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More "Femininity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... luxurious car along the road which laced the forest to the singing beaches. She had to let her sidewise smile do what it could toward making the girl's bald evasion of her engagement seem the mere flutter and hesitancy of besieged femininity. For the moment she was as much "outside" so far as her daughter was concerned as Peter was of the select bright circle in ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... committee of awards made a special journey to St. Louis, a month after the committee was appointed, and in company with Miss Egan, a member of the committee, waited upon the director of exhibits and asked that the World's Fair light, for femininity, might be thrown on the 144 groups of exhibits, that woman's work, "in whole or in part," might have a juror appointed by the board of lady managers ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... and all overt signs of strength of character vanished in her usual expression of sweet, reserved femininity. "Bring him to-morrow," said she. "A little late, please. I want others to be there, so that I can study him unobserved." She laughed. "This is a serious matter for me. My time is short, and my list of possible ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... level. She had the poise of one who had learned to depend on her own resolute spirit. But she displayed something more than that. It was recklessness that was bravado. In the eyes of the State chairman, friend of Thornton, and accustomed to a milder form of femininity, it was impudence. Yet her beauty made its appeal to him. The old man lunged toward her, but ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... insignificance of the deceased might only be likened to the secondary position of a man at his own wedding. It was all fuss and mortuary feathers, mourning rings and mulled wine in the one case, just as in the other it is entirely a show of bride and blushes, flounces and femininity. [Footnote A: In writing of the customs connected with old-time English funerals, Misson says: "The relations and chief mourners are in a chamber apart, with their more intimate friends; and the rest of the guests are dispersed in several rooms about the house. When they are ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... not been out of her New England village, a place called briefly, with American economy of time, Clark, for many years, and her ideal of youthful femininity was still that which she had been herself. She had, if unconsciously, tried to mould Mr. Twist also on these lines, in spite of his being a boy, and owing to his extreme considerateness had not yet discovered her want of success. For ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... was a rather odd little thing that Miss Winchelsea only noticed as she re-read it the third time. Fanny's natural femininity had prevailed even against the round and clear traditions of the Training College; she was one of those she-creatures born to make all her m's and n's and u's and r's and e's alike, and to leave ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... dishonesty that had nearly ruined his own small existence and indirectly caused his mother's death. Women, indeed, had always been near him, and there were times when he thought regretfully of Mrs. Moss. There were none but menservants at Aston house, and the only glimpse of femininity was afforded by the flying visits of Constantia, Mr. Aston's married daughter. She would at times invade Aymer's room, a vision of delicate colourings and marvellous gowns. She was a tall, dark, lovely woman who carried on the traditional family beauty with no poverty ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... worth noting that the spread of feminism will reinforce the action of sexual selection in keeping down the numbers of this "intermediate sex." In the past, women who lacked femininity or maternal instinct have often married because the pressure of public opinion and economic conditions made it uncomfortable for any woman to remain unmarried. And they have had children because they could ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... for the sake of hearing a contradiction or a series of saving clauses. She never spoke of it to any one. She had grown up with it, and as it was beyond doubt, so was it outside discussion. All her femininity seemed to be concentrated, all her vanity centred, on her hair. It was her one pride, perhaps her one hope. Women have been loved for their voices. Catrina's voice was musical enough, but it was deep ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... in one corner, which the yearly ship from England had brought the summer before. While the room of the other interview was palpably that of the factor, there was something about this one, a certain pervasive touch of femininity, that marked it as that of the ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... irritable nervous system and delicate health which are so often associated with inversion, though this is certainly an important factor. Although the invert himself may stoutly affirm his masculinity, and although this femininity may not be very obvious, its wide prevalence may be asserted with considerable assurance, and by no means only among the small minority of inverts who take an exclusively passive role, though in these ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... since the days of the cave men has masculine assurance dared issue such an ultimatum to femininity as that just sent by an organization of students of Tulane University known as "Our Future Wives" club. The club has as its purpose the dictation of the dress selection of every woman. It is an organization of young men who have developed the stern purpose ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... adjusted his tunic with a purely feminine gesture expressive at once of pride and nervousness. Gradually my vision gained in focus. The station has a good many people in it. The number increases momently. A great many are girls. I am in a new world—a world of chic femininity. My eyes devour the inimitable details of costume, the inexpressible nuances of pose, the indescribable demarche of the midinette. They hold themselves differently. They have even a little bold color here ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... Nippon, and on his arms a cock and a skeleton, the latter with a fan and a lantern. On his belly was limned a nude woman. He had certain other decorations the fame of which had been bruited wide so that a keen curiosity existed to see them, and they were discussed in whispers by white femininity and with many "Aucs!" of astonishment by the brown. They were Pompeiian friezes in their unconventionality of subject ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... the trifles of the toilet. A soiled or rumpled article of attire showed a dangerous lack of something that should make up the womanly character. He had not reduced all these unreasonable men's notions to a system by which to measure femininity. He did not even know he had them. An excessive constitutional refinement and keenness of perception made him involuntarily look for such scrupulous delicacy as belonging of course to every woman he was thrown in contact with. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... was the patron saint of music. Her soul was full of it, and it ran off the ends of her fingers in the most enchanting manner. Elise, half French, as you would see at a glance, was from the Golden Gate,—as dainty and pretty a bit of femininity as ever wore French gowns with the inimitable American air. Elise could smile her way straight through the world. All barriers gave way before her dimples, and with her on board ship we never feared icebergs at sea, feeling confident they would melt away before her glance. Thirdly, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... been in such deadly earnest his efforts to make reparation for what he considered his inexcusable short-sightedness and neglect, would have been funny, for, like most men when confronted by some problem involving femininity, he was utterly at a loss how to set about "his job" as he ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... him in playful reproach, a gay irresponsible specimen of femininity, who would ignore a man's treason because he chanced to be a charming partner in ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... were splendidly casual and wise and good-looking. With no men about to intimidate them—or to attract them—they made a solid phalanx of bland, satisfied femininity, and Una felt more barred out than in an office. She longed for a man who would be curious about her, or cross with her, or perform some other easy, customary, simple-hearted ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... very sketchy analysis of German femininity in the war, I reiterate views expressed on previous visits to Germany, that German women are not standing the anxiety of the war as well as ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... of both ovaries, it leads her to develop masculine physical characteristics and her temperament is wholly lacking in those characteristics which, summed up, might, for the want of a better term, be called FEMININITY. ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... was smiling a welcome upon him from the depths of his favourite easy-chair—Lucille sitting over his fire, a novel in her hand, and wearing a delightful rose-pink dressing-gown. Some of her belongings were scattered about his room, giving it a delicate air of femininity. The faint odour of her favourite and only perfume gave to her undoubted presence ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... with all his senses quickened by an intense curiosity, there seemed to hang about the atmosphere of the room that subtle odour of femininity which, in the case of a man, would probably have been represented by tobacco smoke. A Sevres jar of Neapolitan violets stood upon the table near the divan. Henceforth the perfume of violets seemed a thing apart from the perfume of all other flowers to the man who stood there ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... may be odorous, but it is full of human possibilities. One midnight, two ladies started a scrap. A Special Constable, raw and without experience of militant femininity, blew his police-whistle. The whole slum-district turned out, dressed or half-dressed, like a fevered anthill. It took the regular police half-an-hour to clear the streets, the original cause of tumult vanishing in the swirl. In this neighbourhood, we are informed, it is etiquette to blow a police-whistle ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 14, 1914 • Various
... her glossy brown hair was becomingly arranged about the bright, smiling face. She chose to be very gracious to her husband's life-long friend, giving him a small, plump hand in a welcoming grip, establishing him in an instant, by some sleight of femininity which King did not plumb, as a hearthside intimate most affectionately regarded. His first two impressions of her, arriving almost but not quite simultaneously, were of ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... virginity, and frailty. He imported masculine qualities into every female theme he handled. The case is different when we turn to his treatment of the male figure. It would be impossible to adduce a single instance, out of the many hundreds of examples furnished by his work, in which a note of femininity has been added to the masculine type. He did not think enough of women to reverse the process, and create hermaphroditic beings like the Apollino of Praxiteles or the S. Sebastian of Sodoma. His boys and youths and adult men remain, in the truest and the purest sense of the ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... femininity, weakness, need of protection, of fear even, disappeared. The illusion was no longer possible! Miss Urania was an ordinary mistress, in no wise justifying the cerebral curiosity she had at ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... from the town four miles away brought back Babette at the end of a string. Oh, such a soaked, bedraggled Babette! The old woman had found her crouching in a doorway, a bewildered little heap of palpitating femininity; and, reading the address upon her collar, and may be scenting a not impossible reward, had thought she might as ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... crowded about him; and, as they examined his find, their faces softened. Nothing could more subtly have emanated femininity. It was a hand-mirror of silver. Two carved Cupids held the glass between them. Their long wings made ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... charming and irritating, with sufficient coquetry to freshen her love. Her greatest charm, however, lay in the dominant quality of brooding motherhood, the birthright of primal women and the very essence of femininity. After one of those sweet silences, she would steal on him from behind, and pull his head to her bosom with such a squeeze as a loving mother ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... made his house, with even Mrs. Mumpson and Jane abiding there, seem a refuge. In the morning after the day on which he had brought, or in a sense had carted, Mrs. Wiggins to his domicile, Nature was evidently bent on instituting contrasts between herself and the rival phases of femininity with which the farmer was compelled to associate. It may have been that she had another motive and was determined to keep her humble worshiper at her feet, and to render it impossible for him to make the changes toward which he had ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... Pretty spitfire! Where have they been hiding you? I had no idea, till I saw you the other day at the Creamery, that there was anything so pretty hereabouts. I generally find out what there is delectable in the way of femininity before I am forty-eight hours in a place. You have no idea of what an adorable little modesty you looked with your white arms plunged in the milk. You took the shine out ...
— The Story of Bawn • Katharine Tynan
... seemed as though her sex possessed her to the exclusion of everything outside. Her eyes were soft and filled with the desire of love, her lips sweet and tremulous. She had suddenly created a new atmosphere around her, an atmosphere of bewildering and passionate femininity. ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... boys when they first begin to notice little girls. Both use more soap and water, both brush their hair and their clothes more carefully, and select their cravats with more caution, and there isn't a piece of femininity that passes that isn't looked at ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... if she abandoned all claims to femininity with that single step; the gun at her side made her seem inches taller and years older. She was no longer a child, but a long-rider who ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... groups with an adequate allurement, pointing the moral of each situation while she shines brightest. The two children for whom the contest is fought are winsome little girls. By the side of their mother in the garden or in the nursery they are a potent argument for the natural rights of femininity. The film is by no means ultra-aesthetic. The implications of the clipping are correct to that degree. But the resources of beauty within the ready command of the advising professional producer are used by the women for all they are worth. It could not be ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... candle and went into her bedroom. As he stood on the threshold, he shaded the flame with his hand and looked round like a man who is about to commit a crime. The room did not betray the slightest trace of femininity. A narrow bed without curtains; a writing-table, bookshelves, a smaller table by the side of her bed, a sofa. Just like his own room. There was no dressing-table, but a little ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... and nurses, and governesses already. You had better content yourself with the fact that you have four proper traveling companions, and bear the disgrace of being shocked as best you may by one wild scrap of femininity who will have her own way in spite of you all." Mae half laughed, but she was serious, and the ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... strutting along with an arrogant and truculent swagger most laughable to see. She was dressed for the occasion after the fashion of the Malay warrior. Her body was encased in a short-sleeved, tight-fitting fighting jacket, which only served to emphasise the femininity of her bust. She wore striped silk breeches reaching to the middle of her shins; a silk sarong was folded short about her waist; and her thick hair was tucked away beneath a head handkerchief twisted ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... his mind now. His blue eyes caught her dark ones, and his glance was lowered in confusion. Womanlike, Jerkline Jo took him in at a glance, and something within her responded to the appeal that his handsome manhood made to femininity. ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... and of the girl's altered expression, Hal spoke a hasty word or two of farewell, and followed his father out into the hallway. But the blithe and vivid femininity of the young expert plucked at his mind. At the bend of the hall, he turned with half a hope and saw her standing at the door. Her look was upon him, and it seemed to him to be ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... hard beauty of nineteen years and exuberant health; contrasted with Flavia, there was almost a boyishness in her air of assurance and athletic vigor. But in the studied coquetry of her glance at Gerard, the instant desire to allure in response to the allure of this man's good looks, she showed femininity of a type that ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... ethereality is necessarily ephemeral, nor that bonbons and glaces, whether of the palate or of the soul, nauseate and pall upon the taste. Dear God, forgive her, for she bent with contrite tears over her worn rosary, and glanced no more at the worldly glitter of femininity. ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... incommensurable cycle as that in which the variations are produced. This last cycle is that of occurrences before the animal is born. It is the cycle of influences upon ova and embryos; {224} in which lie the causes that tip them and tilt them towards masculinity or femininity, towards strength or weakness, towards health or disease, and towards divergence from the parent type. What are the ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... making a sermon on that," she retorted; and he gave a sad, consenting laugh, as if it were quite true, though in fact he never really preached a sermon on mere femininity or mere mortality. His sermons were all very good, however; and that was another thing that put her out of patience with his Rixonite parishioners—that they should sit there Sunday after Sunday, year in and year out, and listen to his beautiful sermons, ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... had made it quite clear to her how grave an error it was on her part to persist in being a daughter and not a son. At moments it seemed to Sir Richmond that she was disposed to agree with father upon that. When Mr. Grammont's sense of her regrettable femininity was uppermost, then he gave his intelligence chiefly to schemes for tying her up against the machinations of adventurers by means of trustees, partners, lawyers, advisers, agreements and suchlike complications, or for acquiring a workable son by marriage. To this last idea it would ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... the elbow of Madame de Tencin steps a figure of different type, a woman not accustomed to please by brilliance of mind or vivacity of speech, but by sheer femininity of face and form. Tall, slender, yet with figure divinely proportioned, this beautiful girl, Haidee, or Mademoiselle Aisse, reputed to be of Turkish or Circassian birth, and possessed of a history as strange as her ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... the great moment had arrived, and upstairs Catherine and Virginie were in attendance—both ousted from what each considered her own rightful place of authority by a slim, capable, and apparently quite unconcerned piece of femininity equipped against rebellion in all the starched panoply of a nurse's uniform, while downstairs Hugh stared dumbly out at the frosted lawns, with their background of bare, brown trees swaying to ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... been eased of their presence, the fever of their prayers and hopes. It was the other way with this dim little old woman. During the whole of her life she had never done anything. She was one of those faint whispers of femininity who missed the ears of mankind and who faded into the sigh of widowhood without attracting the least attention. She was simply the "relic" of William J. Mosely, who at the time of his death was the richest man in Jordantown. And by the same token, ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... the air, soft and perfumed, of this room; to be surrounded by this luxury, these tokens of a life which stinted nothing in the pursuit of enjoyment; more than all to appreciate by some subtle inner sense the appealing charm of femininity, the suggestions of domestic intimacies; all this was to the young deacon to be exposed to influences far more formidable to the ascetic life than those grosser temptations with which a stupid fiend assailed St. Anthony. Wynne drew a deep breath, wondering why he felt so strangely ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... herself won the affection of everyone she wished, and made everyone ready to spring to do her bidding. She pointed out to me how politic she had had to be over her art. When she had wished to become a sculptor, everyone in her native place had been shocked at the un-femininity of it, and people fabled behind her back about her depraved instincts. She, for her part, exerted no more strength than just enough to carry her point, let people talk as much as they liked, took no revenge on those who spread calumnies ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... moment be supposed that Mr. Opp was a stranger to the fascinations of femininity. He had been inoculated at a tender age, and it had taken so completely, so tragically, that he had crept back to life with one illusion sadly shattered, and the conviction firm within him that henceforth he was immune. His attitude toward the subject remained, however, ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... order of muscular feelings with which the use of the ski, or long snow-shoes, as a sport for both sexes, has made the women acquainted. Fifteen years ago the Norwegian women were even more than the women of other lands votaries of the old-fashioned ideal of femininity, "the domestic angel," the "gentle and refining influence" sort of thing. Now these sedentary fireside tabby-cats of Norway have been trained, they say, by the snow-shoes into lithe and audacious creatures, for ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... would have been out of place. It is this extraordinary insight into the human mind which brings us to the feet of the master in reverential awe; and it detracts nothing from his fame that his themes descriptive of average femininity would have been quite different had he written them for the women of this epoch. The world moves rapidly. This motive slips with a series of imperceptible musical glides into the "Siebente-FrauMotiv" (Seventh Wife Motive): Bluebeard enters well in ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of engaging Gabrielle in the matter was altogether against his principles. He had always made it a rule that her essential femininity should not be compromised by any contact with the business of the school. He did not even like her to take an intimate share in the management of the house. After all she was a Hewish and a ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... another, hoping that he would find the perfect woman, able to understand him. At last he did find her, so he thought, in the person of a young woman of twenty-five, a consummate mistress of the arts of femininity. She sized him up at once, played on his vanity, extolled his fine tastes and never exposed a single crudity of her own, until she brought him to the point where his passion for her, his conviction that he had found "the perfect woman," led him to propose marriage. Then came the blow: she laughed ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... lying on the great polar-bear skin in their bedroom, half-undressed, for they were dining with the Greens in Wilton Crescent, the ruddy firelight making the diamonds wink and twinkle on her bare arms and in the delicious curve of her breast—a vision of adorable femininity. He forgave her all.' (Well, this goes from bad to worse, and finally about fifty pages later, Hugh takes a week-end ticket to Swanage and 'has it out with himself on the downs above Corfe.' . . . Here there's fifteen pages or so which we'll skip. ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... murmurous appeals to their patron saints, and senoritas squealed in trepidation that was at least half sincere. It was a very big bear, and she truly looked very fierce and as if she would think nothing of climbing the adobe wall and devouring a whole front seat full of fluttering femininity! Rosa screamed and was immediately reassured, when Teresita reminded her that those fierce gringos across the corral ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... was the face of a woman whose heart and mind were crowding with a yearning for something—something unattainable. Such was her look of strength and virility that he almost regretted them, fearing that her character might belie her wondrous femininity. ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... hand to her eyes as if counting them, in the strange manner of lovers). Those eyes could never be disloyal—my lady of the nut-brown eyes. (He holds her from him, surveying her, and is scorched in the flame of her femininity.) Oh, the sveldtness of you. (Almost with reproach.) Joanna, why are you ...
— Dear Brutus • J. M. Barrie
... more or less pointless stories, and even forgot to be angry when for one brief, fleeting instant his massive hand closed over her slim, aristocratic one. It seemed too good to be true that this fascinating bit of femininity was soon to ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... were playing at games, with laughter and chat, in all the pride of life, the notes of piano and harp trembling in the air from the open windows adjoining. Moreover, they were girls—and this was a fact which Grace Melbury's delicate femininity could not lose sight of—whose parents Giles would have addressed with a deferential Sir or Madam. Beside this visioned scene the homely farmsteads did not quite hold their own from her present twenty-year point of survey. For all his woodland sequestration, Giles knew the primitive simplicity ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... creeping, nasty, horrid things—did we not see that they were no longer the same beings we had previously known, that in their long flights in heat and cold and rain and wind and dust they had shaken off some ancient weakness that was theirs, that without loss of femininity they had become more like ourselves in the sense that they were more self-centred and ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... meet with the same—no greater—temptation than their brothers, but with no knowledge to guide them, no traditions to give them poise, no ameliorating factor of social tenderness or tolerance when inexperience fails to temper their emotions and their femininity.... ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... frame and limbs of the youth, the greatest attraction lay in his countenance. His features were classical in their regularity, excepting the nose, which was just enough aquiline to give character to his face, and take away the femininity which ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... Oriental assailant of our customs terms the overcharge of femininity in Occidental society does mellow us, it does not follow that it weakens us. Anyhow it does not affect what I say about the influence of the mother upon the purposes and "principles" of young men. And, in any event, our Western civilization constitutes ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... Dawn as a passing stranger. I think her especially honest and especially beautiful, and it worries me to think she has thus erred. Her action was unwomanly, if you like, but peculiarly feminine, with the unavoidable hysterical femininity engendered in women by their subjected environment. Are you quite sure you consider Dawn merely a passing stranger not worth consideration?" I asked, looking him fair in the eyes; and the quick lowering of them and the tightening of his mouth satisfied ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... bit of femininity was the one creature who could keep her father amiable from one end of ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... thoughtless young girl can who is free from care. "I couldn't count all who make eyes at me now, so what will it be when I get as old as the rest of you girls?"—this a trifle maliciously, for every one of them was at least twenty, and that seemed rather passee to this bit of femininity of sweet sixteen. ...
— Pretty Madcap Dorothy - How She Won a Lover • Laura Jean Libbey
... minutes she did not speak, because she could not. Like many women, she fought desperately against the tears which seemed a badge of her femininity. She sat down in a chair, dropped her face upon her folded arms, and bit her lips until they were sore. Kent took a step toward her, reconsidered, and went over to the window, where he stood staring moodily out ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... "manifesting the destructive energy, the brutal combative instinct, or the intense sex-vanity of the male"; and in our brief attempt to make a first study of womanhood in the light of Mendelism, we have seen good reason to understand why masculine characters may come to the surface in the female whose femininity has worn thin. Several of the lower animals definitely show us ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... it, and she had perceived that after all there is nothing better for a girl, even a girl who is a doctor of medicine, than a ladylike manner. Now, however, she wished that she could do or say something aggressively mannish, for she felt herself dwindling away to the merest femininity, under a scrutiny which had its fascination, whether agreeable or disagreeable. "You must," he said, with really unwarrantable patronage, "have found that the study of medicine has its difficulties,—you must have been very strongly ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... occurs in Lysistrata. The intellectual and spiritual tendrils of the poem are more truly interwoven, the operation of their centres more nearly unified; and so the work goes deeper into life. It is his greatest play because of this, because it holds an intimate perfume of femininity and gives the finest sense of the charm of a cluster of girls, the sweet sense of their chatter, and the contact of their bodies, that is to be found before Shakespeare, because that mocking gaiety we call Aristophanies reaches here its ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... Stewart—why, he's wild with rage to think it could hev happened. You see, it couldn't hev happened if I hedn't sloped the boys off to the gol-lof-links, an' if Stewart hedn't rid out on the mesa after us. It's my fault. I've hed too much femininity around fer my old haid. Gene cussed me—he cussed me sure scandalous. But now we've got ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... praises with, 'she is essentially womanly.' I knew one of these womanly women, whose voice was like liquid music, whose ways were gentle, whose eyes filled with tears at the recital of some tale of woe, and always about her was an air of gentle, womanly sweetness and dainty femininity. She had a friend who loved her, one whose voice was not so soft, whose manner was brusque, who was considered, "not quite good form, you know." My womanly woman allowed this friend to take upon herself the burden of a sin which she herself had committed, ...
— Wise or Otherwise • Lydia Leavitt
... little with women—he had theories about them. Small men, with midget minds, know femininity much better than do the great ones. Traveling salesmen, with checkered vests, gauge women ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... passion, she might have chosen a more sightly object of devotion. Not that there was much to be said for Yossel's taste either. When after seventy-five years of celibacy the fascinations of the other sex began to tell upon him, he might at least have succumbed to a less matriarchal form of femininity. But perhaps his grandmother had fascinations of another order. Perhaps she had money. He put the ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... so beautiful before! Jeff had only seen her in those soft enwrappings and half-deshabille that belong to invalid femininity. Always refined and modest thus, in her present walking-costume there was added a slight touch of coquettish adornment. There was a brightness of color in her cheek and eye, partly the result of climbing the staircase, partly the result ...
— Jeff Briggs's Love Story • Bret Harte
... he possessed, of course, the usual outfit of medical knowledge, open to any one, but which had never yet made a great physician since the world with all its aches and pains began. For that other things were needed: a coloring of the artistic temperament, a dash of the gambler's, a touch of femininity, as well as the solid stratum of cool common sense at the bottom of all; these eked out the modicum of scientific knowledge which is all mankind has yet wrested from secretive nature. The Doctor sometimes described himself as a "good guesser." ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... Mrs. Stephen Brigham, who had been Emma Glynn, the one beauty of the family. The latter was beautiful still, with a large, splendid, full-blown beauty, she filled a great rocking-chair with her superb bulk of femininity, and swayed gently back and forth, her black silks whispering and her black frills fluttering. Even the shock of death—for her brother Edward lay dead in the house—could not disturb her outward serenity ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... scattered loosely over her shoulders, the finely-cut features, the delicate texture of the skin, the petticoat skirt, the small hand, with slender tapering fingers stretched forward to caress the neck of the mustang mare, are signs of femininity not ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... emotion, just as are the mother's curses or beatings of her child because it has fallen and hurt itself. But observe that the prevalence of emotion is so thoroughly a feminine condition that it is clearly noticeable only where femininity itself is explicit— therefore, always weaker among masculine women, and in the single individual most powerful when femininity is most fully developed. It grows in the child, remains at a constant level when woman becomes completely woman, and decreases ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... laughed because I laughed, and I laughed because he was laughing. I had some delicious moments of femininity too (such as no woman can resist), until it struck me suddenly that in all this make-believe we were making love to each other again. That frightened me for a time, but I told myself that everything was safe as long as we could carry on ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... their dead dry-eyed and revengeful. Small wonder that Cressy McKinstry had developed strangely under this sexless relationship. Looking at the mother, albeit not without a certain respect, Mr. Ford found himself contrasting her with the daughter's graceful femininity, and wondering where in Cressy's youthful contour the possibility of the grim figure before him was even ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... not thought deeply enough to know that the heart in you is the woman in man. You have derided your femininity, where you have suspected it; whereas, you should have known its power, cherished and utilized it, for it is the hidden well-spring of Intuition and Imagination. What can the brain accomplish without these two? They are the man's ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... resembled the roar of the clouds, that hero, shrouding the very Sun with his arrows, quickly covered his antagonists therewith. The grandsire of the Bharatas, however, getting Sikhandin before him, avoided him, remembering the femininity of his sex. Then, O king, urged by thy son, Drona rushed to battle, desirous of protecting Bhishma in that stress. Sikhandin, however, approaching Drona that foremost of all wielders of weapons, avoided, from fear, that warrior resembling the blazing fire that appears at the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... godhood in time of war) that they will have lost the disposition to tear from him the few compensations the new era of peace can offer. If that is the case, if women at the end of the war are soft, completely rehabilitated in that femininity, or femaleness, which was their original endowment from Nature, the whole great movement will subside, and the work must begin over again by unborn women and their accumulated grievances some ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... subjects. This is one explanation of the fact that Leprechawns are always seen alone, though other authorities make the Leprechawn solitary by preference, he having learned the hollowness of fairy friendship and the deceitfulness of fairy femininity, and left the society of his kind in disgust at its ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... we respect femininity, whether it be animal, vegetable or mineral. Nonetheless, we-all got to remember, though Miss Magnolia is unquestionably a lady, she is ...
— The Venus Trap • Evelyn E. Smith
... again into one of the maddening and mysterious laughs of femininity. Then she composed her features, and replied with equal dignity: "Well, if it comes to that, why ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... one type of femininity more than another which Brett thoroughly understood it was the saucy, quick-witted, handsome adventuress. He knew that the woman scrutinizing him so coolly ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... that Miss Dickinson, though as relating to her femininity she is quite as pretty and modest a young woman as any to be found in the most sheltered circle, has yet a most exceptional talent for public speaking, which draws crowds to hear her, and makes lecturing for her a lucrative profession, as well as ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... apparently, that her sex was an obstacle in the way of participating in whatever dangerous enterprise he had planned. She was, in fact, behaving like a chivalric but obstinate boy; she had not been a militant suffragette for nothing. And yet, somehow, this attitude only served to enhance her essential femininity. Nevertheless, Cleggett was inflexible. ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... fall in with any of these ladies, I will see what they have to say about it. But to return, friend, to your own case: were you a prophet even in the days of your femininity? or did manhood ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... exclaimed Darrow, "the delicious femininity of the proposal. It displays at once such really remarkable insight into the psychological needs of another human being, and such abysmal ignorance of the demands of what we are pleased to ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... distinction to her unobtrusive entrance, and caused a feeling of something like awe to follow the first sight of her cold features and deep, heavily-fringed eyes. But this soon passed in the more human sentiment awakened by the soft pleading which infused her gaze with a touching femininity. She wore a long loose garment which fell without a fold from chin to foot, and in her arms ...
— The House in the Mist • Anna Katharine Green
... species—journalists and women-journalists—and that the one is about as far removed organically from the other as a dog from a cat. And we treat these two species differently. They are not expected to suffer the same discipline, nor are they judged by the same standards. In Fleet Street femininity is an absolution, not an accident. The statement may be denied, but it is broadly true, ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... that continued until his thirty-fifth year. When we consider how his combined innocence and ignorance plunged him into a sudden marriage with a bit of pink-and-white protoplasm, aged seventeen, we can not but regret that he had not devoted a little of his valuable time to a study of femininity. And in some way we think of Thackeray, when he was being shown the marvelous works of a certain amateur artist. "Look at that! look at that!" cried the zealous guide, "and he never had a lesson in art in ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... considered characteristic of woman. Man begins to have all the feelings of woman—or all the feelings which he attributed to woman. He becomes more feminine than woman ever was, and worships his own femininity, calling it the highest. In short, he begins to exhibit all signs of sexual complexity. He begins to imagine he really is half female. And certainly woman seems very male. So the ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... last flicker of romance at the embassy...a last resurgence of the evil the war had done her, as she sat in her cold room...a last blaze of sheer femininity when she discovered that Gora had come to Paris in ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... postscript. Women always wrote postscripts—the gesture of femininity immortalized by Lot's wife. Never mind the postscript. Tear the paper into bits. It offended his fingers. Walk over to the water's edge and scatter it on ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... directed upon me her grey eyes shaded by black eyelashes, and I became aware, notwithstanding my years, how attractive physically her personality could be to a man capable of appreciating in a woman something else than the mere grace of femininity. Her glance was as direct and trustful as that of a young man yet unspoiled by the world's wise lessons. And it was intrepid, but in this intrepidity there was nothing aggressive. A naive yet thoughtful assurance is a better definition. She had reflected already (in Russia the young begin to ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... observed Miss Hendy, "in stamping on eternal marble the femininity of the subject ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... completely escaped the buccaneer. He was spurred to it, I suspect, by certain vague stirrings of jealousy. Miss Bishop's conduct in the perils through which they had come had brought him at last to perceive that a woman may lack the simpering graces of cultured femininity and yet because of that lack be the more admirable. He wondered what precisely might have been her earlier relations with Captain Blood, and was conscious of a certain uneasiness which urged him now to ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... selection has chosen women for their femininity first, and next for qualities of submissiveness and patient service bred ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... jacket that so graciously improved the appearance of the slender specimen of femininity is sinister in its effect on the short, stout woman, in sketch No. 38. It should be the study of her life to avoid horizontal lines. Length of limb is to be desired because it adds distinction. Her belt, the horizontal effect of the skirt of the jacket, the horizontal trimming of the ...
— What Dress Makes of Us • Dorothy Quigley
... the room at Betty chatting with young Lane. What a damned fool he was,—he, MacRae! All his wires were crossed. If some inescapable human need urged him to love, how much better to love this piquant bit of femininity beside him? But he couldn't do it. It wasn't possible. All the old rebellion stirred in him. The locked chambers of his mind loosed pictures of Squitty, memories of things which had happened there, as he let ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... more spirit than I gave him credit for. Isabelle just told me that he has a new love, and a very appetizing piece of femininity she is, Fraeulein Dolores of the ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... brim, which I turned up on one side. Then I went into a milliner's store, carrying it in my hand, and made a woman curl a long white feather over the crown, which gave the whole affair a touch of the beehive, stamping it with beautiful femininity. ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... interest to his criticism of the act, agreeing with him generally, sometimes quietly contesting a point, and with some strange fascination drawing new and unexpected ideas from him; and in the intellectual warmth of her femininity his brain seemed to clear and his ideas took ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... should worry. He also told her to go ahead and be as "princessy" as she liked. He would take the risk. Whereupon he placed a generous sum of money at her account in a Boston bank and sent her away with his blessing and an amused smile at the femininity of females. And Ruth had gone and played princess to her heart's content. But there was little enough of heart's content in any of it for poor Larry. Day by day it seemed to him he could see his fairy ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... sorry that she heard what I said," remarked Miss Blake; "but she did not seem to mind. These young women who go out into the world lose the edge of their sensitiveness and femininity. I have always ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... the generous features of a marked man,—if he chose to become marked. He inherited his mother's look; hers was the face of a strong woman, wide of sympathy, broad of experience, showing peace of mind amid troubles—the touch of femininity was ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... prevents women— to use the phrase an old boatswain of my acquaintance applied descriptively to his captain—what prevents them from 'coming on deck and playing hell with the ship' generally, is that something in them precise and mysterious, acting both as restraint and as inspiration; their femininity in short which they think they can get rid of by trying hard, but can't, and never will. Therefore we may conclude that, for all their enterprises, the world is and remains safe enough. Feeling, in my character of a lover of peace, soothed by that conclusion I prepared ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... strong point. She had an exultant joy in living, but laughter, whether genial or sardonic, is not in her work. Irony she seldom, if ever, employed; satire she never attempted. It was on the maternal, the sympathetic side that her femininity, and therefore her creative genius, was most strongly developed. She was masculine only in the deliberate libertinism of certain episodes in her own life. This was a characteristic—one on no account to be overlooked or denied ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... the other for comparison. Between and around them steam plumes from unseen buildings drift like clouds. Diana turns a little, and points her shaft into the wind anew. The might of the new tower is mightier for this close comparison. Yet the other tower, too, does not suffer, its femininity is the more alluring. But lift your eyes as you walk through this commonplace cross-street of New York, and you may see as picturesque a vista, over the quaint wooden cottage, as any city, anywhere, affords—forty stories looking down on two and a half, and between them, in intermediate flight, ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... wish to create the impression that you are indifferent to men—that men, by the same token, are indifferent to you." The Countess Olga smiled. "Your disguise is complete, mon enfant—except for one thing— your femininity—which refuses to be extinguished. You do not hate men. If you did you would not go to so much trouble to look like them. One day you will love very badly—very madly. And then—" the Countess ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... with delight at the gracefully delicate form, luminous, as though within it burned the flame of life, showing through the pearl-pale flesh. A shadow, scarcely perceptible, veiled in mystery of her femininity; the light traced a bright spot on her smoothly rounded knees and once more the shadow reached down to her tiny feet with their delicate toes, ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... amused, Percival was profoundly annoyed. The incident on the train had been pretty enough in its way, but it was closed. As it stood, it had been rather artistic and satisfying. A wild, unknown bit of femininity dashing into his life for ten throbbing minutes, then vanishing into the sunset, was one thing, and this very tangible young person in clothes of the wrong cut and color, addressing him in terms of easy familiarity, was ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... painter of women from the woman's point of view that desires the world only to think of woman in her pose as woman, reticent, careful to screen the impulsive, most of all the vexatious, the violent, and the irregular moods of femininity's temperament from the eyes of the passer-by; always eager to show woman dressed for the part, and well dressed. She was incapable of stating the deeps of character; and had she had the power, she would have ...
— Vigee Le Brun • Haldane MacFall
... visitors? Well, the sisters and cousins of an undergraduate seldom seem more passable to his comrades than to himself. Altogether, the instinct of sex is not pandered to in Oxford. It is not, however, as it may once have been, dormant. The modern importation of samples of femininity serves to keep it alert, though not to gratify it. A like result is achieved by another modern development—photography. The undergraduate may, and usually does, surround himself with photographs of pretty ladies known to the public. A phantom harem! Yet the houris have an effect ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... been said of the Jew that he is nearly always possessed of a streak of femininity, not effeminacy. In Doctor Meyer Isaacson this streak certainly existed. His intuitions were feminine in their quickness, his sympathies and his antipathies almost feminine in their ardour. He understood women instinctively, as generally only other women understand them. Often he ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... picked up her suit-case and led her past the sidling admiration of the drummers, those sovereign critics of Western femininity, to the back of the station where stood a tottering surrey and a dingy gray nag, far gone in years, that leaned upon its shafts as though on crutches. Katherine clambered in, and the drooping animal doddered along a street thickly overhung with ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... so heartfelt and sincere when he pushed the insect through the slit in her pasteboard box that he truly believed he would have run one all the way to the Middle Fork of Powder River only to hear her say it again. And then her womanly aversion to inflicting pain, her appealing femininity when she brought a bulky-bodied, tobacco-chewing grasshopper for him to pinch its head into insensibility! He liked this best of all, for, of necessity, their fingers touched in the exchange, and he wondered a little at his strength of will in refraining ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... younger by years and with that unexpected winsomeness which was her charm. The murmur of approval was a tribute to her femininity that was music in her ears. The night promised to be one of triumph which she intended to enjoy to the utmost, but to her it ensured more than that, for Ogden Van Lennop was there, as she had seen in one swift glance, and it meant, ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... another great Russian, Kuprin, who is supreme—if not unique—as a painter of the universal scourge of prostitution, per se; and not as an incidental background for portraits. True, he may not have entirely escaped the strange allure, aforementioned, of the femininity he paints; for femininity—even though fallen, corrupt, abased, is still femininity, one of the miracles of life, to Kuprin, the lover of life. But, even if he may be said to have used too much of the oil of sentimentality in mixing his colours ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... filled. This was the first time she had ever heard Martin ask for something as sentimental as a kiss. She was thoroughly ashamed of herself for it—it was really too absurd!—but she felt jealousy, an emotion that had never bothered her since they had been married. And this bit of chattering femininity had caused it. Mrs. ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... Alan were twins. I was tremendously interested in Beth even then. She seemed one of the most worth-while girls I had ever met. She was a little wisp of femininity, slender and delicate, hardly more than five feet one or two. She had beautiful golden hair and an animated, pretty face, with a pert little snub nose. She was a graduate of Vassar, and planned to take up chemistry as a profession, ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... of which Dayak handicraft is capable. He made altogether a splendid subject for the camera, but his family proved less satisfactory. I had to wait an hour and a half before his womenfolk were ready, femininity apparently being alike in this regard in all races. When they finally emerged from the house in great array (which showed Malay influence) they were a ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... he now found himself as a trout in a sandpile. The great room, with its costly furnishings, the tea-table crowded with silver and fragile porcelain, the kettle purring contentedly above the iridescent flame of the alcohol lamp,—above all, the subtle, indefinable suggestion of femininity which unknowably pervaded his surroundings,—all these enthralled young Nisbet beyond expression, and awed him immeasurably, into the bargain. He was, as usual, very clear in his own mind as to what he wanted, and that was the younger Miss Rathbawne, ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... it, of course. His artist's eyes had been far too interested in a certain rare quality of delicate femininity in the girl's face and figure, and his ear too quick to appreciate the music of her cultured voice, that he should not be able to recall such pleasant memories later. Indeed, during those fleeting moments on the threshold of the theater, he ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... womanhood to me. With her steady amber-brown eyes, her unaffected interest in impersonal things, her upstanding waistless blue body, her energy, decision and courage, she seemed rather some new and infinitely finer form of boyhood than a feminine creature, as I had come to measure femininity. She was my perfect friend. Could I have foreseen, had my world been more wisely planned, to this day we ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... out resourcefulness which she never suspected herself of having. Fortunately Miss Scovill had been the sort to teach her something of the realities of life. The Scovill School for Girls might have had a larger fashionable patronage if it had turned out more graduates of the clinging-vine type of femininity instead of putting independence of thought and action as among ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... in the United States, constitute the most remarkable pathology of the female heart, its motives, objects, and secret aspirations, ever penned. With unsparing hand she unmasks the human heart and unveils the most carefully hidden mysteries of femininity, and every one who reads these letters will see herself depicted as in ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... with it in her hand, careless of the dust which powdered her masses of dark, neatly coiled hair. The action revealed her keen, cleanly cut features, so strongly resembling her brother's. But the resemblance was softened by femininity; for young McCrae's visage was masculine and hawklike, and under excitement fierce, even predatory; while his sister's, apart from sex, was more refined, more thoughtful, with a grave ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... hence the comparative infrequency of viraginity. The congenital viragint will always remain somewhat masculine in her tastes and ideas, but her inclinations and desires having been turned toward femininity early in life, she will escape the horrors of complete viraginity or gynandry. The victim of effemination, however, is saved by no such accidental forethought. The ignorant mother fosters feminine inclinations and desires in her effeminate son until his psychic being becomes ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... woman staying in a house full of men would find life as depressing as I do cooped up here under precisely opposite circumstances," he thought, as he made his way through the little churchyard. "It cannot be the atmosphere of femininity that bores me, however, for Mrs. de Tracy has a strongly masculine flavour and Miss Smeardon is as nearly neuter as a ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Her disposition was one of serene gentleness, yet as fearless and open as her beautiful eyes suggested. She was of a strongly independent spirit too, but, even so, the woman in her was never for a moment jeopardized by it; she was never anything but a delightful femininity, rejoicing wholesomely in the companionship ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... floors between, women. At every cashier's desk, at the wrappers' desks, running back and forth with parcels and change, short-skirted women. Filling the aisles, passing and repassing, a constantly arriving and departing throng of shoppers, women. Simply a moving, seeking, hurrying mass of femininity, in the midst of which the occasional man shopper, man clerk, and man supervisor, looks lost and out ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... greatest dislike to leaving a conversation just when it was likely to become really interesting. Moreover, Miss Goold smoked, not because it was a smart or emancipated thing to do, but because she liked it, and—a curious note of femininity about her—she objected to her drawing-room ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... this intimacy between Camillo and Rita grew to love he never knew. The truth is that he enjoyed passing the hours at her side; she was his spiritual nurse, almost a sister,—but most of all she was a woman, and beautiful. The aroma of femininity: this is what he yearned for in her, and about her, seeking to incorporate it into himself. They read the same books, they went together to the theatre or for walks. He taught her cards and chess, and they played of nights;—she badly,—he, ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
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