"Feminine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tenderness, gratitude, devotion, heroism, equal to this, the world had never seen. The exquisite inventiveness of a love that lavished tears as water on the feet of Jesus, and made tresses of hair a towel, and broke the alabaster flask for his anointing; the feminine tenderness that lifted his mangled body from the cross and wrapped it in new linen, with costly spices, and laid it in a virgin tomb, have at length been surpassed by the ingenious devotion of the cursed sons ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... was smiling, and pulling his beard behind his paper; but he made no attempt to check the flow of feminine eloquence. He had said his say like a man, and had taken my part behind my back, and he knew women were like new wine,—very sound and sweet, but they must find their vent. Aunt Philippa would be kinder ever after if we let her scold us properly, and took ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... confined to the present, but extended to the future—the constructive plan of Malicorne, we say, was this:—To obtain entrance into the household of Madame Henrietta for a woman devoted to himself, who was intelligent, young, handsome, and intriguing; to learn, by means of this woman, all the feminine secrets of the young household, whilst he, Malicorne, and his friend Manicamp, should, between them, know all the male secrets of the young community. It was by these means that a rapid and splendid fortune might be acquired at one and the same ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... snake, deer, rabbit, etc. Every child, male or female, received the name of the day, and also its number, as a surname; its personal name being taken from a fixed series, which differed in the masculine and feminine gender, and which seems to have been derived from the names ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton
... consists of two parts. The first part, of the means to render a marriage happy, of itself prevents every possibility of dissension; and would even at last make the spider and the fly the best of friends with each other. The second part is the best and surest method of preserving feminine attractions." ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... the past I don't know—a promoter would better describe her. Undoubtedly she has been behind the scenes in many an untold intrigue of the business world. A very feminine woman, and yet, as you shall see, with an unusual instantaneous ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... it is being asked, feminine—like a ship? A correspondent in The Times refers to her as a lady. Presumably because ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 7, 1914 • Various
... instant—and as she looks at you out of those impudent eyes, she is mentally searching out your most vulnerable spot. In this woman's face there is an entire absence of wonder, curiosity, modesty or passion. All that we call the eternally feminine is obliterated. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... trefoil, or clover. Others have imagined the Trinity like a triangle; or they have referred to the three qualities of space,—height, breadth, width; or of fire,—form, light, and heat; or of a noun, which has its masculine, feminine, and neuter; or of a government, consisting of king, lords, and commons; or of ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... her a sort of miniature and feminine edition of the Luke Raeburn whom she remembered eight-and-twenty years before in their Scottish home. When Rose had gone into the back drawing room to fetch her crewels, she drew Erica toward her, and kissing her again, said in ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... of Diana, the Gipsy, the Goddess, the Woman, one in all and all in one and that one so wonderful, so elusive, so utterly feminine that I, being but a man and no great student in the Sex, may, in striving to set her before you in cold words, distort this dear image out of all semblance and ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... Rotton becoming manager. This gentleman, whose death only recently occurred, held this position for many years, and was universally respected. His mental organisation was, however, too refined and feminine to battle with the rough energy of modern trading. The bank, under his management, was tolerably successful, but it remained a small and somewhat insignificant concern in comparison with others. An arrangement, satisfactory on ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... be built, if you neglected your home affairs, and went cantering about the country, like those evil-spirited women, turning everything topsy-turvy, and mocking at all law and order; but I know my wife has a mind too delicate and feminine to commit ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... and blandishments, she bestowed on an imaginary partner, were indescribably ludicrous. Now and then, in her evolutions, she would cast a momentary reproachful glance at the ungallant clergyman who had refused to dance with feminine royalty, and who stood looking on with a sheepish expression of face. He was a Kentuckian, and lack of gallantry is not ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... returned because of the money that was his when he chose to claim it. Rather, he had realized—and Margery had a great deal to do with his newer outlook—that so long as he stayed away from home he was confessing to cowardice. Incidentally Margery, being utterly feminine, wanted to see Arizona and the free life of the range, of which Corliss had told her. As for Nell Loring ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... a feminine low laugh, Yet did not stay her dexterous hand: "Now tell me of those days," she said, ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... the admitted moonlight showed him the entrance of one—two feminine apparitions, followed by that of a man. For a moment they stood in the hall, speaking with one another in an undertone. What they said Mr. Morgan could not hear—their voices, too, were too low to be recognized—but ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... guineas upon the next ship. She laid out her all upon her children, indulging them beyond all measure, as was inevitable with one of her kindness of disposition; giving all her thoughts to their welfare—learning, that she might teach them; and improving her own many natural gifts and feminine accomplishments, that she might impart them to her young ones. To be doing good for some one else, is the life of most good women. They are exuberant of kindness, as it were, and must impart it to some one. She made herself a good scholar of French, ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... loves of the ancient Irish, whether immortals or mortals, the woman's role is the more accentuated, while in Teutonic tradition man plays the chief part. Again, it has often been remarked that the feminine interest is absent from the earlier heroic forms of some literatures. Not so, however, in the earliest saga-texts of the Irish. Many are the famous women to whom the old tales introduce us and who stand out and compel attention like the characters of the Greek drama. Everyone ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... stands as follows: These ladies don't want any man in the expedition; but they have at last realized that they've got to take a guide or two. And there are no feminine guides in Alaska. ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... 1745, a gracious and lovely woman, still young, dispensing her charities and hospitalities, and esteemed everywhere as a model of all the proprieties. But she was still a woman. Romance and passion were by no means dead in her; and to this "eternal feminine" we must look for an explanation of the strange event which now follows ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... and 6 dilate with keen irony on the fate of the first half of Israel's sin—the calf. It was thought a god, but its worshippers shall be in a fright for it. 'Calves,' says Hosea, though there was but one at Beth-el; and he uses the feminine, as some think, depreciatingly. 'Beth-aven' or the 'house of vanity,' he says, instead of Beth-el, 'the house of God.' A fine god whose worshippers had to be alarmed for its safety! 'Its people'—what a contrast to the name they might have borne, 'My people'! God disowns them, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... a true woman; and even in her present predicament her feminine love of things beautiful was strong enough to win from her a ready assent to Ned's proposition. In the meantime the muslins were carefully re-folded—a task of some little difficulty, owing to their filmy texture—and replaced in ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... enthroned on high, with St. Francis and St. Liberale on either hand. The Child's glance is turned upon the soldier-saint, a gallant figure with his lance at rest, his dagger on his hip, his gloves in his hand, young, high-bred, with features of almost feminine beauty. The picture is conceived in a new spirit of simplicity of design, and shows a new feeling for restraint in matters of detail. It is the work of a man who has observed that early morning, like late evening, has a marvellous power of eliminating all unessential ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... the court, the same closet against the blank wall. Hooper had evidently inhabited it for some days, for it was filled with his personal belongings. Indeed he must have moved in en bloc when his ward had been moved out, for none of the furnishings showed the feminine touch, and several articles could have belonged only to the old man personally. Of such was a small iron safe in one corner and a tall old-fashioned desk crammed ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... and many more joined in the enterprise. With them came Atalanta, the daughter of Iasius, king of Arcadia. A buckle of polished gold confined her vest, an ivory quiver hung on her left shoulder, and her left hand bore the bow. Her face blent feminine beauty with the best graces of martial youth. Meleager saw ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... fell. The excitements of the past six hours had demoralised me altogether. I could not remember who or what gradus was—whether it was an active noun or a feminine verb or a plural conjunction, or what. In vain the faithful Dicky prompted me from behind and Graham minor from the side. As they both prompted at the same time, and each suggested different things, I only floundered deeper. I felt myself ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... was too faint, so he struck a match and held it close to the paper. The action betokened only a languid interest, but when he caught sight of the first of the four subscribed lines he sat up straight in his chair with an ejaculation. At the bottom of Fisbee's page was written in a dainty, feminine hand, of a type he had not ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... "I think the sex feminine has marriage on the brain," I exclaimed, somewhat heatedly. "My Aunt Jessica was worrying me about it the day before yesterday. As if it were any ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... be attributed for the most part to the influence exercised upon him by the Queen, who was at Coblenz close by. He was seventy-three years old, a lover of peace, and disinclined to risk the laurels of 1866 in a fresh struggle; but when he was free from the feminine influence, the sense of honor of the heir of Frederick the Great and of a Prussian officer always remained paramount. Against the opposition of his consort, due to her natural feminine timidity and lack of national feeling, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... she saw her brother Jack and his chum, Walter Pennington. "The boys are here! Any more of you, Jack?" she asked, as she crowded some feminine finery out of sight ...
— The Motor Girls on Crystal Bay - The Secret of the Red Oar • Margaret Penrose
... back in three minutes with the entire cache of cookies, which she religiously divided and the children munched contentedly while Chicken Little speculated as to what the wonderful excursion could be. With feminine persistence she wormed a few ...
— Chicken Little Jane • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... days, having inherited that frivolity with regard to women which is a traditional characteristic of the illustrious House of Hapsburg, he has never at any moment during his long reign permitted his susceptibility to feminine charms to go to the length of influencing his political conduct, or the ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... see, 'White Violet' may as well be the nom de plume of a man as of a woman, especially if adopted for the purpose of mystification. The handwriting, I remember, WAS more boyish than feminine." ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... an amply-framed, finely-proportioned person, and rejoiced in her physique, having a masculine pride in her breadth of shoulders and depth of chest. But in all other respects she was exquisitely feminine: she never displayed either strength or agility. Westbrook was a country place, and in the young folks' rambles about town and out over the hills she was more often fatigued than anybody else, and obliged to accept support from some one of the gentlemen, all of whom were eager ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... green rosette, and on his left arm a band of crape. Numbers had hat-bands depending to the shoulder; others had close crape intertwined carefully with green ribbon around their hats; and the great majority of the better sort adhered to this plan, which was executed with a skill unmistakably feminine. Here and there at intervals a man appeared with a broad green scarf around his shoulders, some embroidered with shamrocks, and others decorated with harps. There was not a man throughout the procession but was conspicuous by some emblem of nationality. Appointed officers walked at the ...
— The Wearing of the Green • A.M. Sullivan
... changing his sex, is perhaps based upon the fact, that the country of Thrace, which took the name of Thracia from a famous sorceress, was before called Scython; and that as it lost a name of the masculine gender for one of the feminine, in after times it became reported that Scython had ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... outer office; he proposed that he should bring her in; and I gathered from his manner, that he expected her to pronounce against his accepting my solicitation, and so terminate our interview pleasantly, with the aid of the feminine social grace. ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... they laughed at him and, alas with some justice; for he was an exaggerated person. He was to be construed in the comparative. Everything in his life was a trifle overdone, from the fastidious arrangement of his neckties to the feminine nicety of his little dinner-parties. In age Mr. Ricardo was approaching the fifties; in condition he was a widower—a state greatly to his liking, for he avoided at once the irksomeness of marriage and the reproaches justly levelled at the bachelor; finally, he was rich, having amassed a ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... expression had lit up her face with a positive beauty—when the soul, the life of beauty beamed forth, and went to the heart with a thrill that acknowledged its power. She knew that she would have been brilliant and fascinating, if she had not been repressed; with all her faults, there was a more feminine yieldingness about her, than about herself. There was an affectionate pathos in her voice, a tender grace in her air, when she asked to sympathize in her sorrow. Ann felt for the first time fully, that she was one to love, and be beloved in the social circle. She felt that she ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... said to be peculiarly a foible feminine. It is not, as every one knows. But of the major masculine allotment, Ormsby the masterful had rather less than his due share. He saw the chauffeur turn his car in the length of it and send it spinning down ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... d—d,' and came away in high dudgeon." And so matters stood up to the last we had heard from Fort Phoenix, except for one letter which Mrs. Frazer wrote to Mrs. Turner at Sandy, perhaps purely out of feminine mischief, because a year or so previous Baker, as a junior second lieutenant, was doing the devoted to Mrs. Turner, a species of mildly amatory apprenticeship which most of the young officers seemed impelled ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... ourselves in a snug little boudoir, furnished and decorated with feminine skill and taste, and commanding through the open French windows a gorgeous view down the valley. Two ladies, one middle-aged, one young, are sitting there as the footman enters. The elder, evidently the mistress of the mansion, is reading a newspaper; the younger is dividing her time between needlework ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... him to social or political gatherings, occupied the place of that companion in victory, its panels draped in black, its lanterns enveloped in long, light streamers of crepe, which floated to the ground with an indescribable undulatory feminine grace. That was a new idea for funerals, those veiled lanterns, the supreme manifestation of chic in mourning; and it was most fitting for that dandy to give one last lesson in style to the Parisians who flocked to his funeral as to ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... appropriate. There is a mixture of timidity and frankness in Mercy, which is as sweet in itself as it is artlessly and unconsciously drawn; and in Christiana we discover the very characteristics that can make the most lovely feminine counterpart, suitable to the stern and ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the walls of the houses opposite, filled the little drawing-room in which the mass of feminine ornaments glimmered and glittered. ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... the men. Often they join in groups singing and dancing, and this, I believe, is the gayest moment of their lives and to this honest pleasure they will abandon themselves with rapture, forgetting the fatigue of the day. Then feminine coquetry triumphs before the other girls and the ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... boys vanished, with much tramping of boots and banging of doors, Bab observed, in the young-ladyish tone she was apt to use when she composed her active little mind and body to the feminine ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... intermediates (neuter). All ending in N, P, S, or in the two compounds of this last, PS and X, are masculines. All ending in the invariably long vowels, H and O, and in A among the vowels that may be long, are feminines. So that there is an equal number of masculine and feminine terminations, as PS and X are the same as S, and need not be counted. There is no Noun, however, ending in a mute or in either of the two short vowels, E and O. Only three (meli, kommi, peperi) end in I, and five in T. The intermediates, or ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... Todd closed his eyelids, and peeped out through the narrowest possible slits in the cunningest fashion. "Some experience you know. I am the last man to boast of it. A certain almost feminine sensibility—and there you have my secret. I read the character of women in their eyebrows. A woman's eyebrows. Oh, how loud they speak! I looked at Miss Whitworth's eyebrows, and I exclaimed, 'There is a book there—and I ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... the evening was a tremendous success. The blatant signore sang his Figaro song very well indeed—it suited him better than little feminine love-ditties. The signora was loud and passionate and dramatic in "Roberto"; and Belgians make more allowance for a German accent in French than Parisians; besides, it was not quite their own language that was being murdered ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... either male or female; but, whichever it may be, there should be added one other watcher or attendant at hand of the opposite sex. Understand, that it is of the very essence of my wish that there should be, awake and exercising themselves to my purposes, both masculine and feminine intelligences. Once more, my dear Margaret, let me impress on you the need for observation and just reasoning to conclusions, howsoever strange. If I am taken ill or injured, this will be no ordinary occasion; and I wish to warn you, so that your ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... the usual masculine dread of an angry woman, and, moreover, he had a sharp-tongued wife, but he had also the masculine tenacity of a position. He stared at the post as if his spirit held fast to it, and braced itself against the torrent of feminine wrath which he expected; but it did not come. Madelon Hautville set her mouth hard, wrapped her red cloak around her with a firm gesture, as if she were a soldier about to start on a long march, and walked out of the yard and up the road without ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... those exotic productions specially designed for the Tired Business Man. It relied for a large measure of its success on the size and appearance of its chorus, and on their constant change of costume. Henry, as a consequence, was the centre of a kaleidoscopic whirl of feminine loveliness, dressed to represent such varying flora and fauna as rabbits, Parisian students, colleens, Dutch peasants, and daffodils. Musical comedy is the Irish stew of the drama. Anything may be put into it, with the certainty that it will ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... robust famine, too. It is true that I should not have set my heart upon such a transitory and evanescent terrestrial object like a pumpkin pie so near to T. Tooterson, imported pie soloist, doughnut mastro and feminine virtuoso, but I did, and so I returned from ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... of the impropriety of feminine interference in masculine duties, coupled with her attachment to France, both from principle and feeling, may be ascribed the neglect of her German connexions, which led to many mortifying reproaches, and ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 3 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... Speaker or a member in the Government. When Mrs. Irene Parlby was similarly successful in Lacombe, Alberta, she was not so modest when Premier Greenfield offered her a position without portfolio in the United Farmers' Cabinet. To those who have the feminine movement at heart, these instances will certainly be ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... life. And the girl suffers more than the boy, for the girl-student does as she is told much more conscientiously than boys. Similarly in industry: tapping or pushing at a machine until she taps or pushes on in her dreams; all the more monotonous kinds of machine-tending will wear feminine nerves, naturally more irritable than those of men, more than the same work will wear the male nerves. Not that I believe in subordinating the worker of either sex to the machine. What I want to prevent is the same stupid sacrifice of girls and women in industry as has been permitted ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... discover the present feminine attitude toward the profoundest compliment ever paid women by the heart and mind of men in league—the worshipping devotion conceived by Plato and elevated to a living faith in mediaeval France. Through that renaissance of a sublimated passion domnei was regarded as a throne of alabaster ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... there is something also delightful in it,—I mean in the feminine show of resistance, which gives one the pleasure ...
— The Stepmother, A Drama in Five Acts • Honore De Balzac
... disappointment, which were deep. The rumour of lion was genuine and the excitement, extending far down the Nile, intense. In fact, with the aid of the Oriental's prodigal imagination the one royal beast of feminine persuasion which was reported as having been seen prowling around Deir el-Bahari had been multiplied to two pairs ravaging the ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... have collected a multitude of information. Disliking the dulness of my companion, I drove at a swift pace, but the skydsgut did not seem to like it, and several times I could guess from his manner, that he was expostulating with me. The Norwegians love their horses with the strong, feminine devotion of Arabs, and it is not an uncommon sight to see the skydsgut, if he be a boy, burst into a passionate fit of tears should you lash his horse twice in a mile. He will strive to tell his grief, but if the language of ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... consisting of a noble boy in the wash-leather boots of a gigantic ancestor, a venerable Peer with a dirty face who seemed to have risen from the people late in life, and the Danish chivalry with a comb in its hair and a pair of white silk legs, and presenting on the whole a feminine appearance. My gifted townsman stood gloomily apart, with folded arms, and I could have wished that his curls and ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... it up, admiring it, Freckles' astonished eyes saw a new side of Sarah Duncan. She was jesting, but under the jest the fact loomed strong that, though poor, overworked, and with none but God-given refinement, there was something in her soul crying after that bit of feminine finery, and it made his heart ache for her. He resolved that when he reached the city he would send her a hat, if it took ...
— Freckles • Gene Stratton-Porter
... what has already been said (note 28, above) about the pronoun its. Hell, in the Anglo-Saxon language, is feminine. But, just above, observe the expression it self. See, in the last line of stanza xv, the pronoun her with heaven as its antecedent. Heofon, in ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... invited me to assist in two seances, in which we experimented upon some of the feminine members of the Congress who desired to try it. The first, in which the subject was Mme. Glika, yielded nothing conclusive. But at the second, at which Professor Alrutz attempted to increase the force by adding two other members of the Congress (strangers ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... upon him, this was surprising. The solution of the mystery came from the crowd, close-pressed about the Tyro. It took the form of an unmistakable sniffle, and it somehow contrived to be indubitably and rather pitifully feminine. The Tyro turned. ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... feminine hatred for politics I have no inclination to become diffuse on them, as I have on the errors of other people's cooking or ideas on decoration. I know I am held to be too partial to France in West Africa; too fond ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... To tell the truth, my dear, I never admired Priscilla more than I did last night. I encouraged her to give up her classics for the present and to devote herself to modern languages and to those accomplishments which are considered more essentially feminine. As I did so I had a picture before me, in which I saw Priscilla crowned with love, the support and blessing of her three little sisters. The picture was a very bright one, Maggie, and your crown of bay looks quite tawdry ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... annually to perform, as a scholastic exercise in public oratory (on the first of October, 1533). A gentle queen was here represented as throwing aside needle and distaff, at the crafty suggestion of a tempting fury, and as receiving in lieu of those feminine implements a copy of the Gospels—when, lo! she was suddenly transformed into a cruel tyrant. It was perhaps hard to detect the exact connection between the acceptance of the holy book and so disastrous a change of character—neither ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... within herself whether she should answer, and if so, what she should say. In truth, it was not easy. She felt herself unable to write in the way he did, had she wished to. Besides, there was that feminine feeling still lurking in her heart, which said, "Do not trust him till he comes back." It seemed to her it must be so easy to write like that—and yet, she had not thought so at the first reading. But she loved him, not yet as ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... Venice to retain her ascendency over Caterina by intensifying her dependence, by fostering the distinctively feminine and predominant side of her nature—by insisting upon abnormal claims to her duty, her obedience, her love, ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... well I know Your furtive feminine shape! As if reluctantly you show You nude of cloud, and but by favour throw Aside ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... agreeable and seductive light to the females of their kind, whilst he regards any such effort as beneath his dignity. Not that he cultivates dignity in demeanour. He merely slouches. Unlike his feminine counterpart, he lets his raiment match his manners. Observe him any afternoon, as he passes down Piccadilly, sullenly, with his shoulders humped, and his hat clapped to the back of his head, and his cigarette dangling almost vertically from his lips. It seems only appropriate ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... his wife and sister-in-law, who are very handsome Spanish ladies, seemingly of excellent sense. The wife is the gentler, and more feminine: and the sister more regularly handsome, and vivacious. I think that he is a very remarkable man: and I like him more the more I see ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... a fine, clear, almost feminine hand. The words in the left-hand corner