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noun
To-do  n.  Bustle; stir; commotion; ado. (Colloq.)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"To-do" Quotes from Famous Books



... of this region. The productive, red soil was highly cultivated—not an inch of ground neglected—comfortable, often handsome, stone houses scattered along their route at frequent intervals, and surrounded by large, luxuriant gardens, spoke of a well-to-do population. On each side of the broad, smooth road was a row of fine trees, whose falling leaves lay piled upon the ground in yellow heaps, or whirled in the wind before de Sigognac and Isabelle, as they walked along beneath their spreading ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier

... pupils was a girl of thirteen, daughter of a well-to-do farmer, who lived within a mile of the village. Her father had been converted at a camp-meeting and was a devout Methodist. The first day she attended, I asked ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm

... There was a well-to-do man of the Koeri (cultivating) caste and opposite his house lived a barber who was very poor; and the barber thought that if he carried on his cultivation just as the Koeri did he might get better results; so every day he made some pretext to visit ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas

... custom till sich times as summat turns up at they can raise a trifle to pay up wi'. . . . He has nobbut one razzor, but it'll be like to do." Hearken this, oh, ye spruce Figaros of the city, who trim the clean, crisp whiskers of the well-to-do! Hearken this, ye dainty perruquiers, "who look so brisk, and smell so sweet," and have such an exquisite knack of chirruping, and lisping, and sliding over the smooth edge of the under lip,—and, sometimes, agreeably too,—"an infinite deal of nothing,"—ye ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh

... reverent possessor of a genuine "Cremona." He consents to take for his pupil a handsome youth who proves to have an aptitude for technique, but not the soul of an artist. The youth has led the happy, careless life of a modern, well-to-do young American and he cannot, with his meagre past, express the love, the passion and the tragedies of life and all its happy phases as can the master who has lived life in all its fulness. But a girl comes into his life—a beautiful bit of human driftwood that his aunt had taken into her ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... improving the surroundings, and preventing deformity. Phosphorus in doses of 100th grain may be given dissolved in cod-liver oil, and preparations of iron and lime may be added with advantage. To avoid those postures which predispose to deformities, the child should lie as much as possible. In the well-to-do classes this is readily accomplished by the aid of a nurse and the use of a perambulator. In hospital out-patients the child is kept off its feet by the use of a light wooden splint applied to the lateral aspect of each lower extremity, and extending from the pelvis ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles

... that I first saw the English close at hand. They were strong, fair, and closely shaved, like well-to-do bourgeois. They defended themselves bravely, but we were as good as they. It was not our fault—the common soldiers—if they did defeat us at last, all the world knows that we showed as much and more courage than ...
— Waterloo - A sequel to The Conscript of 1813 • Emile Erckmann

... a visit from M. de Chavigni, who came to ask for dinner, and made a great to-do when he heard that my housekeeper dined in her room. The ladies said he was quite right, so we all went and made her sit down at table with us. She must have been flattered, and the incident evidently increased her good humour, as she amused us by her wit and her ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... and such environment. Richter's grandfather had held worthily minor offices in the church, his father had followed in his churchly steps with especial leaning to music; his maternal grandfather was a well-to-do clothmaker in the near-by town of Hof, his mother a long-suffering housewife. It was well that Fritz brought sunshine with him into the world; for his temperament was his sole patrimony and for many years his chief dependence. He was the eldest of seven children. None, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... grown amazingly in the years since I had seen him, and carried himself like a man. He was handsomer than ever I thought, and liker to our island's patron saint. As he stripped off his travelling coat and stood up in the neat habit of a well-to-do town gentleman, he looked such a cavalier as no woman but would wish for a lover, no man but ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... dust at his feet—in thought only, for in reality he would not have allowed me to do it, being a statesman and a man of modern political and enlightened ideas. I returned home, and when I announced that I'd been taken back into the service and should receive a salary, heavens, what a to-do ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... average value of Mang-i-lot's' sementeras, then, is 33 1/3 pesos — which is thought to be a conservative estimate of the value of the Bontoc sementera. Mang-i-lot' is rated among the lesser rich men. He is relatively, as the American says, "well-to-do." However, when a man possesses twenty sementeras ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks

... Cotton, "that it was only among the poor in the cities, who have begin misled by agitators, that the-well-to-do classes were ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... Max Nordau and his followers never was more than a sentimental sport for the well-to-do in the ranks of the Jews. The latter-day Nationalists, however, are bent on reaching those circles of the Jewish race that have so far followed the banner of Internationalism and Revolution; and this at a moment when revolutionists of all nationalities ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various

... thoughtfully returned to his quarters after witnessing the departure of his son, he found sitting on the doorstep, and patiently awaiting his coming, a Canadian woman. Beside her stood her stolid-looking husband, whom the major recognized as a well-to-do farmer of the settlement, to whom he had granted some trifling favors while in ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore

... her face; but the curtain was always drawn down, and Bertha remained invisible. During the second week, however, she relented, and they had many a pleasant chat together. He now volunteered to write all her exercises, and she made no objections. He learned that she was the daughter of a well-to-do peasant in the sea-districts of Norway (and it gave him quite a shock to hear it), and that she was going to school in the city, and boarded with an old lady who kept a pension in the house adjoining the ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... Apprentice, Mate, Master, in the ancient and honourable craft of the sea. As to my friend Hermann, he might have been a consummate master of the honourable craft, but he was called officially Schiff-fuhrer, and had the simple, heavy appearance of a well-to-do farmer, combined with the good-natured shrewdness of a small shopkeeper. With his shaven chin, round limbs, and heavy eyelids he did not look like a toiler, and even less like an adventurer of ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad

... good lands had passed, without even a will to disturb them, except at distant intervals; and the present owner was Stephen Anerley, a thrifty and well-to-do Yorkshire farmer of the olden type. Master Anerley was turned quite lately of his fifty-second year, and hopeful (if so pleased the Lord) to turn a good many more years yet, as a strong horse works his furrow. ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore

... some importance include smelting, and manufactures of beds, furniture, railway carriages, matches, paper, sweets and woollen and cotton goods. Bread-stuffs. colonial products and machinery are largely imported. Few provinces in Spain are inhabited by so laborious, active and well-to-do a population. The primary schools are numerously attended, and there are very good normal schools for teachers of both sexes, and a model agricultural farm: The public roads and other works of the province are excellent, and, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... Texas, and apparently well-to-do people. On learning that the Lieutenant was out on a scouting tour, they prepared a nice supper for the three of us. The following morning the Lieutenant detailed twenty men in charge of a sergeant, to escort ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan

... making shift to live on a beggarly stipend. Handsome, pleasing, not quite thirty, he was well received in such semblance of society as his town offered, and, in spite of his defects as a suitor, he won for his wife a certain Miss Baxendale, the daughter of a well-to-do manufacturer. She brought him at once a few hundreds a year, and lie pursued his college work in improved spirits. His wife had two brothers; one had early gone to America, the other was thriving as a man of business ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing

... in a fat-pig style, Mr Verloc, without either rubbing his hands with satisfaction or winking sceptically at his thoughts, proceeded on his way. He trod the pavement heavily with his shiny boots, and his general get-up was that of a well-to-do mechanic in business for himself. He might have been anything from a picture-frame maker to a lock-smith; an employer of labour in a small way. But there was also about him an indescribable air which no mechanic could have acquired in the practice of his handicraft however ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad

... and a bad habit of eating four-penny lunches. The chief charge some of her fellow clerks have against her, apart from her inferior work, is that she only makes use of typing as a road to marriage. The other class of offender is the daughter of well-to-do parents. Typing is regarded as a ladylike employment, and parents, who would never expect their daughters to be self-supporting, are glad for them to earn pocket money or just ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley

... got-to-do-it-ness," said Cricket, stoutly. "If you had to go to church with a great, big, flappy, floppy hat on, that joggled your ears all the time, 'cause the roses were so heavy, and if you had to be careful to keep your pink organdie clean for next Sunday, and if you had a teasy cousin, who, likely ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow

... of the poor, that the same short-sighted extravagance, the same recklessness of consequences, which are frequently found in them, would cause quite as much misery, if they prevailed in a like degree among people with a thousand a year. But it seems as if only the tolerably well-to-do have the heart to be provident and self-denying. A man with a few hundreds annually does not marry, unless he thinks he can afford it: but the workman with fifteen shillings a week is profoundly indifferent ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various

... relating their artistic misery with the magniloquence of a traveller narrating a tiger hunt. Others persist and put their self-esteem in it, but when once they have exhausted those resources of credit which a young fellow with well-to-do relatives can always find, they are more wretched than the real Bohemians, who, never having had any other resources, have at least those of intelligence. We knew one of these amateur Bohemians who, after having remained three years in Bohemia and ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger

... appropriated to the support of the former by far the most valuable portion was diverted to the endowment of King's College. In 1838 there were 24,000 children in the common schools, out of a population of 450,000, leaving probably some 50,000 destitute of the means of education. The well-to-do classes, however, especially those living in the large towns, had good opportunities of acquiring a sound education. Toronto was well supplied with establishments, supported by large endowments: Upper Canada College, the Home District Grammar School, ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot

... came; I had to go. I tried to run away, but I was caught by brutal soldiers, and they banged me with the butt-end of muskets till my mustachios curled with pain. I had a cousin a linen-draper, well-to-do, but very ugly. He had drawn a good number, and sympathized when they thumped me. "To thee, my cousin," I said, "to thee, in whose veins flows the blue blood of our heroic grandparent, to thee I consign Annette. Watch over her whilst I hunt for ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard

... somewhat acid in manner; censorious concerning the other visitors; singularly devoted to her tedious husband, and fretfully attached to the beautiful daughter, for whose pleasure and education they were visiting Rome. I gathered that they were fairly well-to-do. ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross

... I called to see Aunt Judy for the last time. Superannuated, and rapidly failing, she had been installed by my father in a comfortable room in the house of a sort of cousin of hers, a worthy and "well-to-do" woman of color, where she might be cheered by the visits of the more respectable people of her own class,—darkies of substantial character and of the first families, among whom she was esteemed as a mother in Israel. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various

... his "Parson's Tale," speaks of the Curiositie of Minstralcie, at the banquets of the well-to-do in his day. ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence

... have received the same notice," said Brissac, coolly; "and I have given all the necessary orders. Leave me to act, and keep you quiet, so as not to wake up those who will have to be secured. To-morrow morning you will see a fine to-do and the policists much surprised." During all the first part of the night between the 21st and 22d of March, Brissac went his rounds of the city and the guards he had posted, "with an appearance of great care ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... who have no need of aught beyond a competence, money pours in almost against our will, while to those who long and labour for it, it comes not, or comes so slowly the life wears out in the waiting and the working. The Zabels, now! Once well-to-do ship-builders, with a good business and a home full of curious works of art, they now appear to find it hard to obtain even the necessities of life. Such are the freaks of fortune; or should I say, the dealings of an inscrutable Providence? ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green

... A well-to-do widow, in memory of her boy, Wallace Todd, who had died the preceding year while a student at the high school, had offered a beautiful silver cup to the victor in the football contests, the winning team to hold it ...
— The Boys of Columbia High on the Gridiron • Graham B. Forbes

... humble station—the comic man. The village blacksmith or a peddler. You never see a rich or aristocratic comic man on the stage. You can have your choice on the stage; you can be funny and of lowly origin, or you can be well-to-do and without any sense of humor. Peers and policemen are the people most utterly devoid ...
— Stage-Land • Jerome K. Jerome

... is the greatest sugar consuming nation in the world. No other country devours so much of it. One reason is because here even the poorer classes have money enough so they can afford sugar for household use; in many countries this is not the case. Only the well-to-do take sugar in tea or coffee and have it for common use. Our Americans also eat quantities of candy. At the present time children eat three times as many sweets as did their parents, and the amount is constantly increasing. Doctors tell ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett

... I admit the weight of the claim,) that common and general worldly prosperity, and a populace well-to-do, and with all life's material comforts, is the main thing, and is enough. It may be argued that our republic is, in performance, really enacting to-day the grandest arts, poems, &c., by beating up the wilderness into fertile farms, and in her railroads, ships, machinery, &c. And it ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... much, the sentimentalist, enemy of aristocracy and monarchy, instinctively antagonistic to the legal temperament, speaks directly to the people, even as Montesquieu had spoken to the educated and the well-to-do, and Voltaire to kings; and they, stirred to the heart by his appeals, elected him the prophet of their cause, believed in him, and at his bidding subverted the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various

... again removed his lodgings; this time to the third floor. His dress turned shabbier; with each ascending grade his diamonds, gold snuff-box, and jewels disappeared. He grew thinner in person; his face, which had once the beaming roundness of a well-to-do middle-class gentleman, became furrowed with wrinkles. Lines appeared in his forehead, his jaws grew gaunt and sharp; and at the end of the fourth year he bore no longer the likeness of his former self. He was now a wan, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various

... word. M. Gerson and his grandson had disappeared silently in a covered country cart hermetically closed. A stout, ruddy, thick-set matronly woman was waiting for them, but the coachman looked as though he were in the service of well-to-do people. General Pelissier's son, who had not uttered a word since we had left Gonesse, had disappeared like a ball from the hands ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt

... always draw me back to her. More than two- thirds of our time together we spent in violent quarrels; and all my hopes of eternity I would have given to make her my companion for life. But for Luck, in the shape of a well-to-do cab proprietor, as great an idiot as myself I might have done it. The third was a chorus girl: on the whole, the best of the bunch. Her father was a coachman, and she had ten brothers and sisters, most of them doing well in service. And she was succeeded—if I have the ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome

... great time when I went off to America at last. My friends made a great to-do aboot my going. There were pipers to play me off—I mind the way they skirled. Verra soft they were playing at the end, ane of my favorite tunes—"Will ye no come back ...
— Between You and Me • Sir Harry Lauder

... having been born in Malacca. I had tea, and was introduced to his mother, wife, and two boys and two girls. He intends to send one of his sons to England for education. He denounces opium and the other vices of his countrymen, and their secret societies. All the well-to-do Chinese agree in this, but they have not moral courage to come out against them. Indeed, I suppose they could hardly do so without great risk.... Alas! still no sign ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin

... rubbed his spare hands together, with an assumption of cheerfulness in which some one less stout and well-to-do than his companion might have perceived that dim minor note of pathos, which always rings somewhere in a ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman

... was thus again saved by his good fortune from attempting to fill a situation in which he would not have shone. There are, no doubt, many to whom a seat in Parliament comes almost as the birthright of a well-born and well-to-do English gentleman. They go there with no more idea of shining than they do when they are elected to a first-class club;—hardly with more idea of being useful. It is the thing to do, and the House of Commons is the place where a man ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope

... strengthened with stout wire in several places to keep it rigid, and the whole is painted in colours (a very unusual feature), in imitation of the costume of the period; and I was shown a curious old print of Tonbridge in the time when the well-to-do farmers wore top-hats and swallow-tailed coats, in which the vane is represented just as it appears at present. Vane number two is a much weathered and discoloured one, almost within touch, on a wooden turret surmounting the ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... the acquaintance of the future head of the family, if only out of mere curiosity. Besides, cynicism apart, his being rich will make a difference in the way people will look at his failing. When a man is absolutely wealthy, not merely well-to-do, all suspicion of sordid motive naturally disappears; the thing becomes merely a ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki

... do! I can't have you talking like that about the Mate!" he said, sharply. "Let me know what's to-do, and then go forrard again, the lot ...
— The Ghost Pirates • William Hope Hodgson

... next Sunday, Veit Haselnuss, the bath-house proprietor, a well-to-do man who owned another house besides the one where he lived, invited her to take a walk with him. She knew instantly that her late husband was beginning to pay his debt of gratitude with this visitor and, in fact, a short time after, the worthy man asked her to be his wife, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... the York Lunatic Asylum. This was a proceeding which called much attention to the treatment of the insane, and produced much good effect. He was very resolute and energetic. The magistracy of his {276} time had such scruples about using the severity of law to people of such station as well-to-do farmers, &c.: they would allow a great deal of resistance, and endeavor to mollify the rebels into obedience. A young farmer flatly refused to pay under an order of affiliation made upon him by Godfrey Higgins. He was duly warned; and persisted: he shortly found himself in gaol. He went there sure ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan

... One can fancy some well-to-do and thoroughly respectable and clean-living native of Capernaum saying, 'What! those foul beasts in Sodom better off than I? Impossible!' Well, Jesus Christ says so upon very intelligible grounds. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren

... soup, fish, a ragout, or stew of some cheap cut of meat, and a few vegetables; and now and then indulge in a plain pudding, or a little fruit for dessert. With judicious marketing and proper cooking, the food of our well-to-do classes might be made far better than two-thirds of that now served on the tables of the wealthy; and the poor might learn that their scrag-end of mutton would furnish them with at least three dishes. To forward in some measure this result, the present collection ...
— The Cooking Manual of Practical Directions for Economical Every-Day Cookery • Juliet Corson

... experience and knowledge of the business their progress was slow; but it improved from year to year, and now, in the year 1899, it has become one of the most important, successful and profitable industries in the state, and the farmers of southern Minnesota constitute the most independent and well-to-do class of all our citizens. It was not very long ago when a mortgage was an essential feature of a Minnesota farm, but they have nearly all been paid off, and the farmer of southern Minnesota is found in the ranks of the stockholders and depositors of the banks, and if he ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau

... one of security. Near the door may be seen a little sign which reads thus: 'Entrance next door: office hours from nine to three.' The next door, to which we are referred, is a plain three-story brick dwelling, with no name on the door, and might be taken for the residence of some well-to-do old-fashioned family. Hence one is quite startled to find that this is the headquarters of the chief capitalist of America. Entering the street-door, one will find himself in a small vestibule, neatly floored with checkered ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... was no sign of the two flag-officers. Now, a dog who has lost his master is an unperturbed, torpid, contented creature compared with a flag-lieutenant who has lost his admiral, and there was a terrible to-do. All the telephones were buzzing and ringing, the dockyard police were eagerly interrogated, and there was already talk of despatching search-parties, when the two distinguished truants suddenly turned up, exceedingly hot, decidedly ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell

... And then she thought of the girls, her friends, who used to sneer at her—of Emma Baker, who was so proud, forsooth, because she was engaged to a cheesemonger, in a white apron, near Clare Market; and of Betsy Rodgers, who make such a to-do about her young man—an attorney's clerk, indeed, that went ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray

... told her mother, and had received from her that ready, willing, quick assurance of her sanction which was sure to operate in a different way than that intended. Her mother was thinking only of her material interests,—of a comfortable house and a steady, well-to-do life's companion. Of what more should she have thought? the reader will say. But Cecilia had still in her head undefined, vague notions of something which might be better than that,—of some companion who might be better than the companions which other girls generally choose for themselves. ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope

... government had to take charge of the helpless boy; and when the Council's master carpenter, a well-to-do, respectable man, who found in the child's face, notwithstanding that it was pinched with hunger, certain traits which pleased him,—when he would not suffer the boy to be lodged in a public institution, but took him into his own house, ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann

... have been ascribed to the agency of the devil. In manufactures of all kinds, and to some extent in agriculture, machines now do a thousand times more than could ever have been done by the hands of all the well-to-do, educated, and professional classes, and could ever have been attained if all luxury had been abolished and every one had returned to the life of a peasant. It is by no means the rich alone, but all classes, ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer

... were all on their side, against the bourgeois as well as against the aristos. This was the reign of the proletariat, and the sans-culotte always emerged triumphant in a conflict against the well- to-do. Nor was it good to rouse the ire of citizen Chauvelin, one of the most powerful, as he was the most pitiless, members of the Committee of Public Safety. Quiet, sarcastic rather than aggressive, something of the aristo, too, in his ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy

... messmates. One of them, Frank Singleton, after being captured at Port Republic had been taken to Fort Warren, where were in confinement as prisoners members of the Maryland legislature, Generals Pillow and Buckner, and others captured at Fort Donelson. Singleton gave glowing accounts of the "to-do" that was made over him, he being the only representative from the army of Stonewall, whose fame was now filling the world. His presence even became known outside of prison-walls, and brought substantial tokens of esteem ...
— The Story of a Cannoneer Under Stonewall Jackson • Edward A. Moore

... ought, perhaps, to explain how Karl Schmidt, the son of a well-to-do Bauer in the Prussian village of Schonhausen, became Karl Karl'itch, the principal personage in the Russian village ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace

... Thousands of well-to-do people endure privation and discomfort every year for the pure pleasure of it. In my campaigning days I lived on black bread and onions and dirty water for seven weeks, and topped up that agreeable record with four days' absolute starvation, But I had a pocketful of money, though there ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray

... Funeral" the author impaled, with many a merciless slash of the pen, the hypocrisy and vulgar flummery that characterised the whole gruesome ceremony of conducting to its earthly resting-place the body of a well-to-do sinner. For the average Englishman loved a funeral and all its ghastly accompaniments as passionately as though he had Irish blood in his veins, and often insisted upon investing the burial of his friends with the mockery, rather ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins

... spring unbidden from the very joy of life; it should need no justification and certainly no urging. But unfortunately, as the world now stands, there are men and groups of men who do not see the light. There is a wide contagion of selfishness and short-sightedness among the well-to-do, and a necessary federation of protection and selfishness among the poor. The practical needs of life, artificial as they are among the rich, and terribly insistent as they are among the poor, blind ...
— The Untroubled Mind • Herbert J. Hall

... the 15th century, if they could ever have done so. Nor would simplification of the requisites of a deed, such as has now been introduced in many jurisdictions, have been of much use at a time when only a minority even of well-to-do laymen could write with ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various

... adequately supplied with money. She had more than once to remind him of this. "I wish you would write again to Mr. Phipps, for I don't hear of any money, and am in the utmost necessity for it," she told him in November, 1712. Montagu, even at this time a well-to-do man, found it difficult to part with his money. A couple of years later, Lady Mary had again to say to him: "Pray order me some money, for I am in great want, and must run into debt if you don't do ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville

... said the queen again, "but I have nothing to-do with him, and as I have a conscience free of the crime for which I am about to die, with God's help, martyrdom will take the place of confession for me. And now, I will remind you, my lord, of what you ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... a great to-do up in the hollow. Teddy watched it all lying on his stomach in the door of the knot-hole, for it was moonlight by this time and almost as ...
— The Counterpane Fairy • Katharine Pyle

... shelf covered with plates and preserve jars. This evident appreciation of jam, as one of the pleasant things of this world, corresponds with the pot of flowers on the window, the bird-cage hanging up: the mother of Christ must have the little tastes and luxuries of a well-to-do burgess's daughter. Again, the cell of St. Jerome, painted some thirty years later by Carpaccio, in the Church of the Slavonians, contains not only various convenient and ornamental articles of furniture, but a collection ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... Shakspere impossible—because of his ignorance—which made him such a really good pseudo-author, and such a successful mask for Bacon, or Bacon's unknown equivalent. The Shakspere of later life, the well-to-do Shakspere, the purchaser of the right to bear arms; so bad at paying one debt at least; so eager a creditor; a would-be encloser of a common; a man totally bookless, is, to Mr. Greenwood's mind, an impossible author of the ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang

... exactly envious, but looking through the iron railing at the gay array of lanterns in the vast garden, and the glowing mansion, and hearing the hubbub of cheerful voices and the laughter, he had a dawning sense that respectability, especially well-to-do respectability, ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson

... live in a basement and do janitor's work," says Vee. "For you know Gummidge puts most of it on her. No, her people were fairly well-to-do. Her father ran a shoe store up in Troy. They lived over the store, of course, but very comfortably. She had finished high school and was starting in at the state normal, intending to be a teacher, when she met Henry Gummidge and ran off and married him. He was nearly ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford

... at a meeting in a place called Powell's Fort. This is a very singular conformation of country. It is entirely surrounded by high mountain walls, with the exception of one notch or outlet for drainage and a road. It is about twenty miles south of Winchester, Virginia. Some well-to-do people live in this secluded abode. It is likewise the point to which it is said that Washington had resolved to retreat, with his army, rather than surrender to the British, in one of the dark periods of the Revolutionary War. On this visit to the Fort Brother Jacob ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline

... The child of well-to-do parents, but homeless, living in hotels and boarding-houses, is awfully handicapped. Children are only little animals, and travel is their bane and scourge. They belong on the ground, among the leaves and flowers and tall grass—in the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard

... the roll of bills from his pocket and counted them out upon the table. "Here it is," he said, "and I am done with you for good and all—with you and your rascally cheating ways," "Come, come, let's go easy," warned Sam Murray, a fat, well-to-do farmer, who was accustomed to act the part of a lawyer in small transactions. Fletcher flushed purple and threw off his rage in a sneering guffaw. "Now that sounds well from him, doesn't it?" he inquired "when everybody ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow

... all this discipline was to make Frank just like his father. Now I am not saying anything against Frank's father. He was a truly good man, and well-to-do. Still, there have always been so many just like him that it would not have done much harm if Frank had been allowed to ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers

... has taken a fancy to his friend's wife, and is rather embarrassed with his own, asserts that Enlightenment is proceeding towards the Rights of Women, the reign of Social Love, and the annihilation of Tyrannical Prejudice. A third, who has the air of a man well-to-do in the middle class, more modest in his hopes, because he neither wishes to have his head broken by his errand-boy, nor his wife carried off to an Agapemone by his apprentice, does not take Enlightenment ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... the entries in 'Who's Who' gives about the same proportion for well-to-do families in England. The Catholic birth-rate of the Irish is nearly 40.[21] The French-Canadians are among the most prolific races in the world. On the other hand, their infant mortality is very high, and it is said that French-Canadian ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... become a senator. These are points which, in my opinion, are not to be neglected, for I regard them as meet rewards to a girl for her chastity. I don't know whether I should add that his father is a well-to-do man, for when I think of you and your brother for whom we are looking out for a son-in-law, I feel disinclined to speak of money. On the other hand, when I consider the prevailing tendencies of the day and the laws of the state which lay such prominent stress upon the matter of income, I think ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger

... him. The guests were generally the notabilities of the small towns and villages of his circumscription,—mayors, farmers, and small landowners. They all talked politics and W. was surprised to see how in this quiet agricultural district the fever of democracy had mounted. Usually the well-to-do farmer is very conservative, looks askance at the very advanced opinions of the young radicals, but a complete change had come over them. They seemed to think the Republic, founded at last upon a ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington

... structure of narrative. For when you look at the old gambrel-roofed house, you will see an unpretending mansion, such as very possibly you were born in yourself, or at any rate such a place of residence as your minister or some of your well-to-do country cousins find good enough, but not at all too grand for them. We have stately old Colonial palaces in our ancient village, now a city, and a thriving one,—square-fronted edifices that stand back from the vulgar highway, with folded arms, as it were; social fortresses of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... New-England-like in the general make-up of its social, religious, and educational characteristics than any town west of the Mississippi. The poorer people are a respectable class who have received some social and educational advantages; none but enterprising or well-to-do people would ever cross the plains to establish a ...
— The Truth About America • Edward Money

... no duties they must perform: without those two main pillars of life, necessity and duty, how shall the temple stand, when the huge, weary Samson comes tugging at it? The wonder is, there is not a great deal more wickedness in the world. For listlessness and boredness and nothing-to-do-ness are the best of soils for the breeding of the worms that never stop gnawing. Anyhow, Sepia had flashed on Tom, the tinder of Tom's heart had responded, and, any day when Sepia chose, she might blow up a wicked as well as foolish flame; nor, ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald

... feeling that if he had really been the irresponsible creature he was suspected of being he would have come much nearer to controlling his own destinies. He sowed a decent regard for his obligations, and reaped a perfect whirlwind of well-to-do respectability. Grand Chain is a really remarkable novel, and no discriminating reader ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various

... Sunday with a well-to-do friend of mine in a beautiful little town up in Connecticut. We went to church. It was an old colonial edifice, quaint, clean, and outside on the green before it were forty or fifty automobiles, for, as my friend told me with pride, it was the richest congregation ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball

... adduced it may fairly be concluded, I think, that during the seventeenth century smoking was not fashionable, or indeed anything but rare, among the women of the more well-to-do classes, while among women of humbler rank it was an occasional, and in a few districts a ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson

... morning and evening at improving and tilling his lands. Hence it came about that his farm and all that belonged to him prospered exceedingly. In three years he was better off than his neighbours, in six he was well-to-do, in nine he was rich, and in twelve there were not half a dozen men in the whole of Salt Lake City who could compare with him. From the great inland sea to the distant Wahsatch Mountains there was no name better known than that of ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle

... man of the middle age; he had a face of a mulberry colour, round black eyes, comical tufted eyebrows, and a protuberant forehead, and was dressed in clothes of a Quakerish cut. In spite of his plainness, he had that inscrutable air of a man well-to-do in his affairs. I conceived he had been some while observing me from a distance, for a sparrow sat betwixt us quite unalarmed on the breech of a piece of cannon. So soon as our eyes met, he drew near and addressed me in the French language, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the only child, while Grace had, as I have mentioned, a brother Will. Mollie had a small brother and sister—the twins, Dora (or "Dodo") and Paul. Her mother was a well-to-do widow, and the parents of the other girls were wealthy, but made ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Florida - Or, Wintering in the Sunny South • Laura Lee Hope

... "they want me to go up and see Runyon Q. Sampson, the well-to-do millionaire, and get him to buy the first car. You can imagine what a terrible good advertisement that will be for us if he ...
— Alex the Great • H. C. Witwer

... is a marvellous instance of genius devoted to the attainment of a high position. The daughter of a well-to-do squire, she was married at fifteen to a wealthy young gentleman whose estate lay ten miles away, and who, dying very soon, left her mistress of the greater part of his fortune. Her first house at Barlow, near Chesterfield, has entirely disappeared, save for a piece of old wall. ...
— The Dukeries • R. Murray Gilchrist

... of a well-to-do Hindu house one day, and talked to the bright-looking women in their jewels and silks. And all the time, though little I knew it, a widow was tied up in a sack in one of the inner rooms. This wrong is a ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael

... was another visit to Doctors' Commons, and a great to-do with an attesting hostler, who, being inebriated, declined swearing anything but profane oaths, to the great scandal of a proctor and surrogate. Next week, there were more visits to Doctors' Commons, and there was a visit to the Legacy Duty Office besides, and there were ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens

... There, there! I wouldn't make so much fuss over it!" she said, stripping her hands out of the biscuit dough in order to go over and pat Sarah on the shoulder. "After all that to-do gettin' settled, seems 's if you ought 'o stay settled. Good land! It ain't anything to have a fuss ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland

... lived in a large house on one of the numerous side streets from the Park, in a neighborhood that was in fact something more than merely well-to-do. ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve

... message that it was very urgent brought us in as far as the library, where we sat for a moment looking around at the quiet refinement of a more than well-to-do home. ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve

... with his hands in his pockets and attracted his attention. To McGregor's nostrils came the odour of rich fragrant tobacco. He turned and stood staring at the intruder on his thoughts. "That's what I am going to fight," he growled; "the comfortable well-to-do acceptance of a disorderly world, the smug men who see nothing wrong with a world like this. I would like to frighten them so that they throw their cigars away and run about like ants when you kick over ant hills ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson

... those delightful mixed grills in Dover Street, London, where men and women are equally welcome. Dover Street is lined with them, pleasant refuges for the wives of army officers, literary women of distinction, and the host of well-to-do uncelebrated persons, who make the rich background of modern life. Dr. McDonnell's warm friend, the Earl of Tottenham, and his wife, were entertaining Hilda at dinner, and, knowing she had something to tell of conditions at Ypres, they had made ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason

... of air into the back chamber, which the animal ceases to occupy, allow it, without further to-do, to remain for an indefinite period on the surface. To dive down again, the caddis worm has only to retreat entirely into its sheath. The air is driven out; and the canoe, resuming its mean density, a greater specific density than that of water, goes under at once and descends ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre

... quizzical smile quirking at the corners of his mouth, "mighty often the ingredient of permanency is left out in the making up of a woman's mind, one way or another. Can't you kinder pervail with your Aunt Viney some? I've got a real hanker after this little birthday to-do. Jest back her around to another view of the question with a slack plow-line. Looks like ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess

... And, though their well-to-do friends were beginning to talk of new model cars and going abroad once more, the Quentins continued to be hard up. David seemed to have struck a dead level. One month business would be pretty good; the ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller

... books is for the well-to-do. We hope that they will distribute our Broadsheets, which are obtainable at the station book-stalls of Messrs. W. H. Smith & Sons. The little work No. 52 is also a suitable ...
— The Esperantist, Vol. 1, No. 1 • Various



Words linked to "To-do" :   kerfuffle, upheaval, tempest, convulsion, disorder, incident, hoo-hah, disruption, well-to-do, earthquake, garboil, turmoil, storm center, uproar, flutter, hoo-ha, tumultuousness, storm centre, tumult, disturbance, commotion, storm



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