horned Alexander • Frank R. Stockton
... mine of general information. He knew nothing at all specific but evinced a candid willingness to overcome this by acquiring facts from Kenny. Nobody he knew had run away from an uncle. Why was Kenny seeking uncles? . . . Hum . . . Joel Ashley's boy had run away but the uncle there had been a stepmother. Was the runaway boy anybody's long lost heir? A pity! One read such things in the papers. Years back there had been a scandal about a girl who ran ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... Sir Gawaine, while under the influence of the spell of her wicked stepmother, was more decrepit probably, and what is commonly called more ugly, than Meg Merrilies; but I doubt if she possessed that wild sublimity which an excited imagination communicated to features, marked and expressive ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... her, which she mounted as though it had been a steed to carry her onward, and sat a moment looking at the beauty of the morning, her eyes taking on that far-away look that annoyed her stepmother when she wanted her to hurry with the dishes, or finish a long seam before it ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... must be an unregenerate heart, for I took a furious dislike to her. Very unjust and unreasonable, wasn't it? Afterwards, when my father took me over to his cottage, near Dieppe, to spend my holidays, I found that my stepmother was a kind-hearted, pretty little thing, whom I might look down upon for her want of education, but whom I could not dislike. She was very kind to me; and she had a baby boy. I have told you about him, and how he and I fell in love ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... probably have mastered the despot, whose intellect was far from brilliant. But Mme. Favoral was too proud to be shrewd; and besides, the springs of her will had been broken by the successive oppression of an odious stepmother and a brutal master. Her abdication of all was complete. Wounded, she kept the secret of her wound, hung her head, and ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... was a singer of merit, a player on the harp, and a person of education. She certainly had no seraglio notions of wanting to be petted and pampered and taken care of, or she would not have assumed the office of stepmother to that big family and married a poor man. Bach never had time to make money. Very soon after their marriage Bach began to dictate music to his wife. A great many pieces can be seen in Leipzig and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... and laborious age, would all the work he performed compensate for the strains and aches and bruises suffered. Circumstances prevented the completion of the yard in exact accordance with plans, for experience, that harsh stepmother, proved that the enclosure was unnecessary. The yard exists as a monument to profane misunderstanding of Christmas's character. Had I realised his high-mindedness, his amiability, his considerateness and shrewdness, the yard would never have ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... in the course of years to look upon the older brothers of her stepmother as in some sort her uncles, but for Harold, who was so much nearer her own age, she entertained a sincere sisterly regard. And he was worthy of it and of the warm place his many noble qualities had won for him in ...
— Elsie's Womanhood • Martha Finley
... hymns, very soon after he could speak, appropriate to his tender age, pointing out to him the inevitable fate of wicked children, and giving him the earliest possible warning and description of the punishment of little sinners. He repeated these poems to his stepmother after dinner, before a great shining mahogany table, covered with grapes, pineapples, plum-cake, port wine, and Madeira, and surrounded by stout men in black, with baggy white neckcloths, who took the little man between their ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... as was the fashion of the period in general, and almost necessarily so in Russia. Born in a village of the Archangel Government, near Kholmogory on the White Sea, he was a fisherman, like his father, until the age of sixteen, having learned to read and write from a peasant neighbor. A tyrannical stepmother forced him to endure hunger and cold, and to do his modest studying and reading in desert spots. Accordingly, when he obtained from the village authorities the permission requisite for absenting himself for the space of ten ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... Mrs. Lorton, the stepmother of the boy and girl. She had been pretty once, and had not forgotten the fact—it is on the cards that she thought herself pretty still, though the weak face was thin and hollow, the once bright eyes dim and querulous, the lips drawn into a ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... I dispelled no doubts. Davies had only seen the Dollmanns on their yacht, where father and daughter were living for the time. Their villa at Norderney, and their home life there, were unknown to him, though he had landed once at the harbour himself. Further, he had heard vaguely of a stepmother, absent at Hamburg. They were to have joined her on their arrival at that city, which, be it noted, stands a long way up the Elbe, forty miles and more above Cuxhaven, the ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... personification of Kuvera, the god of riches, appears before him in the form of a Jaina mendicant—a conclusive proof of the Buddhistic origin of the story.—A trunkless head performs the same part in the Russian folk-tale of the Stepmother's Daughter, on which Mr. Ralston remarks that, "according to Buddhist belief the treasure which has belonged to anyone in a former existence may come to him in the form of a man, who, when killed, ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... might be sent to Paris for use in the scheme of royal alliances. Lucien assented, and the child, a clever girl of about fourteen, was sent to live with Madame Mere. She was thoroughly discontented, and wrote bright, sarcastic letters to her stepmother, whom she loved, depicting the avarice of her grandmother and the foibles of her other relatives. These, like all other suspected letters of the time, were intercepted and read in the "cabinet noir"; their contents ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... delectable chronicles of his ancestors, he found that Geoffrey of Lusignan, called Geoffrey with the great tooth, grandfather to the cousin-in-law of the eldest sister of the aunt of the son-in-law of the uncle of the good daughter of his stepmother, was interred at Maillezais; therefore one day he took campos (which is a little vacation from study to play a while), that he might give him a visit as unto an honest man. And going from Poictiers with some of his companions, they passed by the Guge (Leguge), visiting the noble Abbot Ardillon; ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... persuaded the women of the country to roast the seed corn secretly before it was committed to the ground. So next year no crops came up and the people died of famine. Then the king sent messengers to the oracle at Delphi to enquire the cause of the dearth. But the wicked stepmother bribed the messenger to give out as the answer of the god that the dearth would never cease till the children of Athamas by his first wife had been sacrificed to Zeus. When Athamas heard that, he sent for the children, who were with the sheep. But a ram with a fleece of ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... five years later his father married again. This younger Robert when a youth desired to become an artist, but such a career was denied to him. He longed for a University education, and, through the influence of his stepmother, this also was refused. They shipped the young man to St Kitts, purposing that he should oversee the West Indian estate. There, as Browning on the authority of his mother told Miss Barrett, "he conceived such a hatred to the slave-system ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... precious volume tucked tightly under his arm, went down the single street of Gentryville with the joy of anticipation in his face. He could hardly wait to open the book and plunge into it. He stopped for a moment at the village store to buy some calico his stepmother had ordered, and then struck into the road through the woods ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland
... first place in arts above the law, More grave and noble than it ever saw. Fraud in this age of ours unpunished can Tread down the equity so dear to man. Can you for spirits just and generous find A fairer cause to plead before mankind? Mother or stepmother let Fortune be, The theatre and not the bar for me; For client virtue, truth for counsel's wage; For judge the present and the ...
— Briefless Ballads and Legal Lyrics - Second Series • James Williams
... Godmother', No. xxvii, tries to persuade her son to have the young queen burnt alive for a wicked witch, who was dumb, and had eaten her own babes. In 'East o' the Sun and West o' the Moon', No. iv, it is a wicked stepmother who has bewitched the prince. In 'Bushy Bride', No. xlv, the ugly bride charms the king to sleep, and is at last thrown, with her wicked mother, into a pit full of snakes. In the 'Twelve Wild Ducks', No. viii, the wicked stepmother persuades the king that Snow-white and Rosy-red is a witch, ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent |
