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More "Dowdy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Matilda said, "is positively dowdy. But that proves they are somebody. Only the very best people can afford to wear shabby clothes ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 10, 1917 • Various
... upon her favorite theme, she had forgotten her haste. "She sees at a glance all the good points of a figure; she knows how to bring them out strongly; she discovers by intuition what is lacking, and dexterously hides the defects. I have seen her convert the veriest dowdy into an elegant woman. And, when she gets a subject that pleases her, she perfectly revels in her art. Look at this dress for instance,—see by what delicate combinations ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... Byron's poetry so exquisite that fifty or five hundred years hence they will be read, felt, and adored throughout the world. I grant that Wordsworth is very pure, very holy, very orthodox, and occasionally very elevated, highly poetical, and oftener insufferably obscure, starched, dowdy, anti-human, and anti-sympathetic, but he never will be ranked above Byron, nor classed with Milton.... I dislike his selfish Quakerism, his affectation of superior virtue, his utter insensibility to the frailties, the beautiful frailties ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... precise postures you are wont to see them in when their portraits adorn the picture-galleries. With women it is quite different. Woman is born to beautify the domestic circle, woman is always fascinating whether she be dressed up or domestically dowdy, but man is least of all ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... are in themselves, they have enabled our tourist to produce a rambling, rattling, frolicsome work of seven or eight hundred pages. His attentions to the softer sex sparkle every where. At Hamburgh, "we dined at a most excellent table d'hote, but thought the ladies plain and dowdy." "We laughed much at the Holsteiner peasantry, the women being dressed like devils, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 533, Saturday, February 11, 1832. • Various
... it, and feel it. How can I help feeling it when I know that if I had Evelyn Chesley's friends and Evelyn's fortune, people would look on Me-Myself in quite a different way. You see, they would judge me by the Outside-Person part of me, which would be soft and silky and secure, and not dowdy and diffident. ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... connections, was the lady, fair, faded, with mildly aquiline features, and an aspect at once distinguished and dowdy, who appealed to Merton. She sought him in what she, at least, regarded as the interests of her eldest daughter, an heiress under the will of a maternal uncle. Merton had met the young lady, who looked like a portrait ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... 961[of mind]. defilement, contamination &c. v.; defoedation|; soilure[obs3], soiliness|; abomination; leaven; taint, tainture|; fetor &c. 401[obs3]. decay; putrescence, putrefaction; corruption; mold, must, mildew, dry rot, mucor, rubigo|. slovenry[obs3]; slovenliness &c. Adj. squalor. dowdy, drab, slut, malkin[obs3], slattern, sloven, slammerkin|, slammock[obs3], slummock[obs3], scrub, draggle-tail, mudlark[obs3], dust- man, sweep; beast. dirt, filth, soil, slop; dust, cobweb, flue; smoke, soot, smudge, smut, grit, grime, raff[obs3]; sossle[obs3], sozzle[obs3]. sordes[obs3], dregs, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... I know how it is done. I will make you as gorgeous as you wish. But you must return the compliment. If you are to be an ornament of fashion, so must I be; for are we not inseparable cronies? And when you become beautiful it would not do for you to be seen with such a dowdy as I am." ...
— The Curious Book of Birds • Abbie Farwell Brown
... picture? Constance Elliot has only ordered two gowns from the studio since you left—but you will have seen that by the books. She says she is saving her money for the Cause." He snickered. "The fact is, she grows dowdy as she grows older. Gunther has gone to Frisco with his group. Polly Thayer tells me his adoration of the beautiful Byrd is pathetic. So much in love he nearly broke her neck showing off his driving for her benefit." Marchmont snickered again. "As for your friend Mr. Byrd—" ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... driving a pair of gray ponies along the boulevard and he was much pleased with the sight. It reached to the top of his ambition. Florence was to his eyes really the sort of a girl whom a man in his position ought to marry. A secretary of legation in a small foreign capital cannot do with a dowdy wife, as may a clerk, for instance, in the Foreign Office. A secretary of legation,—the second secretary, he told himself,—was bound, if he married at all, to have a pretty and distinguee wife. He knew all about the intricacies which had fallen in a peculiar ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... mostly women and all pretty and perfectly dressed, as even quite common people appear to be in America. I haven't caught sight of a dowdy woman since I came. None of their frocks hitch up in front and dip down behind, as you see people's doing if you are taken to a shop in Oxford Street or even sometimes in Bond Street; and their belts always point beautifully ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... condemned to the blank solitude of hospital nights or becalmed, mid-ocean days, and had hours for fruitless dreaming, I wonder what viands we should choose, in setting forth a banquet from that ambrosial past! Foods unknown to poetry and song: "cold b'iled dish," pan-dowdy, or rye drop-cakes dripping with butter! For these do we taste, in moments of retrospect; and perhaps we dwell the more on their homely savor because we dare not think what hands prepared them for our use, or, when the board was set, ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... trailing in, tall and thin, in her sagging grey coat and skirt, her wispy grey hair escaping from under her floppy black hat, and with the air of having till a moment ago been hung about with parcels (she had left them in the hall), looked altogether unsuited to her environment, like a dowdy lady from the provinces, as ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... Milly, throwing back her head with much disdain; "but I'm sure you'll please nobody else with such a dowdy thing as that you have on. Lord! I should like to see her walk the streets of York on a Sunday that figure. Lord! how Mrs. Stokes ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... Botolph's Mission Hall the oddly-assorted crowd which generally finds its way to such functions. There were smart people, just a scattering of the cultured, dowdy and dull folk, who had "helped the good cause," and expected to get as much sober entertainment in return as might be had for the asking. Then, there were the ever-present army of free sight-seers, and a leaven of ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... entertainment elsewhere. The furnishing of the houses was within the bounds of good taste. Monumental marbles were not erected by the hearth-side; the window drapery was diaphanous rather than dense and dowdy. The markets of San Francisco were much to blame for the flashiness of the domestic interior: they were stocked with the gaudiest fixtures and textures, and in the inspection of them the eye was ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... I marry some entrancing slip of girlhood, what am I to say when, later, I discover myself irrevocably chained to a fat and dowdy matron? I married no such person, I have indeed sworn eternal fidelity to an entirely different person; and this unsolicited usurper of my hearth is nothing whatever to me, unless perhaps the object of my entire abhorrence. Yet am I none the less compelled ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... parties are so ill to manage, and Polly was of the same mind, and she came in to show me the effect, for I always like to see the girls after they are dressed, and be satisfied how they look—and there she has forgotten the box, and she will appear quite a dowdy, and be so vexed." ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... dreadful!" said Pheasant. "There's my new mauve silk dress! it was a very expensive silk, and I haven't worn it more than three or four times, and it really looks quite dowdy; and I can't get Patterson to do it over for me for this party. Well, really, I shall have to give up company because I have nothing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... the style which, after all, does go so far. There's nothing dowdy about her. A dowdy woman would have killed me. She attracted me from the first moment; and, by Jove, old fellow, I can assure you it was mutual. I am the happiest fellow alive, and I don't think there is anything I envy anybody." In all this ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... poor dowdy in a haase. It's a queer thing, but eddication seems to mar as mony as it maks. Aw dooant know what ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... said, "is positively dowdy. But that proves they are somebody. Only the very best people can afford to wear shabby ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 10, 1917 • Various
... I won't, darling! You're a pet and an angel. Darling Dulcie! The truth is I adore your father. And he always told me that he fell in love with me because I looked so smart! I was so terrified of losing his affection by getting dowdy, don't you see? Besides, he doesn't take the slightest notice what I wear, he never knows what I've got on! Always betting or absorbed in the Racing Intelligence; it's ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... ever. But few cast him more than a passing glance. Then they gave an audible gasp, induced by an ingenuous compound of amazement, disappointment, and admiration. They had been prepared to forgive, to endure, to make every allowance. The poor thing could no more help being plain and dowdy than born in Boston, and as their leader had satisfied herself that she "would do," they would never let her know how deeply they ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... a pleasant morning, the mist had lifted and the sky was a freshly washed blue. Suvaroff walked down Kearny Street, and past Portsmouth Square. At this hour the little park was cleared of its human wreckage, and dowdy sparrows hopped unafraid upon the deserted benches. A Chinese woman and her child romped upon the green; a weather-beaten peddler stooped to the fountain and drank; the three poplar-trees about the Stevenson monument trembled to silver ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... wore evening frocks; others, with more limited means, contented themselves with Sunday frocks or delicately coloured robes that had been manoeuvred into something that showed enough white neck and bosom to be at once alluring and decorous. There was nothing of the plain or the dowdy. They were all out for enjoyment, and they meant to make the best of everything, themselves included. Frills and fluffiness were the order. They were ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... picture, and you will see what a plain, dowdy old maid she is. She is not for the like of you, Gavin—a bit country dressmaker, ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... talk about clothes. I saw her the first day she came, and was the victim of despair until she suddenly got sick and so couldn't wear those wonderful waists and jackets. I felt like a dowdy when I ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... shall. But as to the wench, I am resolved she shall not settle here; I will not suffer such beauties as these to produce children for us to keep."—"Beauties, indeed! your ladyship is pleased to be merry," answered Scout.—"Mr Adams described her so to me," said the lady. "Pray, what sort of dowdy is it, Mr Scout?"—"The ugliest creature almost I ever beheld; a poor dirty drab, your ladyship never saw such a wretch."—"Well, but, dear Mr Scout, let her be what she will, these ugly women will bring children, you know; so that we must prevent the marriage."—"True, madam," replied Scout, ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... that was here just now? Will he thrash my jacket? Let'n,—let'n. But an he comes near me, mayhap I may giv'n a salt eel for's supper, for all that. What does father mean to leave me alone as soon as I come home with such a dirty dowdy? Sea-calf? I an't calf enough to lick your chalked face, you cheese-curd you: —marry thee? Oons, I'll marry a Lapland witch as soon, and live upon selling contrary winds and ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve
... said Matilda; "and there's nothing on earth so dowdy as an old black coat, But, then, officers are always going away: you no sooner get to know one or two of a set, and to feel that one of them is really a darling fellow, but there, they are off—to Jamaica, China, Hounslow barracks, or somewhere; and then it's all to ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... in Jersey. The square was crowded with people. All was a cheerful babel; there was movement, colour everywhere. Here were the high and the humble, hardi vlon and hardi biaou—the ugly and the beautiful, the dwarfed and the tall, the dandy and the dowdy, the miser and the spendthrift; young ladies gay in silks, laces, and scarfs from Spain, and gentlemen with powdered wigs from Paris; sailors with red tunics from the Mediterranean, and fishermen with blue and purple blouses ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... shapely is not the word for it, she is absolutely beautiful! She is to other craft what,"—here his eye rested upon Miss Onslow's unconscious face for an instant—"a perfectly lovely woman is to a fat old dowdy. There is only one fault I have to find with her, and that is only a fault in my eyes; there are many who regard it as a ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... been accustomed to spending their vacations together in the woods, or on the waters. In all they were five close friends, but Owen Hastings, a cousin of Max, and who had made his home with him, was at present away in Europe with another uncle; and Steve Dowdy happened to be somewhere else in town, perhaps helping his father remove his stock of groceries from his big store, which being in the lower part of town was apt to suffer ...
— Afloat on the Flood • Lawrence J. Leslie
... look. The cast was working overtime as she gazed at the gowns, and the ridiculous old sprigs on her rusty black bonnet trembled with her silent mirth. She looked like one of those clever, epigrammatic, dowdy old duchesses that one reads about in English novels. I'm sure she had cardamon seeds in her shabby bag, and a carriage with a crest on it waiting for her just around the corner. I ached to slip my hand through her arm and ask her what ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... so well that I lived in luxury, and, I fear, somewhat extravagantly, and my performance as heroine in —— was so highly praised that I had no doubt my future was well assured. Last year I earned L40, and I have to live on what I earn, and if I look dowdy when I go seeking an engagement I have little chance of getting it. Yet I am under thirty, and although not one of the little group of alleged beauties whose faces appear monotonously week after week in the illustrated ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... days out we called in at Kamaishi, in the neighbourhood of which are the imperial copper mines and smelting works. The people here lack the rosiness and freshness of face of the Japanese, and have a dowdy, sickly look, due, I suppose, to the unhealthy exhalations ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... all he could do to keep from saying this—despite the fact that he knew it would ruin everything. Once little Jennie appeared in a new silk dress, brought to her by one of the rich ladies whose heart was touched by her dowdy appearance. It was of soft grey silk—cheap silk, but fresh and new, and Peter had never had anything so fine in his arms before. It matched Jennie's grey eyes, and its freshness gave her a pink glow; or was it that Peter admired her, and loved ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... and go down and outshine all these dear, dowdy Englishwomen; and while you are sipping courtesy and gentleness with Lord Fordyce, I shall try to quaff gloriously attractive, aboriginal force with Mr. Arranstoun—but it would have been more suitable to our characters could we have changed partners. ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... Fourth, lived at Blackheath, and drove occasionally in an open carriage through the streets of Greenwich, and there I saw her. I have a perfect recollection of her face and figure. A very common-looking red face it was, and a very "dowdy" figure. She wore always an enormous flat-brimmed "Leghorn" hat, trimmed with ostrich feathers. The remainder of her dress was gaudy, and, if one may say so of a Queen's attire, rather vulgar. She was, however, very popular in the neighbourhood; ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... gowns that you saw Brigitte and Madame Thuillier wear last night were a present from her, and it was because she came herself to superintend the toilet of our two 'amphitryonesses' that you were so surprised last night not to find them rigged in their usual dowdy fashion." ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... at recess, and nearly all the girls were out, except three or four. Maud said that Carrie Wilson's mamma had been calling at Mrs. Simpson's and that she said that Mrs. Ashley told that Hattie's sister Belle was the most dowdy-looking girl at ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... long; comedy was evidently her natural line. Against her reputation, rumour, always an inquisitive censor, often a mean libeller, of ladies of her profession, had as yet, so far as I could learn, found nothing to allege. Her mother, a dingy old dowager, with bad teeth, dowdy gowns, a profusion of artificial flowers, and a strong addiction to tea and knitting, perfectly understood the duties of duennaship, and did propriety by her daughter's side at dinner-table and promenade. To the heart of the daughter, Van Haubitz, almost ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... "Dowdy-cow, dowdy-cow, ride away heame, Thy[1] house is burnt, and thy bairns are tean, And if thou means to save thy bairns Take thy wings and ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 9, Saturday, December 29, 1849 • Various
... have overlooked. It was careless of him to forget that a woman about to travel abroad wants to make herself as stunning as she possibly can on the day of departure, so that the impression she will make at the start shall be strong enough to carry her through the dowdy stage which comes, as Marguerite had intimated, on the second and third days at sea; and to expect a woman like Marguerite Andrews, who really had no responsibilities to call her up at an early hour, to be ready at 9.30 sharp, was a fatal error, unless he provided his ...
— A Rebellious Heroine • John Kendrick Bangs
... wonderfully pretty, all admitted, in her gown of a rich amber satin draped with delicate folds of black lace; around her white throat a diamond necklace glistened. How well I can remember her as she stood there toying with a button of her glove! And how mean and dowdy we all looked beside this ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the queerest little people. Besides the melancholy boy, who, I hoped, had not been made so by waltzing alone in the empty kitchen, there were two other boys and one dirty little limp girl in a gauzy dress. Such a precocious little girl, with such a dowdy bonnet on (that, too, of a gauzy texture), who brought her sandalled shoes in an old threadbare velvet reticule. Such mean little boys, when they were not dancing, with string, and marbles, and cramp-bones in their pockets, and the most untidy legs ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... the mournful looks of these ancient cousins, the shaking of their black beads, their sibilant whisperings, and in their presence she was dry-eyed and rather rude. Aunt Caroline would have laughed at them and their dowdy clothes that smelt of camphor, but it seemed as though no one would ever laugh ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... and understood his feelings. On such people, however, his Dresden china was thrown away. Joe and Mrs. Joe were much more in their way than the elegant University man and the well-bred mother, who was "a poor little dowdy," they all said. Therefore the fact had been forced upon Mr. Copperhead that his circle must be widened and advanced, if his crowning glories were to be ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... being tremendously fashionable or anything of that kind. I would not for one moment think of allowing any of my court-ladies to cut their hair short, for instance, or to wear one of those foolish hobble skirts; but nobody, nobody could accuse us of being dowdy. Now tell me, have you ever seen one of us looking like that, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 11, 1919 • Various
... her dowdy black dress, and, opening a drawer in her wardrobe, took out a soft gray silk which lay folded between tissue paper and sprigs of lavender. She put the dress on, and fastened soft lace ruffles round ...
— A Girl in Ten Thousand • L. T. Meade
... sat nearly opposite, stared at the girl in stupefaction. "She makes me feel dowdy," she had confessed to Lee in the dressing-room. "Why didn't you warn me to come in my best? Who has been coaching her? Alice Heath, I suppose." She now wondered as sharply over the girl's manner; for Bertha, carried out of herself by Ben's word of praise, felt no desire to drink ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... "finish," and the tender-hearted bride who, for the sake of their purses sends her bridesmaids to an average "little woman" to have their clothes made, and to a little hat-place around the corner, is apt to have a rather dowdy little flock fluttering down the ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... give you a few finishing touches before we go," said Marion, a few minutes afterwards, "and I will lend you my green brooch and a veil. You must let me alter your bonnet a little one night next week. There; now you don't look quite so dowdy," said Marion, as she pushed her cousin before the looking-glass after the "few touches" had been given to her bonnet and ...
— Kate's Ordeal • Emma Leslie
... she could buy a new evening dress at eight-thirty on Sunday evening. And, anyhow, he said, she looked quite nice, really very smart; besides, Mrs Mitchell was not the sort of person who would think any the less of a pretty woman for being a little dowdy and ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... said to herself as she ran upstairs, "He's growing up far too quickly. He needs to be snubbed." She dashed to the wardrobe, pulled out the black garment, and gave it a vindictive shake. "Old, dowdy, unbecoming, ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of the choicest ornaments of the Society Column, displayed toward the rest of the company, convinced Undine that they must be more important than they looked. She liked Mrs. Fairford, a small incisive woman, with a big nose and good teeth revealed by frequent smiles. In her dowdy black and antiquated ornaments she was not what Undine would have called "stylish"; but she had a droll kind way which reminded the girl of her father's manner when he was not tired or worried about money. One of ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... She thinks she loves lavender, but Joseph's coat would have been a colorless piece of apparel beside her dress if we finally hadn't sat on her and told her certain things couldn't be done. She was crazy to pile on a bunch of ancestral lace, yellow and dowdy; but we told her not much, told her freshness and daintiness suited her style much better, and she wasn't old enough to emphasize ancestral lace, and she blushed and gave in. But nothing would have made her ...
— Kitty Canary • Kate Langley Bosher
... vigorously at the opera. To-day the mellow sunlight crowned her ancient nobleness with a becoming hue, as Gard was jogged along in a roundabout way through the city. Here at the left were the august bridges and great park, all famed in Napoleon's battles. Over there were the dowdy royal palaces. There, too, was the house of the sacred Sistine. Her sweet lineaments shone down in almost every American parlor ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... she replied, I was yours before, sweet oyster. I reckon, said Carpalin, she hath gutted his oyster. Another long-shanked ugly rogue, mounted on a pair of high-heeled wooden slippers, meeting a strapping, fusty, squabbed dowdy, says he to her, How is't my top? She was short upon him, and arrogantly replied, Never the better for you, my whip. By St. Antony's hog, said Xenomanes, I believe so; for how can this whip be sufficient to ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... you bullock-man, you've 'eard the bugle blowed, There's a regiment a-comin' down the Grand Trunk Road; With its best foot first And the road a-sliding past, An' every bloomin' campin'-ground exactly like the last; While the Big Drum says, With 'is "rowdy-dowdy-dow!"— "Kiko kissywarsti don't you ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... across the garden. He carried her boxes up himself. "We don't run to a butler," he said. "Got everything you want? Ring if you haven't. We have supper at eight and we shan't dress. Only—well, you couldn't look dowdy if you tried." ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... say?" she exclaimed. "Did you ever see women so weary-looking and so dowdy? They do not talk. They seem to spend their time yawning and inspecting their neighbour's dresses through those hateful glasses. It never seems to enter their heads to try and ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... acknowledgment of his words. But there was little gratitude in the movement, and less warmth. I saw the sister's face—a brilliantly beautiful face it was—brighter eyes and lips and more lovely auburn hair I have never seen—even Kit would have been plain and dowdy beside her—I saw it harden strangely. A moment before, the two had been in one another's arms. Now they stood apart, somehow chilled and disillusionised. The shadow of the priest had fallen upon them—had ...
— The House of the Wolf - A Romance • Stanley Weyman
... and dowdy in the spring weather, when the snow drops and the crocuses are putting on their dainty frocks of white and mauve and yellow, and the baby-buds from every branch are peeping with bright eyes out on the world, and stretching forth ...
— Evergreens - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... mistresses who have the fewest charms, that they may make something out of nothing. They succeed best in fiction, and they apply this rule to love. They make a goddess of any dowdy. As Don Quixote said, in answer to the matter-of-fact remonstrances of Sancho, that Dulcinea del Toboso answered the purpose of signalising his valour just as well as the 'fairest princess under sky,' so any of the fair sex will serve them to write ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... killing the doctor and you oughtn't to kill me"; and to silence her cries one member of the mob struck her in the mouth with a monkey wrench, knocking her teeth out. On May 24, 1919, at Milan, Telfair County, Georgia, two young white men, Jim Dowdy and Lewis Evans, went drunk late at night to the Negro section of the town and to the home of a widow who had two daughters. They were refused admittance and then fired into the house. The girls, frightened, ran to another home. ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... and with eyes A hard, hot blue; her hair a frowsy flame, Bold, dowdy-bosomed, from her widow-frame She leans, her mouth all insult and all lies. Or slattern-slippered and in sluttish gown, With ribald mirth and words too vile to name, A new Doll Tearsheet, glorying in her shame, Armed with her Falstaff ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... There's the dowdy girl, And the rowdy girl, And the girl that's always late; There's the girl of style, And the girl of wile, And the girl with ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... all the gay crowd was more admired or more noticed than "the bride," as she was still called, young Mrs. Kynaston. Helen had surpassed herself in the elaboration of her toilette. The country dames and damsels, in their somewhat dowdy home-made gowns, could scarcely remember their manners, so eager were they to stare at the marvels of that wondrous garment of sheeny satin, and soft, creamy gauze, sprinkled over with absolute works of art in the shape of wreaths of ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... would dare to despise her. She was what Hilda could never be, had never long desired to be. She was what Hilda had definitely renounced being. And there stood Hilda, immature, graceless, harsh, inelegant, dowdy, holding the letter between her inky fingers, in the midst of all that hard masculine mess,—and a part of it, the blindly devoted subaltern, who could expect none of the ritual of homage given to women, who must sit ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... became redder. She pushed her gaily trimmed hat forward over her heated brows. She had an instinctive feeling that she had never before seen any one so dignified and magnificent as Miss Sophia Tredgold. She knew that this was the case, although Miss Sophia's dress was almost dowdy, and the little brown slipper which peeped out from under the folds of her gray dress was decidedly the worse for wear. Nancy felt at the same time the greatest admiration for Miss Tredgold, the greatest dislike to her, and the greatest terror ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... strong antipathy to all that remarkable woman's tastes and opinions. The silent handsome girl of two-and-twenty, who is covering the 'Memoirs of Felix Neff,' is Miss Eliza Pratt; and the small elderly lady in dowdy clothing, who is also working diligently, is Mrs. Pettifer, a superior-minded widow, much valued in Milby, being such a very respectable person to have in the house in case of illness, and of quite too good a family to receive any money-payment—you ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... the housekeeper waited upon us—a fresh rosy little old woman in a clean dowdy cap and a scanty sprigged gown; a quaint careful person, but accessible to the tribute of our pleasure, to say nothing of any other. She had the accent of the country, but the manners of the house. Under her guidance we passed through a dozen apartments, duly stocked with old pictures, old ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... it. How can I help feeling it when I know that if I had Evelyn Chesley's friends and Evelyn's fortune, people would look on Me-Myself in quite a different way. You see, they would judge me by the Outside-Person part of me, which would be soft and silky and secure, and not dowdy and diffident. ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... shall go. I don't want anybody to tell me where I'm to go, my dear, and where I'm not. But it'll be about the first and the last visit. And as for bringing those dowdy girls out in London, it's the last thing I shall think of doing. Indeed, I doubt whether they can afford to dress themselves." As she went up to bed on the Tuesday evening, Miss Macnulty doubted whether the match would go on. She never believed her friend's ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... think, she knew she was "somebody" now, and she would go ahead and prove it. She could, too—she no longer doubted her possession of the college girl's one talent that Betty had laughed about. For there was Theresa Reed, her friend down the street. She was homely and awkward, she wore dowdy clothes and wore them badly, she was slow and plodding; but there was one thing that she could do, and the girls admired her for it and had instantly made a place for her. Helen was glad of a second proof that those things did not matter vitally. She set herself happily ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... only I never feel as if I was dressed right. My things seemed elegant at home, and I thought I'd be over over-dressed if anything; but I look countrified and dowdy here. No time or money to change now, even if I knew how to do it,' answered the other, glancing anxiously at her bright pink silk ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... the Century, or at the little musical and theatrical clubs that were beginning to come into existence. He enjoyed them there, and was bored with them at the Blenkers', where they were mingled with fervid and dowdy women who passed them about like captured curiosities; and even after his most exciting talks with Ned Winsett he always came away with the feeling that if his world was small, so was theirs, and that the only way to enlarge either was to reach a stage ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... a pie consisting of apples, molasses, and bread crumbs baked in a tin pan. This is known to New Englanders as "Pan Dowdy." An agreeable bread was at one time made by an ingenious Frenchman which consisted of one third of apples boiled, and ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... and he gave this excuse with such a conceited smile that all were convinced he was going to crown himself with the most flattering of laurels at the mansion of some princess of the royal blood. In reality, he was going to see one of his Conservatoire friends, a large, lanky dowdy, as swarthy as a mole and full of pretensions, who was destined for the tragic line of character, and inflicted upon her lover Athalie's dream, Camille's imprecations, and ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... shall get, too, traipsing through weather like this. My gown and bonnet will be spoiled quite. Needn't I wear them, then? Indeed, Mr. Caudle, I shall wear them. No, sir; I'm not going out a dowdy to please you or anybody else. Gracious knows, it isn't often I step over the threshold; indeed, I might as well be a slave at once—better, I should say. But when I go out, Mr. Caudle, I choose ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... matron entered the dowdy, suffocating little room where Matilda Bent lay gasping for breath, she was sick for a moment with sympathetic pain. There the dying woman lay, her world narrowed to four close walls, propped up on the pillows near the one little window. Her eyes ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... "understanding" mothers, did not need this special inspiration and help, but it was noticeable that girls who had no mothers at all, found in the little, plump, rather dowdy "old maid school teacher" one of those choice souls that God has put on earth to fulfil the duties of parents ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill
... lady!" Johnston turned to Miss Marvin, and there was a hush as the slight girlish figure—and she seemed very young—stood upright before us. She thrust back the unlovely bonnet, and her thin face was flushed; but when, clenching nervous fingers upon the dowdy gown, she raised a high clear voice, every man in the assembly settled himself to listen. Perhaps it was a chivalrous respect for her womanhood, or mere admiration for personal courage, and she had most gallantly taken up the challenge; but I think she also spoke with force and sincerity, for ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... "Of course!" she said. "What else did you expect! But if you want some fun, ask a young, pretty, and brilliant authoress (there are a few such) to meet an old, ugly and dowdy one (and there are many such), and watch the dowdy one's face! It will be a delicious study of ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... my eye, stroked down an upstarting frill, and coloured furiously. "Ah, my blouse! Do you admire it? I wrote to town for it, to your dressmaker, and I've ordered a lovely frock. You'll see. For once in my life I shall be really well dressed! Seeing you and Mrs Fane has made me discontented with my dowdy ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... I dont want you to talk. I want you to listen. You do not yet understand my views on the question of the Suffrage. (She rises to make a speech.) I must preface my remarks by reminding you that the Suffraget movement is essentially a dowdy movement. The suffragets are not all dowdies; but they are mainly supported by dowdies. Now I am not a dowdy. ...
— Press Cuttings • George Bernard Shaw
... tilt-bonnet on her head She took the path across the leaze. - Her spouse the vicar, gardening, said, "Too dowdy that, for coquetries, So I ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... in the morning, in a room which she shared with a school teacher, Fanny Elmer read Tom Jones—that mystic book. For this dull stuff (Fanny thought) about people with odd names is what Jacob likes. Good people like it. Dowdy women who don't mind how they cross their legs read Tom Jones—a mystic book; for there is something, Fanny thought, about books which if I had been educated I could have liked— much better than ear-rings and flowers, she sighed, ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... esh-Shukafa could not distract my thoughts from the sealed envelopes; and three very modern handwritings came obstinately between my eyes and the matchless wall-paintings—paintings as fresh in their underground hiding-place as if finished yesterday instead of in days when it was dowdy to be pagan, fashionable to ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... dowdy! How dare you come here to disgrace me in my own house and premises, after my sending you fifty pounds? To take the very ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... I called for Duperre's wife at the hotel, and she came down wearing a plain, dark-brown motor coat with a small, close-fitting cap to match. She was, indeed, unusually dowdy ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... They bowed, and shook hands with Mrs. Fargus, but were at no pains to conceal their indifference to the drab and dowdy little woman in the soiled sage green, and the glimmering spectacles. 'What a complexion,' whispered Elsie the moment they were outside the door. 'What's her husband like?' asked Cissy as they descended the first flight. Mildred answered that Mr. Fargus suffered from asthma, ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... trusting heart. The apparition in the doorway was commonplace—the mistress of the house, Lorella's elder and married sister Fanny—neither fair nor dark, neither tall nor short, neither thin nor fat, neither pretty nor homely, neither stupid nor bright, neither neat nor dowdy—one of that multitude of excellent, unobtrusive human beings who make the restful stretches in a world of agitations—and who respond to the impetus of circumstance as unresistingly as cloud ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... clean? Something has happened here in seven years, some sort of psychological change has been wrought in the mind of a people. Here, as in some Slav countries, there are laws and they are not kept, regulations and they are not observed. Unshaven men and ill-washed women on the streets, and dowdy, hatless girls with dirty hair crowding into cheap cinema theatres! A city that had no slums and no poor in 1914 now becoming a slum en bloc. And the litter on the roadways! You will not find its like in Warsaw. You must seek comparisons ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... He was not afraid of her. But he was afraid of her dress—not of the material, but of the cut of it. If she had been Susan in Susan's dowdy and wrinkled alpaca, he would have translated his just emotion into what critics call "simple, nervous English"—that is to say, Shakespearean prose. But the aristocratic, insolent perfection of Helen's gown ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... pins, butterflies, true-love knots, and so on, to fix it with. And, while he was about it, a diamond necklace, and a few little trifles of that sort for Minnie and Kate. Then their figures (dimly dowdy) had come back to him across the years, one plain, the other pretty but peculiar. He accounted for that by remembering that Kate had been literary, while Minnie ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... such connections, was the lady, fair, faded, with mildly aquiline features, and an aspect at once distinguished and dowdy, who appealed to Merton. She sought him in what she, at least, regarded as the interests of her eldest daughter, an heiress under the will of a maternal uncle. Merton had met the young lady, who looked like a portrait of her mother in youth. He knew that Miss Malory, now 'wrapped up in' her betrothed ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... thunder soon goes out; And only makes you more devout. Then is not female clatter worse, That drives you not to pray, but curse? We hardly thunder thrice a-year; The bolt discharged, the sky grows clear; But every sublunary dowdy, The more she scolds, the more she's cloudy. [How useful were a woman's thunder, If she, like us, would burst asunder! Yet, though her stays hath often cursed her, And, whisp'ring, wish'd the devil burst her: For hourly thund'ring in his face, She ne'er was known to burst ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... silent saluting gun he was still admiring. The approach of Don Miguel and Padre Esteban with a small bevy of ladies, however, quickly changed her thoughts, and detached the Senor from her side. Her first swift feminine impression of the fair strangers was that they were plain and dowdy, an impression fully shared by the other lady passengers. But her second observation, that they were more gentle, fascinating, child-like, and feminine than her own countrywomen, was purely her own. Their loose, undulating figures, guiltless ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... and beautiful mouth. For his looks were wasted on a man; Michael wanted to see them repeated and softened in a girl. As his eyes rested contemplatingly on his companion's bent head and youthfully-lean figure, he began to visualize a very plain, dowdy sister. The "Good Lord, no!" probably meant that although Freddy was not the least vain of his own extraordinary good looks, he could not help exclaiming at the idea of his dowdy ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... declare it's charming! Now look at yourself. Why should you make yourself look dowdy? It's all very well—but you can't be much ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... is quite clear you ought to marry; you want some one to take this girl out, and look after her, and who's to do it? She's a dowdy—don't you see? Such a dust! And it is really such a pity; for she's a very pretty creature, and a clever woman could make ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... tent the brass band was blowing blatantly, four cavaliers in rusty spangles and four dowdy women were riding round the ring, going through the old-time preliminary called the grand entry; for whatever else may change, the circus remains faithful to its traditions. The Yorick of the sawdust soon followed, and said the things which convulsed ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... and hooped up, I ween, They're mothers full often before they're sixteen, And fading and dowdy and sickly at twenty, With one boy in trowsers and two girls in laces Complaining of starving while dying of plenty The fate is of ladies ...
— Nothing to Eat • Horatio Alger [supposed]
... said Elma, "do you imagine for a moment that that excrescence at the back of your head is fashionable? I never saw anything more dowdy." ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... gin, whose head barely reaches the counter, the gin-drinking charwoman to the left, and the quarrelsome gin-drinking Irish customers at the back. Everything in this picture reeks of gin; the only persons not imbibing it are the proprietor and his dowdy barmaids, whom I have no manner of doubt the artist intended ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... in the dusty 'carry-all,' Mrs. Cowell was evidently studying Mary's elegant and expensive travelling-dress, from her Russia leather satchel to her dainty boots and gloves, while Mary had taken in at a glance the terribly dowdy appearance of Louise and her mother—the old lady's black alpaca suit, made evidently at home and Louise's Scotch plaid dress, and dyed, and too scant silk overekirt; and yet, with such toilets, it was a relief to her to find they ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... swarm who had no individual physiognomy. Besides, in spite of his superciliousness and irony, it was difficult to believe that he did not admire her spirit as well as her person: he was young, handsome, distinguished in appearance—not one of these ridiculous and dowdy Philistines who thought it incumbent on them to blight the gaming-table with a sour look of protest as they passed by it. The general conviction that we are admirable does not easily give way before a single negative; rather when any of Vanity's large family, male or female, find their performance ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... Bella, as the acknowledged ornament of the family, employed both her hands in giving her hair an additional wave while sitting in the easiest chair, and occasionally threw in a direction touching the supper: as, 'Very brown, ma;' or, to her sister, 'Put the saltcellar straight, miss, and don't be a dowdy little puss.' ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... bag, and he stepped a bit nearer to her side, as they halted beneath the shining stars, to look back upon what they left behind them. Catia saw the huddled gathering of the village people, already looking a little dowdy to her critical eyes. Scott only saw four faces, grouped in perspective: his mother, tearful, a little tremulous, yet radiant in her full content; behind her, two of the visiting clergy, classmates and chums of the divinity school, and, still behind these two, the eager young face ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... of the dreaded dowager above. But he had not been ten minutes in that presence before he had arrived at a faint intuition of what poor Fanny meant. It was not in the exquisite mildness of the old Marquise, a little gray-haired bunch of a woman in dowdy mourning, or in the small neat presence of the priestly uncle, the Abbe who had so obviously just stepped down from one of the picture-frames overhead: it was not in the aspect of these chief protagonists, so outwardly unformidable, that Durham read an occult danger ...
— Madame de Treymes • Edith Wharton
... sounds must secure the answer. 'Maude will never permit it. The unlucky picture has settled that point. Maude will not suffer her to cross the threshold! But for the portrait I could bespeak my cousin's favour and indulgence for a somewhat countrified young girl, dowdy and awkward. I could plead for her good looks in that ad misericordiam fashion that disarms jealousy and enlists her generosity for a humble connection she need never see more of! If I could only persuade Maude that I had done an indiscretion, and that I knew it, I should ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... the keys verily here? Can falsehood build up so august a lie? A couple of friars shuffle past him, and go to their prayers at some near altar; he does not even smile at their shaven pates and their dowdy, coarse gowns of serge. Low music from some far-away chapel comes floating under the panelled vaultings, and loses itself under the great dome, with a sound so gentle, so full of entreaty, that it seems to him the dove on the high altar might have made it with a cooing and a flutter ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... one or two peculiarities of this kind as we stroll about the city, and they are explained to us by our colonial friend. Some extremely dowdy females we see riding in a barouche are the wife and daughters of a high official, who is stingy to his woman-kind, so they say. Two youths we pass are in striking contrast, as they walk along arm-in-arm. One is got ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... and wearing themselves out soul and body, trying to keep in the station where they belong, or used to. Poor Mrs. Mason is pale and nervous and wrinkled at forty, and those three poor girls, who spend their time making over their old dresses, are so dowdy- looking and uneasy that no man ever glances at them twice. It is such misery as that which I dread for you, Helen, and why I am talking to you. There is no reason why you should take upon you such sorrows; ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... them jobs in the same way. Young men possessed the earth; young women had to wrest what they wanted out of it piecemeal. Johnny might end a cabinet minister, a notorious journalist, a Labour leader, anything.... Women's jobs were, as a rule, so dowdy and unimportant. Jane was bored to death with this sex business; it wasn't fair. But Jane was determined to live it down. She wouldn't be put off with second-rate jobs; she wouldn't be dowdy and unimportant, like her mother and the other fools; ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... London chapel I saw a dowdy little woman of this type kneeling in a pew, chanting the responses to the service. Her blouse gaped open all the way down her back and she was saying with much fervor, "We have left undone those things which we ought to have done." She had too, but she didn't know it, ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... a bit better than mine—now! (He puts down the photograph and stares austerely at her.) And you know very well that you think me dowdy and second ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... daughter, who had the fever slightly, could be taken away, and he was driving home again, when he overtook Mrs. Duncombe and offered her a lift, for her step was weary. She was indeed altered, pale, with cheek-bones showing, and all the lustre and sparkle gone out of her, while her hat was as rigidly dowdy as ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that he sat there in that quiet room that had once witnessed the trying out of a manly soul, and saw the calm eyes of the plain mother on the wall opposite, and the true eyes of the dowdy school-boy on the other wall, he was ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... matter of fact, so far from discouraging the passion for dress among their female dependents, ladies of position and fortune are apt to insist on their dressing smartly. They like to see some of their own lustre reflected on their attendants. A dowdy in sad-colored print or linsey is by no means to their taste. This has been well pointed out in a letter in which a "Maid-servant" replied, through the Pall Mall Gazette, to the project of reform proposed by a "Clergyman's Wife." Looking at the question ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... was instantly over, I stole a tip-toe to the passage door, and opening it with a noise, passed for having that moment come home; and after a short pause, as if to pull off my things, I opened the door into the dining room, where I fund the dowdy blowing the fire, and my faithful shepherd walking about the room, and wistling, as cool and unconcerned as if nothing had happened. I think, however, he had not much to brag of having out-dissembled me: for I kept up, nobly, the character of our sex for art, and went up to him ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... be careful in learning. Your sister Fanny says the Boston young men stick out their elbows dreadfully when they waltz, and look like owls spinning on invisible teetotums. She declares, too, that all the Boston girls are dowdy. But she is obliged to confess that Mr. Beacon and Mr. Dinks are as well dressed and gentlemanly and dance as well as our young men here. And as for the Boston ladies, Mr. Dinks tells Fanny that he has a cousin, a Miss Wayne, who lives in Delafield, who might alter her opinion of the dowdiness ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... lady mounted to their compartment just before the train began to move. She was stout and middle-aged, and had never been pretty, but she bore herself with a kind of authority in spite of her thread gloves, her dowdy gray travelling-dress, and a hat of lower middle-class English tastelessness. She took the only seat vacant, a backward-riding place beside a sleeping passenger who looked like a commercial traveller, but she seemed ill at ease in it, and March offered her his seat. She ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... companions; you must do the same. Therefore try and fit yourself for the position.' Everything I did was wrong—according to her, I was rebellious, irreligious, too fond of dress, and lazy physically and mentally. The fact was, I was simply a half-starved, dowdy school-girl—-often hungry for food and always hungry for love. If I had had a dog to talk to I should have been happier. My mother died when I was three years old, and my father two years later. Then, as I told you, I went out as governess to the Warrens when I ...
— John Frewen, South Sea Whaler - 1904 • Louis Becke
... she's a dowdy thing, always trailing round with a book and those horrid children. No danger of his marrying her." And a derisive laugh seemed to settle that ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... like me to marry? Oh, I know the sort! First, she must be tall and handsome, with red, fashionable hair, and cool, offhand manners. She must never look shy or put out, or as if she did not know what to say. On the contrary, she must know who's who, and what's what, and never wear a dowdy bonnet, but always a stunning hat. And she must have a father who can give her something handsome when she is married. That's my mother's girl for me. I can't bear to look such a girl in the face! ...
— Far Above Rubies • George MacDonald
... trim, clean, cleanly; tasteful, trim, finished, artistic, nice, excellent, adroit; dainty; spruce; dapper, natty. Antonyms: dowdy, slovenly, slatternly, untidy, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... Keith went to the address that Phrony had given him. It was a small lodging-house of, perhaps, the tenth rate. The dowdy woman in charge remembered a young woman such as he described. She was ill and rather crazy and had left several weeks before. She had no idea where she had gone. She did not know her name. Sometimes she called herself ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... she was in such matters, instinctively recognised that Maud's clothes not only became her very well, but had been made by a first-class tailor. Her own simply made coat and skirt of blue serge felt suddenly very dowdy. ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... colour, and her flesh. Gradually she shrank back to the old, slim, reticent pallor, with eyes a little too large for her face. And now it seemed her face was a little too long, a little gaunt. And in her civilian clothes she seemed a little dowdy, shabby. And altogether, she looked older: she looked more than her age, which was only twenty-four years. Here was the old Alvina come back, rather battered and deteriorated, apparently. There was even a tiny touch of the trollops in her dowdiness—so ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... Pathfinder. There was a sawpit in the yard, a favourite hiding-place for the boys, and the turpentiny scent of fresh sawdust had always been a thing to conjure with in the Solitary's memory. The smell of printer's ink which hung about the dowdy, untidy, bankrupt printing-office had a hint of it. Years afterwards and years ago in the studio of the President of the Belgian Academy, when Paul was famous and on easy terms with famous people, ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... of instinct distilled from his experience of clergymen's belongings, Godfrey had expected to see a dowdy female, with a red, fat face, and watery eyes, perhaps wearing an apron and a black dress hooked awry, accompanied by a snub-nosed little girl with straight hair, and a cold in the head. In place of these he saw a fashionably-dressed, Parisian-looking ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... however, wholly eschew the hats; leaving those dowdy old souls, their mothers, to ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... evening dresses that it sometimes takes a kindly husband an hour to fasten, with "press-buttons" and hooks and eyes; and poor Vivie had no husband and depended on her suffragette maid because at all costs she mustn't look dowdy or the woman's cause might suffer ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... try at Florence and Aix, "the Queen" has been faithful to Cimiez, a charming site back of Nice. That gay city is always en fete the day she arrives, as her carriages pass surrounded by French cavalry, one can catch a glimpse of her big face, and dowdy little figure, which nevertheless she can make so dignified when occasion requires. The stay here is, indeed, a holiday for this record-breaking sovereign, who potters about her private grounds of a morning in a donkey-chair, sunning herself and watching her ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... choose to ask them. One was Miss Clarke—you know her. She smiled in her usual supercilious manner, but in her case I believe it was only because Miss Clare looks so dowdy. But nobody knows any thing about her except what I've ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... ideas as to provincial life in the course of it. His horizon widened; society assumed different proportions. There were fair Parisiennes in fresh and elegant toilettes all about him; Mme. de Bargeton's costume, tolerably ambitious though it was, looked dowdy by comparison; the material, like the fashion and the color, was out of date. That way of arranging her hair, so bewitching in Angouleme, looked frightfully ugly here among the daintily devised coiffures which ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... just the style which, after all, does go so far. There's nothing dowdy about her. A dowdy woman would have killed me. She attracted me from the first moment; and, by Jove, old fellow, I can assure you it was mutual. I am the happiest fellow alive, and I don't think there is anything I envy anybody." In all ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... social conventions at which she had always laughed, and still laughed, but for the fundamental laws of truth, simplicity, and cleanness, upon which the ideal of civilization, at least, is based. She noticed that she was beginning to like "good" persons, even homely, dowdy, good persons, like Alice and George Valentine. She lost her old appetite for scandal, for ugly ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... you a few finishing touches before we go," said Marion, a few minutes afterwards, "and I will lend you my green brooch and a veil. You must let me alter your bonnet a little one night next week. There; now you don't look quite so dowdy," said Marion, as she pushed her cousin before the looking-glass after the "few touches" had been given to her bonnet and ...
— Kate's Ordeal • Emma Leslie
... the boys say she looks thirty at least. Guy and Walter laugh amazingly at her dowdy dress and ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... very dull here," she moaned. "I'm afraid you'll be bored to death." And she looked at Mary with her most smilingly cruel expression. "Oh, Mary, why did you put on that dreadfully dowdy frock? I've asked you over and over again to give it away, but you never pay attention ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... longing to ask Maud to visit me, and now that the chance has come I am not going to throw it away. I am very sorry for Ruth, of course. It must be dreadful to be all alone like that. But it isn't my fault. And she is so fearfully quiet and dowdy—what would they all think of her at home? Frank and Jack would make such fun of her. I shall ask Maud just as soon as she ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... that their recipient had expressed herself perfectly delighted with the delicate, beautiful gift, but, being a true lady, Bart's mother said nothing about the matter to those who would have been glad to spread a little gossip unfavorable to the dowdy society queen of Pleasantville. ...
— Bart Stirling's Road to Success - Or; The Young Express Agent • Allen Chapman
... I never feel as if I was dressed right. My things seemed elegant at home, and I thought I'd be over over-dressed if anything; but I look countrified and dowdy here. No time or money to change now, even if I knew how to do it,' answered the other, glancing anxiously at her bright pink silk grown, trimmed with ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... covet carnal copulation at set times; men always, ruinating thereby the health of their bodies. And doth it not deserve laughter to see an amorous fool torment himself for a wench; weep, howl for a misshapen slut, a dowdy sometimes, that might have his choice of the finest beauties? Is there any remedy for this in physic? I do anatomise and cut up these poor beasts, [247]to see these distempers, vanities, and follies, yet such proof were better made on man's ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... child," said Elma, "do you imagine for a moment that that excrescence at the back of your head is fashionable? I never saw anything more dowdy." ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... from over-swathing. For pain, actual, excrutiating; for pain invincible, somber and unutterable, one proud woman reduced to a last season's frock suffers more than twenty arrayed in customary rags and tatters. God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, but not to the dowdy woman. The occupant of the cottage or cabin as he hurries home on Saturday night with his hard-earned store perhaps envies the occupant of the mansion where lights burn brightly and music fills the air, but the master of the mansion may be driven to the verge of insanity ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... total inadequacy of her wardrobe. It wouldn't do to go to St. Moritz looking like a frump, and yet there was no time to get anything sent from Paris, and, whatever she did, she wasn't going to show herself in any dowdy re-arrangements done at home. But suddenly light broke on her, and she clasped her hands for joy. "Why, Nelson'll bring them—I'd forgotten all about Nelson! There'll be just time if I ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... impurity &c. 961[of mind]. defilement, contamination &c. v.; defoedation|; soilure[obs3], soiliness|; abomination; leaven; taint, tainture|; fetor &c. 401[obs3]. decay; putrescence, putrefaction; corruption; mold, must, mildew, dry rot, mucor, rubigo|. slovenry[obs3]; slovenliness &c. Adj. squalor. dowdy, drab, slut, malkin[obs3], slattern, sloven, slammerkin|, slammock[obs3], slummock[obs3], scrub, draggle-tail, mudlark[obs3], dust- man, sweep; beast. dirt, filth, soil, slop; dust, cobweb, flue; smoke, soot, smudge, smut, grit, grime, raff[obs3]; sossle[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... mournful looks of these ancient cousins, the shaking of their black beads, their sibilant whisperings, and in their presence she was dry-eyed and rather rude. Aunt Caroline would have laughed at them and their dowdy clothes that smelt of camphor, but it seemed as though no one would ever laugh again ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... or two peculiarities of this kind as we stroll about the city, and they are explained to us by our colonial friend. Some extremely dowdy females we see riding in a barouche are the wife and daughters of a high official, who is stingy to his woman-kind, so they say. Two youths we pass are in striking contrast, as they walk along arm-in-arm. One is got up according to the fullest Auckland idea of Bond Street foppery, ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... on my life, I'll be no farmer's dowdy wife, To toil and drudge thro' mud and mire: I hope you'll ...
— Think Before You Speak - The Three Wishes • Catherine Dorset
... feel it. How can I help feeling it when I know that if I had Evelyn Chesley's friends and Evelyn's fortune, people would look on Me-Myself in quite a different way. You see, they would judge me by the Outside-Person part of me, which would be soft and silky and secure, and not dowdy and diffident. ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... to lay her out. Ah didn't go to the graveyard though. Ah didn't have a home after she died and Ah wandered from place to place, stayin' with a white fambly this time and then a nigger fambly the next time. Ah moved to Jackson County and stayed with a Mister Frank Dowdy. Ah didn't stay there long though. Then Ah moved to Winder, Georgia. They called it 'Jug Tavern' in them days, 'cause jugs wuz made there. Ah married Green Hinton in Winder. Got along well after marryin' him. He farmed fur a livin' ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... dream of being tremendously fashionable or anything of that kind. I would not for one moment think of allowing any of my court-ladies to cut their hair short, for instance, or to wear one of those foolish hobble skirts; but nobody, nobody could accuse us of being dowdy. Now tell me, have you ever seen one of us looking like that, or ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 11, 1919 • Various
... are grateful Under skies serene; But the human type is hateful On a tragic scene; When the outlook's drear and cloudy Punch would rather see you dowdy Than extravagant and rowdy In your dress ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 22, 1916 • Various
... St. Botolph's Mission Hall the oddly-assorted crowd which generally finds its way to such functions. There were smart people, just a scattering of the cultured, dowdy and dull folk, who had "helped the good cause," and expected to get as much sober entertainment in return as might be had for the asking. Then, there were the ever-present army of free sight-seers, and a ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... I saw her the first day she came, and was the victim of despair until she suddenly got sick and so couldn't wear those wonderful waists and jackets. I felt like a dowdy when I saw ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... lace was in the next pew on a body of inferior standing, was a downright outrage to the congregation, the rector, and all religion. A cold-blooded creature, with no pin-money, might reconcile it with her principles, if any she had, to stand up like a dowdy and allow a poor man to risk his life by shot and storm and starvation, and then to deny him a word or a look, because of his coming with the genuine thing at a quarter the price fat tradesmen asked, who never stirred out of their shops when it rained, for a thing that ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... the girl, as one looks at her, that seems to make it very possible she is marked out for one of those wonderful romantic fortunes that history now and then relates. 'Who, after all, was the Empress of the French?' Mrs. Light is forever saying. 'And beside Christina the Empress is a dowdy!'" ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... darling, and go down and outshine all these dear, dowdy Englishwomen; and while you are sipping courtesy and gentleness with Lord Fordyce, I shall try to quaff gloriously attractive, aboriginal force with Mr. Arranstoun—but it would have been more suitable to our characters ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... surprise so much the effect of his dissimulation, as of his want of taste and discernment. She inveighed against him, not as the most treacherous lover, but as the most abject wretch, in courting the smiles of such an awkward dowdy, while he enjoyed the favours of a woman who had numbered princes in the train of her admirers. For the brilliancy of her attractions, such as they at present shone, she appealed to the decision of her minister, who consulted her own satisfaction and interest, by flattering the other's ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... magnified beetles, with bulging eyes of fire, went swiftly by. The pavements were almost deserted when they reached the park. He felt as if hypnotized, and once, rather meanly, was glad that no one saw him in company of his dowdy companion. ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... convinced he was going to crown himself with the most flattering of laurels at the mansion of some princess of the royal blood. In reality, he was going to see one of his Conservatoire friends, a large, lanky dowdy, as swarthy as a mole and full of pretensions, who was destined for the tragic line of character, and inflicted upon her lover Athalie's dream, Camille's imprecations, and ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... a poor dowdy in a haase. It's a queer thing, but eddication seems to mar as mony as it maks. Aw dooant know ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... feet would do more than pass muster here, she reflected with satisfaction. Indeed, although she was more plainly dressed than most of the women present, she rejoiced to feel she did not suffer too much by comparison. Esther was never dowdy. She was not ashamed of her well-tailored coat and skirt, marron in colour—which went well with her eyes and hair—nor of her little new felt hat, purchased in Paris. Her small choker fur was of good stone-marten, even her gloves and the handkerchief ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... dusty dowdy! How dare you come here to disgrace me in my own house and premises, after my sending you fifty pounds? To take the very ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... photograph the family on the porch, where the light was good. While I walked around the house outside, they passed through the front room, which seemed to be the common dormitory as well as parlor. To my surprise and chagrin, the girls and their dowdy mother had, in those brief moments of transition, contrived to arrange their hair and dress to a degree which took from them all those picturesque qualities with which they had been invested at the time of my arrival. The father was being reproved, as he emerged upon the porch, for not "slick'n' ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... eight-thirty on Sunday evening. And, anyhow, he said, she looked quite nice, really very smart; besides, Mrs Mitchell was not the sort of person who would think any the less of a pretty woman for being a little dowdy and ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... prove it. She could, too—she no longer doubted her possession of the college girl's one talent that Betty had laughed about. For there was Theresa Reed, her friend down the street. She was homely and awkward, she wore dowdy clothes and wore them badly, she was slow and plodding; but there was one thing that she could do, and the girls admired her for it and had instantly made a place for her. Helen was glad of a second proof that those things ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... hardly tell you; but it was at recess, and nearly all the girls were out, except three or four. Maud said that Carrie Wilson's mamma had been calling at Mrs. Simpson's and that she said that Mrs. Ashley told that Hattie's sister Belle was the most dowdy-looking girl ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... Indian trader. Matthew Fred. Monet, fruiterer. John Baldwin, greengrocer. Stephen Whitley, laundryman. Charles H. Thorp, ship carpenter. George Washington Hobbs, teamster. Willis Carroll Bond, contractor. Elison Dowdy, painter. Archer Fox, barber. Robert H. Williamson, blacksmith. Randel Caesar, barber. Fortune Richard, ship carpenter. T. Devine Mathews, carrier. Robert Tilghman, barber. Charles Humphrey Scott, grocer. Thomas H. Jackson, drayman. ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett
... is no use in talking to you. You will go your own way. Only, as I am in town, do come to my dressmaker's. Though you had your mourning in Paris, do you know, you look quite dowdy. You'll ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... entitled Celibates) with malice prepense. Too great an artist to use as a dialectic battering-ram one of his characters, for all that he makes Mildred very "modern." She doesn't despise men, nor does she care much for the ideas of her dowdy friend the "advanced" Mrs. Fargus; on the contrary, she makes fun of her clothes and ideas, though secretly regretting that she hadn't been sent by her parents to Girton College. Like Hedda she is ambitious to outshine ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... a crust the pastry and bake in a moderate oven for forty-five minutes. Let cool and then run a knife around the edge of the baking dish and loosen the crust from the dish. Place a large platter over the dowdy and then invert. Dust the dowdy lightly with nutmeg and serve ...
— Mrs. Wilson's Cook Book - Numerous New Recipes Based on Present Economic Conditions • Mary A. Wilson
... friends. They bowed, and shook hands with Mrs. Fargus, but were at no pains to conceal their indifference to the drab and dowdy little woman in the soiled sage green, and the glimmering spectacles. 'What a complexion,' whispered Elsie the moment they were outside the door. 'What's her husband like?' asked Cissy as they descended ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... who, I hoped, had not been made so by waltzing alone in the empty kitchen, there were two other boys and one dirty little limp girl in a gauzy dress. Such a precocious little girl, with such a dowdy bonnet on (that, too, of a gauzy texture), who brought her sandalled shoes in an old threadbare velvet reticule. Such mean little boys, when they were not dancing, with string, and marbles, and cramp-bones in their pockets, ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... of poor Sophia—and very good it is—not that we congratulate Mr Mulready on his Sophia here; she is rather a vulgar dowdy figure, the others are very good, and the incident well told. "A post-chaise and pair drove up to them, and instantly stopped. Upon which a well-dressed man, but not Mr Thornhill, stepping out, clasped my daughter round the waist, and, forcing her in, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... as a relation." Then, oh! visions of the golden dream of bliss when she could visit such titled kin in Old England, and report it all when at home in New York, filled her head. And with her mind eaten up with it, she pushed rudely by a plain, somewhat dowdy-looking woman ...
— Five Little Peppers Abroad • Margaret Sidney
... knew your hold on him was weakening. [She looks at him.] You knew it too. [She looks away.] He was beginning to find out that a dowdy demagogue is not the cheeriest person to live with. I repeat, you're a dooced clever woman, my dear. [She rises, with an impatient shake of her body, and walks past him, he following her with his eyes.] And a ...
— The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith • Arthur Wing Pinero
... sees at a glance all the good points of a figure; she knows how to bring them out strongly; she discovers by intuition what is lacking, and dexterously hides the defects. I have seen her convert the veriest dowdy into an elegant woman. And, when she gets a subject that pleases her, she perfectly revels in her art. Look at this dress for instance,—see by what delicate ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... in her dress, had an instinct for style and had taught Clara some valuable lessons. "Any woman can dress well if she knows how," Kate had declared. She had taught Clara how to study and emphasize by dress the good points of her body. Beside Clara, Rose McCoy looked dowdy and commonplace. ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... current, dowdy Things— "Turkey trots" and rowdy Flings— For they made you overseas In politer times than these In an age when grace could please, Ere St. Vitus Clutched and shook us, spine and knees; Loosed a plague ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... shoes, but his wife was older and larger and had a tiny, stern mustache which made her seem the more male and dominant figure of the two. Mariquita, the girl, was all father, and she had been a year in a Los Angeles convent. The mother wore rich but dowdy black and an impossible headgear, a rather hawklike affair which appeared to have alighted by mistake on the piles of dusky hair where it was shakily balancing itself, but Mariquita's narrow blue serge was entirely modish, and her tan pumps, and sheer amber silk hose, ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... we shall hear no more of the bread and cheese and onions, pot-house scores, and low company, with which you have so unceremoniously taxed our lordship. You will drive your jumped-up coach, with your awkward wives and dowdy daughters, and your tawdry liveries, all the way from Russell Square to the Green Park, to catch the chance of a glimpse of our lordship. You find out from our lordship's footman that our lordship wears a particular collar to his coat, and you will move ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... Slump" is a pie consisting of apples, molasses, and bread crumbs baked in a tin pan. This is known to New Englanders as "Pan Dowdy." An agreeable bread was at one time made by an ingenious Frenchman which consisted of one third of apples boiled, and two-thirds ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... "I'm a dowdy frump!" she lamented, half-voiced. "I dressed myself while Marie was packing. But you needn't be ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... is no Possibility of agreeing with such a one as I have got. You see what a ragged Condition I am in; so he lets me go like a Dowdy! May I never stir, if I an't asham'd to go out of Doors any whither, when I see how fine other Women are, whose Husbands are nothing nigh ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... was put into the water. Shapely? shapely is not the word for it, she is absolutely beautiful! She is to other craft what,"—here his eye rested upon Miss Onslow's unconscious face for an instant—"a perfectly lovely woman is to a fat old dowdy. There is only one fault I have to find with her, and that is only a fault in my eyes; there are many who regard it as a ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... aboriginal from a wild and distant country, and they shot glances at each other, uneasy, half-jealous, half-envious glances, as they noted the beauty of the face, and the grace of the figure in its black dress, which, plain as it was, seemed to make theirs still more dowdy and vulgar. In the midst of this lugubrious account of the annoyances and worries of the journey, Mr. Heron ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... orderly, trim, clean, cleanly; tasteful, trim, finished, artistic, nice, excellent, adroit; dainty; spruce; dapper, natty. Antonyms: dowdy, slovenly, slatternly, untidy, tawdry, gaudy, frowzy, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... had only known how ravishing that simple costume made her appear and what a vision she would be to the hungry eyes of Bob McGraw! Yet, she was ashamed to let even the San Pasqualians see her leaving town in such a dowdy costume, and as she walked up the tracks from the Hat Ranch that momentous morning, bearing aloft a parasol that but the day before had been the joy of her girlish existence, she was fully convinced that a more commonplace addendum to a feminine ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... for a real society," replied Siward, laughing. "At present we have its uncombined ingredients in the raw—noisy wealth and flippant fashion, arrogant intelligence and dowdy breeding—all excellent materials, when filtered and fused in the retort; and many of our test tubes have already precipitated pure metal besides, and our national laboratory is turning out fine alloys. Some day we'll understand the formula, ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... be woven on purpose for her. Her gowns were gowns of the old school, and lasted for years, smelling of the sandal or camphor wood chests in which they reposed for months at a stretch, yet, by virtue of some wonderful tact in the wearer, never looked dowdy ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... we play with each other, and it is a stand-off which is cleverest. She is quite puzzled sometimes by my frankness about some things, for instance, about her looks. I notice she compliments me on my looks whenever I am decidedly off colour, when I wear a green ribbon, or a dowdy dress, or big shoes. But I am honest with her in these things, and I like to see her look well. The game is more ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... but I don't believe she'd mind, for that dowdy tarlaton is all she has got. She may tear it tonight, and that will be a good excuse for offering ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... I fear, somewhat extravagantly, and my performance as heroine in —— was so highly praised that I had no doubt my future was well assured. Last year I earned L40, and I have to live on what I earn, and if I look dowdy when I go seeking an engagement I have little chance of getting it. Yet I am under thirty, and although not one of the little group of alleged beauties whose faces appear monotonously week after week in the illustrated papers, ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... coat would have been a colorless piece of apparel beside her dress if we finally hadn't sat on her and told her certain things couldn't be done. She was crazy to pile on a bunch of ancestral lace, yellow and dowdy; but we told her not much, told her freshness and daintiness suited her style much better, and she wasn't old enough to emphasize ancestral lace, and she blushed and gave in. But nothing would have made her do it if Miss Fannie ...
— Kitty Canary • Kate Langley Bosher
... laughs; "I have nothing to wear. There is a white Swiss muslin in my trunk, but it will look wofully rustic and dowdy, I'm afraid, in your ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... a white dress, too," observed Edna regretfully; for in her heart she thought Bessie's favorite gray gown very dowdy and Quakerish. "But we must try to enliven you with a few flowers. You are going to wear a gray hat. Wait a moment." And Edna darted out of the room, and returned a moment afterward with a dainty cream lace ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... only disinterested, but generous. The two gowns that you saw Brigitte and Madame Thuillier wear last night were a present from her, and it was because she came herself to superintend the toilet of our two 'amphitryonesses' that you were so surprised last night not to find them rigged in their usual dowdy fashion." ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... audience from their posts retir'd, And Julius in a general hiss expir'd, Sage Booth to Cibber cried, "Compute your gains; These Egypt dogs, and their old dowdy queens, But ill requite these habits and these scenes! To rob Corneille for such a motley piece— His geese were swans, but, zounds, thy swans are geese." Rubbing his firm, invulnerable brow, The bard ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, Issue 353, January 24, 1829 • Various
... aristocratic. Mrs. Briggs, nee Van Duysen, has nothing Dutch about her but her name. The Knickerbockers of New York were famous for their thrift, their economy, their neatness, and, above all, their housewifely virtues. Mrs. Briggs is thriftless, extravagant, dowdy in her old age, although she had been a beauty in her youth, and knows as little about keeping a house as she does about keeping a horse. During the war, at a fair given for the benefit of the Sanitary Commission, in Union Square, several ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... course, there are exceptions, but as a class they are either dull, dowdy or dyspeptic. It is only fair to the rising generation of America to state that they are not to blame for this. Indeed, they spare no pains at all to bring up their parents properly and to give them a suitable, if somewhat ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... awkward, shrinking girl who was to be his bride the handsome school-boy exclaimed in disgust, "You are surely not going to marry me to that dowdy!" But there was no escape; the demands of "honour" must be satisfied. The ceremony was quickly performed; and within an hour of first setting eyes on each other, the children were separated—Lord ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... in the dew, and bursting through the cables of gossamer that tried to stay her. A kestrel hovered over the gorse, and she marked a badger on the hillside shuffling home before Man and his Dogs began the old rowdy-dowdy game ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... careless of him to forget that a woman about to travel abroad wants to make herself as stunning as she possibly can on the day of departure, so that the impression she will make at the start shall be strong enough to carry her through the dowdy stage which comes, as Marguerite had intimated, on the second and third days at sea; and to expect a woman like Marguerite Andrews, who really had no responsibilities to call her up at an early hour, to be ready at 9.30 sharp, was a fatal error, unless ...
— A Rebellious Heroine • John Kendrick Bangs
... children in the fugitive pages of that day are grotesque. A little girl in Punch improves on the talk of her dowdy mother with the maids. An inordinate baby stares; a little boy flies, hideous, from ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... her? why, she is a very dowdy, A dishclout, a foul gipsy unto thee. Come to my closet, lass, there take thy earnest Of love, of pleasure, and ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... creature! Fair, sir? fair as the immortal Helena! Proud, sir? proud as an arch-duchess! Handsome, sir? handsome, sir, as—as—oh, dammit, words fail me; but go, sir, go and ransack Olympus, and you couldn't match her, 'pon my soul! Diana, sir? Diana was a frump! Venus? Venus was a dowdy hoyden, by George! and as for the ox-eyed Juno, she was a positive cow to this young beauty! And ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... so dull and dowdy in the spring weather, when the snow drops and the crocuses are putting on their dainty frocks of white and mauve and yellow, and the baby-buds from every branch are peeping with bright eyes out on the world, and stretching forth soft little leaves toward the coming ...
— Evergreens - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... because you're always so quick to flare up. That's why they all call you 'Touch-and-go Steve Dowdy.' But come along, and let's get the other fellows. We can go down to the boathouse and talk ...
— The Strange Cabin on Catamount Island • Lawrence J. Leslie
... is a hint to trail away in the very direction I wanted to lead you. There are a lot of things we can do to add to our soldiers' comfort. They need chocolate—sweets are good for them—and 'comfort-kits' of the real sort, not those useless, dowdy ones so many well-intentioned women are wasting time and money to send them; and they'll be grateful for lots and lots ...
— Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls • Edith Van Dyne (AKA L. Frank Baum)
... Hawker is one of them; but we can't see who the other is. Who should it be but Mary, though, with whom he should walk, with his arm round her waist talking so affectionately. But see, she raises her head. Why! that is not Mary. That is old Jewel's dowdy, handsome, brazen-faced grandaughter. ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... 'Don't be a fool,' she says angrily, 'you've got to face facts, my dear. And a possible.' Charming without a bean in the world isn't a fact—it's a farce. It simply can't be done. . . . And three new very smart ideas in their best glad rags make three long noses at the poor little dowdy fellows as they go fluttering away to try to ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... had "understanding" mothers, did not need this special inspiration and help, but it was noticeable that girls who had no mothers at all, found in the little, plump, rather dowdy "old maid school teacher" one of those choice souls that God has put on earth to fulfil the duties ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill
... on the stage of the Panopticon Theatre? I am an artist giving life to a character in romance, I suppose; certainly not a grown-up child playing at being somebody out of Mrs. Markham's history of England. I wear whatever becomes me. I cannot act when I feel dowdy." ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... gin-drinking charwoman to the left, and the quarrelsome gin-drinking Irish customers at the back. Everything in this picture reeks of gin; the only persons not imbibing it are the proprietor and his dowdy barmaids, whom I have no manner of doubt the artist intended to ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... Leweezy to th' church, An fowk wink'd an dropt monny a hint, Aw knew tha'd nooan leav me i'th lurch, For a dowdy like her wi a squint. An Ellen at lives at th' yard end, May simper an innocent look, But aw think shoo'll ha' farther to fend, Befoor shoo's ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... was lost in wonder, and such was literally the case. He had taught himself to believe that Caroline Waddington was some tall, sharp-nosed dowdy; with bright eyes, probably, and even teeth; with a simpering, would-be-witty smile, and full of little quick answers such as might suit well for the assembly-rooms at Littlebath. When he heard that she ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... fertile, well-watered gardens. But that unattractiveness is not absolute or real; it is only 'that we should desire Him.' We are but poor judges of true 'form or comeliness,' and what is lustrous with perfect beauty in God's eyes may be, and generally is, plain and dowdy in men's. Our tastes are debased. Flaunting vulgarities and self-assertive ugliness captivate vulgar eyes, to which the serene beauties of mere goodness seem insipid. Cockatoos charm savages to whom the iridescent neck of a dove has no charms. Surely this part of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... Nora, with a sunny smile, "is jealous; because, being a doctor, he must wear only dowdy ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... became frequent and friendly. There were horseback rides together in the mornings, sails in the afternoons, and duets on the piano in the evenings. Then her Parisian toilets made poor Sophy's Largo dresses look funnily dowdy, and her sharp questions and affected ignorances of Sophy's meanings and answers were cleverly aided by Madame's cold silences, lifted brows, and hopeless acceptance of such an outside barbarian. Long before a dinner was over, Sophy had been driven into silence, ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... dont want you to talk. I want you to listen. You do not yet understand my views on the question of the Suffrage. (She rises to make a speech.) I must preface my remarks by reminding you that the Suffraget movement is essentially a dowdy movement. The suffragets are not all dowdies; but they are mainly supported by dowdies. Now I am not a dowdy. ...
— Press Cuttings • George Bernard Shaw
... together like a happy family in its tarnished abode. Jenny passed the dully-lighted shop, and turned in at her own gate. In a moment she was inside the house, sniffing at the warm odour-laden air within doors. Her mouth drew down at the corners. Stew to-night! An amused gleam, lost upon the dowdy passage, fled across her bright eyes. Emmy wouldn't have thanked her for that! Emmy—sick to death herself of the smell of cooking—would have slammed down the pot ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... black-lisle gloves worn at the fingers, and shoes run down in the heels, an exact portrait of one of Phil May's lydies. Thus it is that we pass her by, for the artistic sense in every being is repelled at the sight of a dowdy with weeping eyes and a nose that has been rubbed till it is as red as a winter apple. Anyhow, if she does go about in beautiful nudity, she ought at least to clothe herself with smiles and laughter. There are sorry enough things in the world ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... They were forbidden, or, at all events, lacked the means, to follow out their natural instinct of adorning themselves; all were dressed in one homely uniform of blue-checked gowns, with such caps upon their heads as English servants wear. Generally, too, they had one dowdy English aspect, and a vulgar type of features so nearly alike that they seemed literally to constitute a sisterhood. We have few of these absolutely unilluminated faces among our native American population, individuals of whom must be singularly unfortunate, if, mixing as we do, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... and spring-time in a small town! Do you know it? Main Street—on the right side—all a-bustle; farmers' wagons drawn up at the curbing; farmers' wives in the inevitable rusty black with dowdy hats furbished up with a red muslin rose in honor of spring; grand opening at the new five-and-ten-cent store, with women streaming in and streaming out again, each with a souvenir pink carnation pinned to her coat; every one carrying bundles and yellow paper bags that might contain ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... had played for two seasons with some credit T.R.E.O., T.R.S.W., until she fell down a trap-door and broke her leg); the girls at Fanny's school, we say, took no account of her, and thought her a dowdy little creature as long as she remained under Miss Minifer's instruction. And it was unremarked and almost unseen in the dark porter's lodge of Shepherd's Inn, that this ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... have the fewest charms, that they may make something out of nothing. They succeed best in fiction, and they apply this rule to love. They make a goddess of any dowdy. As Don Quixote said, in answer to the matter-of-fact remonstrances of Sancho, that Dulcinea del Toboso answered the purpose of signalising his valour just as well as the 'fairest princess under sky,' so any of the fair sex will serve them to write about just ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... girls as exquisitely beautiful, stylish, quick-witted, energetic, and good-tempered, while the mothers are portrayed as awkward, dowdy, stupid, and ill-educated, though honest and kind. We resent the distortion of this picture, for in America, as elsewhere, girls are largely what they are made by their mothers, yet we do have certain conditions which make sharp contrasts between mothers and ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... last name happened to be Jucklin, also scrambled to his feet when thus hailed by his campmate, Steve Dowdy. ...
— In Camp on the Big Sunflower • Lawrence J. Leslie
... intentions—a truth of which she herself had become possessed since her marriage and which it seemed to her might be utilized delightfully in her department. She would endeavor to treat dress from the standpoint of ethical responsibility to society, and to show that both extravagance and dowdy homeliness were to be avoided. Clothes in themselves had grown to be a satisfaction to her, and any association of vanity would be eliminated by the introduction of a serious artistic purpose into a weekly commentary concerning them. Accordingly she accepted the position and entered ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... spending their vacations together in the woods, or on the waters. In all they were five close friends, but Owen Hastings, a cousin of Max, and who had made his home with him, was at present away in Europe with another uncle; and Steve Dowdy happened to be somewhere else in town, perhaps helping his father remove his stock of groceries from his big store, which being in the lower part of town was apt to suffer from ...
— Afloat on the Flood • Lawrence J. Leslie
... droves of oxen, and long lines of booths, no end; and people selling macaroni, and other people eating it right in the open street, you know—such fun!—and fishermen and fish-wives. Oh, how they were screaming, and oh, such a hubbub as there was! and we couldn't go on fast, and Dowdy seemed really frightened." ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... thrash my jacket? Let'n,—let'n. But an he comes near me, mayhap I may giv'n a salt eel for's supper, for all that. What does father mean to leave me alone as soon as I come home with such a dirty dowdy? Sea-calf? I an't calf enough to lick your chalked face, you cheese-curd you: —marry thee? Oons, I'll marry a Lapland witch as soon, and live upon selling contrary ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve
... it's a merino, but that doesn't matter. Fancy your remembering my wardrobe like that! And wanting me to wear them all for years! So I shall, dear, secretly, when we are quite quite alone. But they are all out of date already, and if in a year or so you saw your poor dowdy wife with tight sleeves among a roomful of puff-shouldered young ladies, you would not be consoled even by the memory that it was in that dress that you first . . ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... thee to ask me a question like that. Have I fretted and pined, and forgot to eat and sleep, and gone dowdy and slovenly, because my lover has been fool enough to desert me? Well, then, that is what any other girl would have done. But because I am of thy blood and stock, I take what comes to me as part of my day's work, and make no more grumble on the matter than one does about bad weather. Is ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... Sajane. Do you reckon I'd risk appearing before Gertrude Loring in a draggled gown just when she has returned from the very heart of the civilized world? Goodness knows, we'll all look dowdy enough to her." ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... some sort of psychological change has been wrought in the mind of a people. Here, as in some Slav countries, there are laws and they are not kept, regulations and they are not observed. Unshaven men and ill-washed women on the streets, and dowdy, hatless girls with dirty hair crowding into cheap cinema theatres! A city that had no slums and no poor in 1914 now becoming a slum en bloc. And the litter on the roadways! You will not find its like in Warsaw. You must seek comparisons in the Bowery of New York or that part of the ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... head She took the path across the leaze. - Her spouse the vicar, gardening, said, "Too dowdy that, for coquetries, So ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... o'clock in the morning, in a room which she shared with a school teacher, Fanny Elmer read Tom Jones—that mystic book. For this dull stuff (Fanny thought) about people with odd names is what Jacob likes. Good people like it. Dowdy women who don't mind how they cross their legs read Tom Jones—a mystic book; for there is something, Fanny thought, about books which if I had been educated I could have liked— much better than ear-rings and flowers, she ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... his roe, like a dried herring.—O flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified!—Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in: Laura, to his lady, was but a kitchen wench,—marry, she had a better love to be-rhyme her; Dido, a dowdy; Cleopatra, a gypsy; Helen and Hero, hildings and harlots; Thisbe, a gray eye or so, ...
— Romeo and Juliet • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... somewhat stiff, and well at the side," the oracle, said. "I'm glad you're going to, dear, it looked just a wee bit dowdy, didn't it?" ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... pleased with the sight. It reached to the top of his ambition. Florence was to his eyes really the sort of a girl whom a man in his position ought to marry. A secretary of legation in a small foreign capital cannot do with a dowdy wife, as may a clerk, for instance, in the Foreign Office. A secretary of legation,—the second secretary, he told himself,—was bound, if he married at all, to have a pretty and distinguee wife. He knew all about ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... them," she said, indicating with a slight revealing gesture the swarming, dowdy, listless occupants of the crowded trench. "How patient they are, how resigned to the dreadful life they drag on here from day to day, full of the horror and the pain and the suffering that you say ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... appeared before Mr. Champneys in her new clothes. She thought that if she had been allowed to pick them out for herself, instead of having been hypnotized—"bulldozed" is what she called it—into plain old dowdy duds by two shopwomen and a Jew manager, she'd have given ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... is reversed. The Mad Hatter would have liked this Club—it would have been a club after his own heart. It opens at half-past two in the morning, and the first to arrive are the most disreputable members. In Rook-land the rowdy-dowdy, randy-dandy, rollicky-ranky boys get up very early in the morning and go to bed in the afternoon. Towards dawn, the older, more orderly members drop in for reasonable talk, and the Club becomes more respectable. The tree closes about six. For the first two hours, however, the goings-on are ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... 'Why, miss, there's many a married woman of thirty who would be proud to have your bust.' But our poor, dear Mary has no figure. She will do excellently for the wife of a country vicar. She's so fond of giving people advice, and of looking after the poor, and it won't matter that she's dowdy. She has no idea of dressing herself, although I've always done ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... Ho! get away you bullock-man, you've 'eard the bugle blowed, There's a regiment a-comin' down the Grand Trunk Road; With its best foot first And the road a-sliding past, An' every bloomin' campin'-ground exactly like the last; While the Big Drum says, With 'is "rowdy-dowdy-dow!"— "Kiko kissywarsti don't you ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... literally as broad as she was high; short hair, turning grey, was fantastically curled about her clever, dark eyes; she had two hats, one for summer and one for winter, the latter a man's old seal cap; her skirts and jackets were skimp and dowdy, and her features and complexion unattractive, yet the authority and ease, the whole manner of the true lady made her a delightful companion, and she would have been equally diverting and diverted at a Royal Audience in Buckingham ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... with more limited means, contented themselves with Sunday frocks or delicately coloured robes that had been manoeuvred into something that showed enough white neck and bosom to be at once alluring and decorous. There was nothing of the plain or the dowdy. They were all out for enjoyment, and they meant to make the best of everything, themselves included. Frills and fluffiness were the order. They were ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... stout and dowdy—"like a cook with pretty hands," as Stendhal said of her—mattered nothing to her admirers, many of whom remembered her in the days of her lovely youth. She was, in their eyes, as much a Queen as if she wore a crown; and, moreover, ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... the dusty 'carry-all,' Mrs. Cowell was evidently studying Mary's elegant and expensive travelling-dress, from her Russia leather satchel to her dainty boots and gloves, while Mary had taken in at a glance the terribly dowdy appearance of Louise and her mother—the old lady's black alpaca suit, made evidently at home and Louise's Scotch plaid dress, and dyed, and too scant silk overekirt; and yet, with such toilets, it was a relief to her to find they ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... have the advantage of my example, and of studying my polished manners (just fancy my polished manners; and I know, because little Tom, who is a brick, told me, that only last year he heard his father tell Emily—that's the eldest—that I was a dowdy, snub-nosed, ill-mannered miss, but that she must keep in with me and flatter me up). No, I will not live with Uncle Tom, and I will tell 'it' so. If I must leave my home, I will go to Aunt Chambers at ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... sarcastic on board ship as to the dresses of some of the people, but I thought it was only his way of grumbling at things in general, though certainly I generally agreed with him. He told me one day that my taste evidently inclined to the dowdy, but you see I wore half mourning until I ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty
... her a bewildered flutter—of pleasure, of fear, of pride, of shyness, of dismay: how dared she show her face in such a grand assembly? She would not know a bit how to behave herself! But it was impossible, for she had no dress fit to go anywhere! What would Tom say if she looked a dowdy? He would be ashamed of her, and she dared not think ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... this; he was also aware of the peculiar charm of it; but what struck him even more forcibly were Lord Henry's loose-fitting and apparently badly cut clothes. Anyone else so clad would have looked hopelessly dowdy, while the carelessly knotted green tie that bulged all askew from beneath the young man's ample collar, seemed for a ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... flight and Herbert's own comment on it in the form of his standing up with Nan for the nuptial benediction of the Vicar of St. Bernard's on a very cold, bleak December morning and amid a circle of seven or eight long-faced, red-nosed and altogether dowdy persons. Poor Nan herself had come to affect him as scarce other than red-nosed and dowdy by that time, but this only added, in his then, and indeed in his lasting view, to his general and his particular ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... is a queer sort of a place and I should be as miserable in it as a fish out of water, only there is sunshine enough in my heart to make any old hole bright. In the first place, this dowdy chamber is in one view a perfect den—no carpet, whitewashed walls, loose windows that have the shaking palsy, fire-red hearth, blue paint instead of white, or rather a suspicion that there was once ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... Therefore try and fit yourself for the position.' Everything I did was wrong—according to her, I was rebellious, irreligious, too fond of dress, and lazy physically and mentally. The fact was, I was simply a half-starved, dowdy school-girl—-often hungry for food and always hungry for love. If I had had a dog to talk to I should have been happier. My mother died when I was three years old, and my father two years later. Then, as I told you, I went out as governess to the Warrens when ...
— John Frewen, South Sea Whaler - 1904 • Louis Becke
... nobleness with a becoming hue, as Gard was jogged along in a roundabout way through the city. Here at the left were the august bridges and great park, all famed in Napoleon's battles. Over there were the dowdy royal palaces. There, too, was the house of the sacred Sistine. Her sweet lineaments shone down in almost ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... if you like! It depresses me to see you going about in that dowdy thing, and it must be a martyrdom for you to wear it every day. Come out and buy a straw shape for something and 'eleven-three'," (it's always "eleven-three" in Edgware Road), "and I'll trim it with some of your scraps. You have such nice scraps. Then we'll have tea, and you shall ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Velasquez painted court-dwarfs and the weavers of the royal tapestry-factories, and all sorts of persons and subjects connected with the king and his court. But in Holland, Rembrandt and Frans Hals and Vermeer painted the barnyard of the merchant's house, and they painted his rather dowdy wife and his healthy but bumptious children and the ships which had brought him his wealth. In Italy on the other hand, where the Pope remained the largest patron of the arts, Michelangelo and Correggio continued to paint Madonnas ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... inattention, dowdy indifference, and half-hearted work seem the rule; and no man succeeds, unless by hook or crook or threat he forces or bribes other men to assist him; or mayhap, God in His goodness performs a miracle, and sends him an Angel of Light for ...
— A Message to Garcia - Being a Preachment • Elbert Hubbard
... too, traipsing through weather like this. My gown and bonnet will be spoiled quite. Needn't I wear them, then? Indeed, Mr. Caudle, I shall wear them. No, sir; I'm not going out a dowdy to please you or anybody else. Gracious knows, it isn't often I step over the threshold; indeed, I might as well be a slave at once—better, I should say. But when I go out, Mr. Caudle, I choose ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... acted, she transformed her whole being, body, shape, voice, language, look, and features, into almost another animal, with a strong Devonshire dialect, a broad, laughing voice, a poking head, round shoulders, an unconceiving eye, and the most bediz'ning, dowdy dress that ever cover'd the untrain'd limbs of a Joan Trot. To have seen her here you would have thought it impossible the same creature could ever have been recover'd to what was as easy to her, the gay, the lively, and the desirable. Nor was her ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... "There's my new mauve silk dress! it was a very expensive silk, and I haven't worn it more than three or four times, and it really looks quite dowdy; and I can't get Patterson to do it over for me for this party. Well, really, I shall have to give up company because I have nothing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... was rushing about with butter-plates, her cousin Lyola, engaged merely for the dinner-hour, was filling glasses. A moment later the entire household assembled for the meal. Mrs. Fox, a gentle, bony old lady, with clean, cool hands, and with a dowdy little yoke of good lace in the neck of her old silk, smiled about her sadly. Mrs. Winchell was a plump little woman who always burst out laughing as a preliminary to speech. Her daughter was eye-glassed, pretty, capable, a woman who realized perfectly, ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... waited on the stone steps of Miss Teeturn's boarding-house for the dowdy servant-girl's return—such dirty, unkempt steps as they were, and such a dingy door-plate, spotted with rain and dust, not like Malachi's, he thought—he could hardly restrain himself from beating Juba with his foot, a plantation trick Malachi had taught him, keeping time the while with the ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... it that I marry some entrancing slip of girlhood, what am I to say when, later, I discover myself irrevocably chained to a fat and dowdy matron? I married no such person, I have indeed sworn eternal fidelity to an entirely different person; and this unsolicited usurper of my hearth is nothing whatever to me, unless perhaps the object of my entire abhorrence. Yet am I none the less compelled to justify the ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... it off she lost her bounce, her colour, and her flesh. Gradually she shrank back to the old, slim, reticent pallor, with eyes a little too large for her face. And now it seemed her face was a little too long, a little gaunt. And in her civilian clothes she seemed a little dowdy, shabby. And altogether, she looked older: she looked more than her age, which was only twenty-four years. Here was the old Alvina come back, rather battered and deteriorated, apparently. There was even a tiny ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... and I'll get him to recommend it to his patients. If he is as successful here as elsewhere they will swallow any dose he orders; for he knows how to manage people wonderfully well. He prescribed a silk dress to a despondent, dowdy patient once, telling her the electricity of silk was good for her nerves: she obeyed, and when well dressed felt so much better that she bestirred herself generally and recovered; but to this day she sings the praises of Dr. ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... ornament of the family, employed both her hands in giving her hair an additional wave while sitting in the easiest chair, and occasionally threw in a direction touching the supper: as, 'Very brown, ma;' or, to her sister, 'Put the saltcellar straight, miss, and don't be a dowdy little puss.' ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... by the things at which we used to laugh become presumptuous, and that which was once funny is now perverse. And the more practical a man is, the larger his stock of Connecticut commonsense, the greater his disillusionment as his children grow to manhood. When he beholds dawdling inanity and dowdy vanity growing lush as jimson, where yesterday, with strained prophetic vision, he saw budding excellence and worth, his soul is wrung by a worry that knows no peace. The matter is so poignantly personal that he dare not share it with another in confessional, and so he ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... had the fever slightly, could be taken away, and he was driving home again, when he overtook Mrs. Duncombe and offered her a lift, for her step was weary. She was indeed altered, pale, with cheek-bones showing, and all the lustre and sparkle gone out of her, while her hat was as rigidly dowdy as Miss Slater's. ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and vigorously at the opera. To-day the mellow sunlight crowned her ancient nobleness with a becoming hue, as Gard was jogged along in a roundabout way through the city. Here at the left were the august bridges and great park, all famed in Napoleon's battles. Over there were the dowdy royal palaces. There, too, was the house of the sacred Sistine. Her sweet lineaments shone down in almost every American parlor ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... harder to achieve equal results. People didn't give them jobs in the same way. Young men possessed the earth; young women had to wrest what they wanted out of it piecemeal. Johnny might end a cabinet minister, a notorious journalist, a Labour leader, anything.... Women's jobs were, as a rule, so dowdy and unimportant. Jane was bored to death with this sex business; it wasn't fair. But Jane was determined to live it down. She wouldn't be put off with second-rate jobs; she wouldn't be dowdy and unimportant, like her mother ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... to ask me a question like that. Have I fretted and pined, and forgot to eat and sleep, and gone dowdy and slovenly, because my lover has been fool enough to desert me? Well, then, that is what any other girl would have done. But because I am of thy blood and stock, I take what comes to me as part of my day's work, and make no more grumble on the matter than one does about bad weather. ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... reflections was instantly over, I stole a tip-toe to the passage door, and opening it with a noise, passed for having that moment come home; and after a short pause, as if to pull off my things, I opened the door into the dining room, where I fund the dowdy blowing the fire, and my faithful shepherd walking about the room, and wistling, as cool and unconcerned as if nothing had happened. I think, however, he had not much to brag of having out-dissembled me: for I kept up, nobly, the character of our sex for art, and ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... very modern handwritings came obstinately between my eyes and the matchless wall-paintings—paintings as fresh in their underground hiding-place as if finished yesterday instead of in days when it was dowdy to be pagan, ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... for sensible, saving people who want to make every dollar buy its utmost. But sometimes being sensible and saving seems to mean just being commonplace and dowdy. Ours is not that ...
— How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) - A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence • Mary Owens Crowther
... lady, and she had a quaint cast in her left eye that gave her the oddest, most sporting look. The cast was working overtime as she gazed at the gowns, and the ridiculous old sprigs on her rusty black bonnet trembled with her silent mirth. She looked like one of those clever, epigrammatic, dowdy old duchesses that one reads about in English novels. I'm sure she had cardamon seeds in her shabby bag, and a carriage with a crest on it waiting for her just around the corner. I ached to slip my hand through her arm and ask her what she thought of it all. I know that her ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... Bolton's new Hippopotamus in the place of it. This Hippopotamus is to be the correct thing in pictures this year, and no woman with any claim to be considered smart will fail to have it over her piano. Marcus Stone's new engraving will also be rather chic. Watts's Hope is now considered a little dowdy.' And so forth. This gregarious admiration is the very antithesis of artistic appreciation, which I tell you, simply must ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... have been part of the undertaker's permanent stock-in-trade. Henrietta hated the mournful looks of these ancient cousins, the shaking of their black beads, their sibilant whisperings, and in their presence she was dry-eyed and rather rude. Aunt Caroline would have laughed at them and their dowdy clothes that smelt of camphor, but it seemed as though no one would ever laugh again ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... cork have really been to sea, and seen a good deal of service on the herring-nets, and so they quite take the lead of the smart shop ships, that have never been beyond a pond or a tub of water. But that's an exception. Amateur toys are mostly very dowdy. Look at that box.' ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... clothes. I saw her the first day she came, and was the victim of despair until she suddenly got sick and so couldn't wear those wonderful waists and jackets. I felt like a dowdy when I saw ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... that nice! I declare it's charming! Now look at yourself. Why should you make yourself look dowdy? It's all very well—but you can't be ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... less danger of dislocation, to these pinnacles of passion, by transferring more of the elevated idiom of the style: for, in some of the complicated paragraphs, a too English rendering of the clauses gives the sentiment a dowdy and prosaic air. We should not object to an occasional inversion of the order, even where Jean Paul himself is more direct than usual; for this always appeared to us to lend a racy German flavor to the page. No doubt Jean Paul needs, first of all, to be made comprehensible; but if his style ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... silence, having, as he explained once to Lady Agatha, said everything that he had to say before he was thirty. His own neighbour was Mrs. Vandeleur, one of his aunt's oldest friends, a perfect saint amongst women, but so dreadfully dowdy that she reminded one of a badly bound hymn-book. Fortunately for him she had on the other side Lord Faudel, a most intelligent middle-aged mediocrity, as bald as a Ministerial statement in the House of Commons, with whom she was conversing in that intensely earnest manner which is the ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... pack'd audience from their posts retir'd, And Julius in a general hiss expir'd, Sage Booth to Cibber cried, "Compute your gains; These Egypt dogs, and their old dowdy queens, But ill requite these habits and these scenes! To rob Corneille for such a motley piece— His geese were swans, but, zounds, thy swans are geese." Rubbing his firm, invulnerable brow, The bard replied, "The critics must allow, 'Twas ne'er ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, Issue 353, January 24, 1829 • Various
... mire; and she stood and looked at him a while like one about to call; then thought otherwise, sighed, and shook her head, and proceeded on her rounds alone. The house lasses were at the burnside washing, and saw her pass with her loose, weary, dowdy gait. ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... deceive us for our good, but they should continue to do so after marriage. 'Pon honor! I have seen the sweetest, most amiable girl turn as sour as could be a few months after the ceremony. The dressiest ones often get dowdy, the most musical can't abide music, the most talkative have the dumps. A man has no chance of judging how they are going to turn out. He is duped by the daughters, inveigled by their mothers, and, what is worse still, as soon ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... thought, looking at the flower-stands bright with bloom, and thinking of the social enjoyments that were about to gratify his vanity. "She was made to be the wife of a minister. When I think of his Excellency's wife, and how little she helps him! the good woman is a comfortable middle-class dowdy, and when she goes to the palace or into society—" He pinched his lips together. Very busy men are apt to have very ignorant notions about household matters, and you can make them believe that a hundred thousand francs afford little or ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... her, as if she were some aboriginal from a wild and distant country, and they shot glances at each other, uneasy, half-jealous, half-envious glances, as they noted the beauty of the face, and the grace of the figure in its black dress, which, plain as it was, seemed to make theirs still more dowdy and vulgar. In the midst of this lugubrious account of the annoyances and worries of the journey, Mr. Heron ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... never feel as if I was dressed right. My things seemed elegant at home, and I thought I'd be over over-dressed if anything; but I look countrified and dowdy here. No time or money to change now, even if I knew how to do it,' answered the other, glancing anxiously at her bright pink silk grown, trimmed ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... Paradise are grateful Under skies serene; But the human type is hateful On a tragic scene; When the outlook's drear and cloudy Punch would rather see you dowdy Than extravagant and rowdy In your dress ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 22, 1916 • Various
... however comfortable otherwise. They were forbidden, or, at all events, lacked the means, to follow out their natural instinct of adorning themselves; all were dressed in one homely uniform of blue-checked gowns, with such caps upon their heads as English servants wear. Generally, too, they had one dowdy English aspect, and a vulgar type of features so nearly alike that they seemed literally to constitute a sisterhood. We have few of these absolutely unilluminated faces among our native American population, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... a man may go through life absolutely blind to a patent, obvious, glaring fact, and then suddenly perceive it. Henry perceived that his mother and his aunt were badly dressed—in truth, dowdy. It struck him as ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... disinterested, but generous. The two gowns that you saw Brigitte and Madame Thuillier wear last night were a present from her, and it was because she came herself to superintend the toilet of our two 'amphitryonesses' that you were so surprised last night not to find them rigged in their usual dowdy fashion." ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... something in the girl, as one looks at her, that seems to make it very possible she is marked out for one of those wonderful romantic fortunes that history now and then relates. 'Who, after all, was the Empress of the French?' Mrs. Light is forever saying. 'And beside Christina the Empress is a dowdy!'" ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... no Possibility of agreeing with such a one as I have got. You see what a ragged Condition I am in; so he lets me go like a Dowdy! May I never stir, if I an't asham'd to go out of Doors any whither, when I see how fine other Women are, whose Husbands are nothing nigh ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... they are smarter," said Matilda; "and there's nothing on earth so dowdy as an old black coat, But, then, officers are always going away: you no sooner get to know one or two of a set, and to feel that one of them is really a darling fellow, but there, they are off—to Jamaica, China, Hounslow barracks, ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... came. After a holiday at Godmother's, she received a hot letter from Mother. Godmother had complained of her looking "dowdy", and Mother was exceedingly cross. Laura was ordered to spend the coming Saturday as well at Prahran, and in her new dress, under penalty of a correspondence with Mrs. Gurley. There was no going against an order of this kind, and with death at her heart Laura prepared to obey. On ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... old carousal, and with eyes A hard, hot blue; her hair a frowsy flame, Bold, dowdy-bosomed, from her widow-frame She leans, her mouth all insult and all lies. Or slattern-slippered and in sluttish gown, With ribald mirth and words too vile to name, A new Doll Tearsheet, glorying in her shame, Armed with her Falstaff now she takes the town. The flaring ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... girl worked at it; the listless hands dropped their hold of it occasionally, and she was lost in bitter thoughts. She however finished it, and then busied herself with a new bonnet for Peggy, which was to be made not at all fashionable, but big and rather dowdy. Elsie's taste rebelled a little at the uncongenial task; but she was doing her best to please Peggy when the postman delivered two letters to Jane—one from Francis, and the other from Mrs. Rennie. Francis' letters had been frequent, ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... them in when their portraits adorn the picture-galleries. With women it is quite different. Woman is born to beautify the domestic circle, woman is always fascinating whether she be dressed up or domestically dowdy, but man is least of ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... Marvin, and there was a hush as the slight girlish figure—and she seemed very young—stood upright before us. She thrust back the unlovely bonnet, and her thin face was flushed; but when, clenching nervous fingers upon the dowdy gown, she raised a high clear voice, every man in the assembly settled himself to listen. Perhaps it was a chivalrous respect for her womanhood, or mere admiration for personal courage, and she had most gallantly taken up the challenge; but I think ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... fashion through Mrs. Vandervoort, and all that is intellectual through Mrs. Latimer, so you see I come in for both. Then if Floyd had married Madame Lepelletier, there would have been another set here. But that little dowdy, who doesn't even know how to dress decently! Common respect ought to ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... Shapely? shapely is not the word for it, she is absolutely beautiful! She is to other craft what,"—here his eye rested upon Miss Onslow's unconscious face for an instant—"a perfectly lovely woman is to a fat old dowdy. There is only one fault I have to find with her, and that is only a fault in my eyes; there are many who regard it as a ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... the tower and spire, after restoration, contrasted so strongly with the "dowdy" appearance of the remainder of the church, that it was little wonder a more determined effort should be made for a general building, and this time (1872) the appeal was no longer in vain. Large donations were given by friends as well as by many outside the pale of the Church, and Dr. ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... Robin hesitated for some minutes before ringing the bell. When it had rung he heard the piano stop. For a few seconds there was no sound; then there were steps in the passage and the door was opened by the very dowdy little maid-of-all-work whose hands were always dirty and whose eyes were always red, as though with ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... shall not settle here; I will not suffer such beauties as these to produce children for us to keep."—"Beauties, indeed! your ladyship is pleased to be merry," answered Scout.—"Mr Adams described her so to me," said the lady. "Pray, what sort of dowdy is it, Mr Scout?"—"The ugliest creature almost I ever beheld; a poor dirty drab, your ladyship never saw such a wretch."—"Well, but, dear Mr Scout, let her be what she will, these ugly women will bring children, you know; so that we must prevent the marriage."—"True, madam," replied ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... eat: but men are immoderate in both, as in lust—they covet carnal copulation at set times; men always, ruinating thereby the health of their bodies. And doth it not deserve laughter to see an amorous fool torment himself for a wench; weep, howl for a misshapen slut, a dowdy sometimes, that might have his choice of the finest beauties? Is there any remedy for this in physic? I do anatomise and cut up these poor beasts, [247]to see these distempers, vanities, and follies, yet such proof were better made on man's body, if my kind nature would endure it: [248]who ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... good were there—the sturdy, respectable, and sometimes dowdy good; also the intellectuals—for ten expensive days at a time—for it is a deplorable fact that the unworthy frivolous monopolise all the money in the world! And there, too, were excursionists from East ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... the fields at dawn, and to become distinct and real in many new and unimagined ways. Above all, I was surprised to find myself admiring her who, fifteen years ago, had appeared to me not a little dowdy. She was now fifty-five, but such an age seemed impossible for so girl-like a figure and such young and effusive laughter. I was, however, sure that she was fifteen years older than when I first saw her, but those fifteen years ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... and the painters: he met them at the Century, or at the little musical and theatrical clubs that were beginning to come into existence. He enjoyed them there, and was bored with them at the Blenkers', where they were mingled with fervid and dowdy women who passed them about like captured curiosities; and even after his most exciting talks with Ned Winsett he always came away with the feeling that if his world was small, so was theirs, and that the only way to enlarge either was to reach a stage of ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... alpaca. As a matter of fact, it's a merino, but that doesn't matter. Fancy your remembering my wardrobe like that! And wanting me to wear them all for years! So I shall, dear, secretly, when we are quite quite alone. But they are all out of date already, and if in a year or so you saw your poor dowdy wife with tight sleeves among a roomful of puff-shouldered young ladies, you would not be consoled even by the memory that it was in that dress that you first ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... said Susan: on my life, I'll be no farmer's dowdy wife, To toil and drudge thro' mud and mire: I hope you'll hold your ...
— Think Before You Speak - The Three Wishes • Catherine Dorset
... no style whatever," was Louise's conclusion. "Neither has she tact nor self-possession, or even a prepossessing manner. She wears her new gown in a dowdy manner and one can read her face easily. There's little danger in this quarter, I'm sure, so I may as well be friends ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces • Edith Van Dyne
... filled with gin, whose head barely reaches the counter, the gin-drinking charwoman to the left, and the quarrelsome gin-drinking Irish customers at the back. Everything in this picture reeks of gin; the only persons not imbibing it are the proprietor and his dowdy barmaids, whom I have no manner of doubt the ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... think I shall be nice to her," said Letty, playing with a flower on the mantelpiece. "Dowdy people make me feel ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... ship as to the dresses of some of the people, but I thought it was only his way of grumbling at things in general, though certainly I generally agreed with him. He told me one day that my taste evidently inclined to the dowdy, but you see I wore half mourning until ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty
... sounded vacant. Her bonnet was awry; she was incomparably dowdy. Carol stared at her, felt contemptuous, ready at last to rebel against the trap, and as the rusty goodwife fished again, "Plannin' some more picnics?" she flung out, "I haven't the slightest idea! Oh. Is that Hugh crying? I ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... Spanish from Austrian, Hungarian from Russian or German types. Almost invariably the pretty women and the good-looking men were well dressed. Only the plain and ugly ones seemed not to care for appearances. But there were more plain people than handsome ones; and dowdy forms strove jealously to hide the charming figures, as dark clouds swallow up shining stars. All faces, however, no matter how beautiful or how repulsive, how old or how young, had a strange family likeness in their expression, it seemed to Mary; a tense eagerness, such ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... so long a silence than pleased, Elizabeth felt. But after she had satisfied her curiosity she was kind, beginning to talk about Lizzie, and mentally compared this thin, brown girl with rough hair and dowdy clothes to her own stylish daughter. Then Lizzie burst in. They could hear her calling to a young man who had walked home with her, even before she ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... buy a new evening dress at eight-thirty on Sunday evening. And, anyhow, he said, she looked quite nice, really very smart; besides, Mrs Mitchell was not the sort of person who would think any the less of a pretty woman for being a little dowdy and ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... She removed her dowdy black dress, and, opening a drawer in her wardrobe, took out a soft gray silk which lay folded between tissue paper and sprigs of lavender. She put the dress on, and fastened soft lace ruffles round her throat and at her wrists. The dress ...
— A Girl in Ten Thousand • L. T. Meade
... this way too! George Hawker is one of them; but we can't see who the other is. Who should it be but Mary, though, with whom he should walk, with his arm round her waist talking so affectionately. But see, she raises her head. Why! that is not Mary. That is old Jewel's dowdy, handsome, brazen-faced grandaughter. ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... ever bought? Our old peaceful City-life—the vacant Sundays!—my ears are haunted by their bells for Evening Service. I said 'There they go, the dowdy population of heaven!' I remember it now. It should be almost punishment enough to be certain that of all those people going to church, there cannot be one more miserable than we who stood at the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... yes," Mr Sharnall said. "It looks a little dowdy just this minute, because the chairs are at the upholsterers to have the gilt touched up; we are putting up new curtains, of course, and the housekeeper has already begun to polish ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... a bride is as magnificent as the widow's is depressing and dowdy. It consists of three different dresses, the first of white velvet with apron of moire-antique, the second of purple velvet, and the third of cloth of gold with embroidered sleeves, with a piece of the same material. A wide sash, embroidered with gold, is used for looping up all these resplendent ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... course of it. His horizon widened; society assumed different proportions. There were fair Parisiennes in fresh and elegant toilettes all about him; Mme. de Bargeton's costume, tolerably ambitious though it was, looked dowdy by comparison; the material, like the fashion and the color, was out of date. That way of arranging her hair, so bewitching in Angouleme, looked frightfully ugly here among the daintily devised coiffures which he ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... old lady, with grey hair, and a dowdy bonnet, and an expensive mantle, passed limping, very slowly, along Wedgwood Street and up the Cock Yard towards the Town Hall. Her wrinkled face had an anxious look, but it was also very determined. The busy, joyous Federationists and Anti- ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... would like me to marry? Oh, I know the sort! First, she must be tall and handsome, with red, fashionable hair, and cool, offhand manners. She must never look shy or put out, or as if she did not know what to say. On the contrary, she must know who's who, and what's what, and never wear a dowdy bonnet, but always a stunning hat. And she must have a father who can give her something handsome when she is married. That's my mother's girl for me. I can't bear to look such a girl in the face! She makes me ashamed of myself and of her. ...
— Far Above Rubies • George MacDonald
... in the wearing. Who she was I did not know; but I soon learned, for one of the two young women in front of me said a low something to which the other gave back a swift retort, woefully audible: "His wife? That little dowdy thing in brown? Oh, what a pity! Such ...
— Across the Years • Eleanor H. Porter
... irony. Her clothes were dowdy, for she had turned the broadcloth dress she had had at her marriage and was wearing it in the street; but if he thought her well dressed, it seemed hardly fair to undeceive him. Had she been any other woman, she reflected, he would probably have looked at her long enough to ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... Besides the melancholy boy, who, I hoped, had not been made so by waltzing alone in the empty kitchen, there were two other boys and one dirty little limp girl in a gauzy dress. Such a precocious little girl, with such a dowdy bonnet on (that, too, of a gauzy texture), who brought her sandalled shoes in an old threadbare velvet reticule. Such mean little boys, when they were not dancing, with string, and marbles, and cramp-bones in ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... away you bullock-man, you've 'eard the bugle blowed, There's a regiment a-comin' down the Grand Trunk Road; With its best foot first And the road a-sliding past, An' every bloomin' campin'-ground exactly like the last; While the Big Drum says, With 'is "rowdy-dowdy-dow!"— "Kiko kissywarsti don't you ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... now quite gay; While the Magpie[89] obtained universal applause, By fluttering a hornpipe upon his hind claws. The Vapourer[90] came not, but he was no loss, For wherever he went he was stupid and cross; And his wife, an old dowdy, bereft of all wings, Was unfit to appear as th' associate of Kings; The Dagger[91] came armed, and looked all around, But his charmer, Miss Snout,[92] was no where to be found, For she had not been asked, and the Figure ...
— The Emperor's Rout • Unknown
... yourself that either 'Lady Veronica' or 'Lady Marjorie' is a member of the aristocracy," chuckled Bessie Kirk. "They're probably most plebeian and dowdy-looking individuals living in Bloomsbury boarding-houses, with pasty complexions and freckled noses, and they get a percentage on the preparations they recommend. If you notice, they always tell you to use Mrs. Somebody's pomade or face cream, ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... prepossessing face; and a pretty little figure—slight and short, but remarkable for its neatness. There was something of her brother, much of him indeed, in a certain gentleness of manner, and in her look of timid trustfulness; but she was so far from being a fright, or a dowdy, or a horror, or anything else, predicted by the two Miss Pecksniffs, that those young ladies naturally regarded her with great indignation, feeling that this was by no means what ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... Olivia. She wished she had gone to her room before tea. These people made her feel dowdy ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... of novels and plays—is a quaint, pedantic person, with spectacles and a beard, but without any passions—except for books. He takes delight in large fat words, but is utterly indifferent to such things as clothes and women—except the dowdy one he married when too young to know better.... It is always so interesting to see ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... the morning, in a room which she shared with a school teacher, Fanny Elmer read Tom Jones—that mystic book. For this dull stuff (Fanny thought) about people with odd names is what Jacob likes. Good people like it. Dowdy women who don't mind how they cross their legs read Tom Jones—a mystic book; for there is something, Fanny thought, about books which if I had been educated I could have liked— much better than ear-rings and flowers, she ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... trimmings she wanted to put on the waist. She thinks she loves lavender, but Joseph's coat would have been a colorless piece of apparel beside her dress if we finally hadn't sat on her and told her certain things couldn't be done. She was crazy to pile on a bunch of ancestral lace, yellow and dowdy; but we told her not much, told her freshness and daintiness suited her style much better, and she wasn't old enough to emphasize ancestral lace, and she blushed and gave in. But nothing would have made her do it if Miss Fannie hadn't ...
— Kitty Canary • Kate Langley Bosher
... to one of Bulwer's heroes, or Disraeli's, or even Thackeray's! And his simple old duke of a father and his dowdy old duchess of a mother are almost as devoid of swagger as himself; they seem to apologise for their very existence, if we may trust these American chroniclers who seem to know them so well; and I really think we no longer care ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... soon find out your mistake, my dear," said Aunt Meg from her couch by the fire. "I question if one of your friends will be dressed in so simple and cheap a material. Why, you will be a regular dowdy, and I told Judith so when she showed me her purchase. She could hardly have ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... framework a portion of that chronic disease for which the State has gained for itself an unenviable reputation. Jutting out of the black, moss-vegetating roof, is an old-maidish looking window, with a dowdy white curtain spitefully tucked up at the side. The mischievous young negroes have pecked half the bricks out of the foundation, and with them made curious grottoes on the pavement. Disordered and unpainted ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... sacrifices to her vengeance. Nor was her surprise so much the effect of his dissimulation, as of his want of taste and discernment. She inveighed against him, not as the most treacherous lover, but as the most abject wretch, in courting the smiles of such an awkward dowdy, while he enjoyed the favours of a woman who had numbered princes in the train of her admirers. For the brilliancy of her attractions, such as they at present shone, she appealed to the decision of her minister, who consulted her own satisfaction and interest, by flattering ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... few cast him more than a passing glance. Then they gave an audible gasp, induced by an ingenuous compound of amazement, disappointment, and admiration. They had been prepared to forgive, to endure, to make every allowance. The poor thing could no more help being plain and dowdy than born in Boston, and as their leader had satisfied herself that she "would do," they would never let her know how deeply they deplored ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... it's so plain an' dowdy. I've somethin' better than that;' and, looking as pleased as a young girl at his interest in her dress, she went off nodding and smiling at the thought of the pleasure she was going to give him at sight of ...
— Sarah's School Friend • May Baldwin
... noise; Cannot play with quiet boys; Cannot play with quiet toys: Rowdy-dowdy loves ...
— The Nursery, March 1873, Vol. XIII. - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest People • Various
... lines of booths, no end; and people selling macaroni, and other people eating it right in the open street, you know—such fun!—and fishermen and fish-wives. Oh, how they were screaming, and oh, such a hubbub as there was! and we couldn't go on fast, and Dowdy seemed ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... indeed. But be careful in learning. Your sister Fanny says the Boston young men stick out their elbows dreadfully when they waltz, and look like owls spinning on invisible teetotums. She declares, too, that all the Boston girls are dowdy. But she is obliged to confess that Mr. Beacon and Mr. Dinks are as well dressed and gentlemanly and dance as well as our young men here. And as for the Boston ladies, Mr. Dinks tells Fanny that he has a cousin, a Miss Wayne, who lives in Delafield, who might alter her ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... Flora McFlimsey," Edith laughs; "I have nothing to wear. There is a white Swiss muslin in my trunk, but it will look wofully rustic and dowdy, I'm afraid, ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... mantlet and jockey bonnet of lilac satin checked with maroon. But Dolly had no such weight of by-gone sorrow to balance her present woe, and the things she had left at home were infinitely brighter than that dowdy Faith's. ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... from her. She had no remembrance of having seen her mother dressed in that gown or cloak. Besides, she looked so wet and muddy. Where had she come from dressed in that dowdy style. ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... know there is no use in talking to you. You will go your own way. Only, as I am in town, do come to my dressmaker's. Though you had your mourning in Paris, do you know, you look quite dowdy. You'll not mind my ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... fact, so far from discouraging the passion for dress among their female dependents, ladies of position and fortune are apt to insist on their dressing smartly. They like to see some of their own lustre reflected on their attendants. A dowdy in sad-colored print or linsey is by no means to their taste. This has been well pointed out in a letter in which a "Maid-servant" replied, through the Pall Mall Gazette, to the project of reform proposed by a "Clergyman's Wife." ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... marry some entrancing slip of girlhood, what am I to say when, later, I discover myself irrevocably chained to a fat and dowdy matron? I married no such person, I have indeed sworn eternal fidelity to an entirely different person; and this unsolicited usurper of my hearth is nothing whatever to me, unless perhaps the object of my entire abhorrence. Yet am I none the less compelled to justify the ensuing ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... bursting through the cables of gossamer that tried to stay her. A kestrel hovered over the gorse, and she marked a badger on the hillside shuffling home before Man and his Dogs began the old rowdy-dowdy game once more. ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... call upon his tailors. A morning-suit which he had commanded being miraculously finished, he put it on, and was at once not only spectacularly but morally regenerated. The old suit, though it had cost five guineas in its time, looked a paltry and a dowdy thing as it lay, flung down anyhow, on one of Messrs Quayther & Cuthering's cane chairs in the mirrored cubicle where baronets and even peers showed their braces ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... a jot of the real happiness of any portion of my life. When you and I, dear Sook (an awful scowl, and a sudden change of her position, on her costly rocking chair. Fitz looked askance at Mrs. Fitz, and proceeded); when you and I, Susan, lived in Dowdy's little eight by ten 'blue frame,' down in Pigginsborough; not a yard of carpet, or piece of mahogany, or silver, or silk, or satin, or flummery of any sort, the ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... 'Maude will never permit it. The unlucky picture has settled that point. Maude will not suffer her to cross the threshold! But for the portrait I could bespeak my cousin's favour and indulgence for a somewhat countrified young girl, dowdy and awkward. I could plead for her good looks in that ad misericordiam fashion that disarms jealousy and enlists her generosity for a humble connection she need never see more of! If I could only persuade Maude that I had done an indiscretion, and that I knew ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... being old-fashioned. None would dare to despise her. She was what Hilda could never be, had never long desired to be. She was what Hilda had definitely renounced being. And there stood Hilda, immature, graceless, harsh, inelegant, dowdy, holding the letter between her inky fingers, in the midst of all that hard masculine mess,—and a part of it, the blindly devoted subaltern, who could expect none of the ritual of homage given to women, who must sit and work and stand and strain and say 'yes,' and pretend stiffly that she was ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... blouses a year ago were wearing Reform-Kleider, shapeless ill-cut garments usually of grey tweed. The oddest combination, and quite a common one, was a sack-like Reform-Kleid, with a saucy little coloured bolero worn over it, fingerless gloves, and a madly tilted beflowered hat perched on a dowdy coiffure. These are rude remarks to make about the looks of foreign ladies, but the Reform-Kleid is just as hideous and absurd in Germany now as our bilious green draperies were on the wrong people twenty-five years ago, and ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... appellation. "See, now," says Dr. Johnson, "what haste people are in to be hooted. Nobody ever thought of this fellow nor of his daughter, could he but have been quiet himself, and forborne to call the eyes of the world on his dowdy and her deformity. But it teaches one to see at least that if nobody else will nickname one's children, the parents will e'en do ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... bowed, and shook hands with Mrs. Fargus, but were at no pains to conceal their indifference to the drab and dowdy little woman in the soiled sage green, and the glimmering spectacles. 'What a complexion,' whispered Elsie the moment they were outside the door. 'What's her husband like?' asked Cissy as they descended the first flight. Mildred answered ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... us dress, darling, and go down and outshine all these dear, dowdy Englishwomen; and while you are sipping courtesy and gentleness with Lord Fordyce, I shall try to quaff gloriously attractive, aboriginal force with Mr. Arranstoun—but it would have been more suitable to our characters could we have changed partners. ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... Renaissance, till they made him as much the child of folly as themselves. And they painted him as Antinous, as Eros, as Sleep, and I know not what, but whatever name they called him he was always the same lank-haired, dowdy, effeminate, pasty-faced photographer's young man. Then he must needs take to writing poems all about Greece, and the free ways of the old Greeks, and Lais, and Phryne, and therein he made "Aeolus" rhyme to "control us." For of Greek this fellow knew not a word, and any Greek that ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... stand-off which is cleverest. She is quite puzzled sometimes by my frankness about some things, for instance, about her looks. I notice she compliments me on my looks whenever I am decidedly off colour, when I wear a green ribbon, or a dowdy dress, or big shoes. But I am honest with her in these things, and I like to see her look well. The game ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... new bag, and he stepped a bit nearer to her side, as they halted beneath the shining stars, to look back upon what they left behind them. Catia saw the huddled gathering of the village people, already looking a little dowdy to her critical eyes. Scott only saw four faces, grouped in perspective: his mother, tearful, a little tremulous, yet radiant in her full content; behind her, two of the visiting clergy, classmates and chums of the divinity school, and, still behind these two, the eager young ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... two peculiarities of this kind as we stroll about the city, and they are explained to us by our colonial friend. Some extremely dowdy females we see riding in a barouche are the wife and daughters of a high official, who is stingy to his woman-kind, so they say. Two youths we pass are in striking contrast, as they walk along arm-in-arm. One is got up according to the fullest Auckland idea of Bond Street ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... plain, awkward, shrinking girl who was to be his bride the handsome school-boy exclaimed in disgust, "You are surely not going to marry me to that dowdy!" But there was no escape; the demands of "honour" must be satisfied. The ceremony was quickly performed; and within an hour of first setting eyes on each other, the children were separated—Lord March being ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... of "finish," and the tender-hearted bride who, for the sake of their purses sends her bridesmaids to an average "little woman" to have their clothes made, and to a little hat-place around the corner, is apt to have a rather dowdy little flock fluttering down the aisle ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... delicacy, and shunned the perils of the habitual and commonplace. Thoroughly aware she was that as she cheapened herself so did she cheapen love. Never, in the weeks of their married life, had Billy found her dowdy, or harshly irritable, or lethargic. And she had deliberately permeated her house with her personal atmosphere of coolness, and freshness, and equableness. Nor had she been ignorant of such assets as surprise and charm. Her imagination had ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... her out. Ah didn't go to the graveyard though. Ah didn't have a home after she died and Ah wandered from place to place, stayin' with a white fambly this time and then a nigger fambly the next time. Ah moved to Jackson County and stayed with a Mister Frank Dowdy. Ah didn't stay there long though. Then Ah moved to Winder, Georgia. They called it 'Jug Tavern' in them days, 'cause jugs wuz made there. Ah married Green Hinton in Winder. Got along well after marryin' him. He farmed fur a livin' and made a good livin' fur me and the ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... save you, and I don't intend you to have any worries except your own. I won't smudge my fingers over the accounts, like that wretched Dora in David Copperfield. Understand that, Howard; I won't be your girl-bride. I won't promise that I won't wear spectacles and be dowdy—anything to be prosaic!" ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and she even came, but she went back just now. She was dressed terribly fine—gold lace and green silk, but it was old and dowdy; and, Momsy, her cheeks were just as red! I was on the stepladder tackin' up the Bethlehem picture, Sisty was standin' on the high-chair hanging up the star, and Buddy's arms were full of gray moss that he ...
— Solomon Crow's Christmas Pockets and Other Tales • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... always laughed, and still laughed, but for the fundamental laws of truth, simplicity, and cleanness, upon which the ideal of civilization, at least, is based. She noticed that she was beginning to like "good" persons, even homely, dowdy, good persons, like Alice and George Valentine. She lost her old appetite for scandal, for ugly ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... often been remarked that in the bird world the rule is for the males to have the brilliant plumage, with all the beautiful colors and for the females to be the dowdy ones—a rule which would entail a revolution in fashions, startling and ludicrous, if it were to be introduced for variety among our own kind. Again, gaily-dressed birds have the least pleasing song—the screaming jay bearing ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... out as companions; you must do the same. Therefore try and fit yourself for the position.' Everything I did was wrong—according to her, I was rebellious, irreligious, too fond of dress, and lazy physically and mentally. The fact was, I was simply a half-starved, dowdy school-girl—-often hungry for food and always hungry for love. If I had had a dog to talk to I should have been happier. My mother died when I was three years old, and my father two years later. Then, as I told you, I went out as governess to the Warrens when I was nineteen, and ...
— John Frewen, South Sea Whaler - 1904 • Louis Becke
... leading business at the Norwich circuit in 182-; and she herself had played for two seasons with some credit T.R.E.O., T.R.S.W., until she fell down a trap-door and broke her leg); the girls at Fanny's school, we say, took no account of her, and thought her a dowdy little creature as long as she remained under Miss Minifer's instruction. And it was unremarked and almost unseen in the dark porter's lodge of Shepherd's Inn, that this little flower ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... ladies of their social standing, was astonishing. But mark the anomaly: had they been Englishwomen of the same rank and similarly uneducated, they would have been uncouth and ungrammatical in speech, awkward in manner and dowdy in dress. There is no people upon whom the transforming, refining effects of a thorough training are so marked—because, it must be confessed, the native soil so much needs cultivation—as upon the English ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... functions elsewhere. With a rare exception, such as the Duchessa Astarte and the Princess Vessano, whose toilettes were the most chic imaginable, the great ladies of Italy followed fashions very little. Not that Nina found them dowdy—far from it: they had a distinction of their own, which, like that of their ancient palaces, seemed to remain superior to modern decrees of fashion. Nearly all of them had lovely figures, which they did not strive to force into newly ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... theirs? Alas! our thunder soon goes out; And only makes you more devout. Then is not female clatter worse, That drives you not to pray, but curse? We hardly thunder thrice a-year; The bolt discharged, the sky grows clear; But every sublunary dowdy, The more she scolds, the more she's cloudy. [How useful were a woman's thunder, If she, like us, would burst asunder! Yet, though her stays hath often cursed her, And, whisp'ring, wish'd the devil burst her: For hourly thund'ring in his face, She ne'er was known to burst a lace.] Some critic ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... being half nettled. "Are you going to stop wearing what all the other women wear—and be looked at askance? Are you going to be dowdy and ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... he was still admiring. The approach of Don Miguel and Padre Esteban with a small bevy of ladies, however, quickly changed her thoughts, and detached the Senor from her side. Her first swift feminine impression of the fair strangers was that they were plain and dowdy, an impression fully shared by the other lady passengers. But her second observation, that they were more gentle, fascinating, child-like, and feminine than her own countrywomen, was purely her own. Their loose, undulating figures, guiltless of stays; their extravagance ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... be all he could do to keep from saying this—despite the fact that he knew it would ruin everything. Once little Jennie appeared in a new silk dress, brought to her by one of the rich ladies whose heart was touched by her dowdy appearance. It was of soft grey silk—cheap silk, but fresh and new, and Peter had never had anything so fine in his arms before. It matched Jennie's grey eyes, and its freshness gave her a pink glow; or was it that Peter admired her, and loved her more, and so brought ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... Fair, sir? fair as the immortal Helena! Proud, sir? proud as an arch-duchess! Handsome, sir? handsome, sir, as—as—oh, dammit, words fail me; but go, sir, go and ransack Olympus, and you couldn't match her, 'pon my soul! Diana, sir? Diana was a frump! Venus? Venus was a dowdy hoyden, by George! and as for the ox-eyed Juno, she was a positive cow to this young ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... would do more than pass muster here, she reflected with satisfaction. Indeed, although she was more plainly dressed than most of the women present, she rejoiced to feel she did not suffer too much by comparison. Esther was never dowdy. She was not ashamed of her well-tailored coat and skirt, marron in colour—which went well with her eyes and hair—nor of her little new felt hat, purchased in Paris. Her small choker fur was of good stone-marten, even her gloves and the handkerchief peeping ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... on her head She took the path across the leaze. - Her spouse the vicar, gardening, said, "Too dowdy that, for coquetries, So I ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... such a pity that you don't leave these rocks and crags, and live in a town; you will lose all your beauty in this desert. What have you to do with mountains? What satisfaction can your beauty give to a lot of cows? You ought to have been married long ago; not to any of these dowdy women hereabouts, but to some Greek girl; an Argive, perhaps, or a Corinthian, or a Spartan; Helen, now, is a Spartan, and such a pretty girl—quite as pretty as I am—and so susceptible! Why, if she once caught sight of you, she would give up everything, I am ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... upon her? why, she is a very dowdy, A dishclout, a foul gipsy unto thee. Come to my closet, lass, there take thy earnest Of love, of ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... so dressed up, and hooped up, I ween, They're mothers full often before they're sixteen, And fading and dowdy and sickly at twenty, With one boy in trowsers and two girls in laces Complaining of starving while dying of plenty The fate is of ladies ...
— Nothing to Eat • Horatio Alger [supposed]
... nice as that," said Ermengarde with a jealous look. "There's my dark blue serge, but it will look dowdy ...
— The Children of Wilton Chase • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... promised her was in reality but two poor houses at a crossroads, inhabited by two Mexican men and dowdy women. On the way they encountered but one horseman; Galloway turned his own and Florence's animals out so that, though seen, they might escape recognition. At the nearest of the two hovels he dismounted, raising his arms to her. When she cried out and shrank back ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... strode off to welcome his elderly relative, and when Austin came into the room he found his friend stooping over a very small, very dowdy old lady dressed in rusty black silk, with a large bonnet rather on one side, who was standing on tiptoe, the better to peck at St Aubyn's cheek by way of a salute. She had small, twinkling eyes, a wrinkled face, and the very honestest wig that Austin had ever seen; and yet there was an air and ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... could, too—she no longer doubted her possession of the college girl's one talent that Betty had laughed about. For there was Theresa Reed, her friend down the street. She was homely and awkward, she wore dowdy clothes and wore them badly, she was slow and plodding; but there was one thing that she could do, and the girls admired her for it and had instantly made a place for her. Helen was glad of a second proof that those things did not matter vitally. She set ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
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