of the envelope were written in a different hand. They were large and bold; almost as though they had been painted with the end of the penholder instead of being written with the pen. The envelope itself was of an unusual size, ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... and then, with a peculiarly feminine movement, placed herself sideways upon the ottoman, half reclining on her elbow on a high cushion, her deep billowy flounces partly veiling the funereal velvet below. Her oval face was pale and melancholy, ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... posset, and is the best woman of business in East Anglia." On another occasion he praises her for more general qualities, when he compares her to the good wife of the Triad, the perfect woman endowed with all the feminine virtues. His wife and "old Hen." (Henrietta) were his "two loved ones," and he subsequently shows in a score of ways how much they had ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... curious straight garment that is a memory of our childhood, went ahead with feminine curiosity; Noah, bare-legged, slithering along in the rear and beseeching the ladies to note the slipperiness of the alluvial deposit, and for goodness' sake not to make a glissade down the ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... to wear the costly gauds by treating as rudely as she dares the customer who can; and as they look upon each other, the one with scorn, and the other with envious hate, we see in both only the very same littleness of feminine vanity, which in its narrow-minded silliness believes that the first requisite of ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... strumpets from the general corruption,—albeit a two months' weakness is better than ten years. I have one request to make, which is, never mention a woman again in any letter to me, or even allude to the existence of the sex. I won't even read a word of the feminine gender;—it must all ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... spite of herself, shone qualities of a superior order. The little hand and foot, so beautiful and delicate, the latter just peeping from the dress under which it was usually concealed, appeared as if formed expressly to adorn a taste that was every way feminine and alluring. ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... feminine of Kurmi, the name of a widely spread and most industrious agricultural caste, closely connected, at least in Bundelkhand, with the similar ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... added all that heart could desire to this ambrosial luncheon. Mrs. Story, whom Mrs. Browning described as "a sympathetic, graceful woman, fresh and innocent in face and thought," was a most agreeable companion; and she and Mrs. Browning frequently exchanged feminine gossip over basins of strawberries and milk in each other's houses, for strawberries abounded in these hills. "If a tree is felled in the forests," said Mrs. Browning, "strawberries spring up just as mushrooms might, and the peasants sell them for ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... religious intolerance and tyranny—are blent together and concentrated in the glowing cantos of this wonderful romance. The hero, Laon, is himself idealized, the self which he imagined when he undertook his Irish campaign. The heroine, Cythna, is the helpmate he had always dreamed, the woman exquisitely feminine, yet capable of being fired with male enthusiasms, and of grappling the real problems of our nature with a man's firm grasp. In the first edition of the poem he made Laon and Cythna brother and sister, not because he believed in the desirability of incest, but because he wished ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... the consciousness of weakness made him timid, and gave a shifty, uneasy look to his eyes. His whole expression was uncertain, and looking only at his face it was difficult at first sight to decide to which sex he belonged. This confusion of two natures, this indefinable mixture of feminine weakness without grace, and of abortive boyhood, seemed to stamp him as something exceptional, unclassable, and once observed, it was difficult to take one's eyes from him. Had he been endowed with physical strength he would have been ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... emotions the heart of Amy Snurge must have been during those hard years, knowing her husband's strength and resource, deploring yet loving his weakness, encouraging, aiding and abetting his every act with the feminine pertinacity which has characterized the world's greatest heroines. Poor woman, no wonder the grave claimed her so soon, for like the bass—like Democracy, her vitality was exhausted by the destructive and constructive force of ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... had a great respect for woman in general, but he entertained an utter detestation of anything like gallantry; in his chaste anxiety he leaned the other way. He was brusque; he often rode roughshod over feminine sensibilities. He was very slightly influenced by considerations of sex. He viewed everybody asexually, as a generalized human being. He dealt with women just as he dealt with men, and he treated young women just as he treated older ones. He treated Clytie just as he treated Eudoxia ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... as all we Subdue themselves to thee, Bow their heads haloed, quench their fiery fame; Seen through dim years divine, Their faint lights feminine Sink, then spring up rekindled from thy flame; Fade, then reflower and reillume From thy fresh spring their wintering age with ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... for the humbler tasks of life. Instinctively we associate them with household work, nursing, and the general drudgery of existence. One never dreams of their having a life of their own. They have no accomplishments, nor any of the feminine charms. Women to whom an offer of marriage would seem as terrifying as a comet, they belong to the neutrals of the human hive, and are, practically speaking, only a little higher than the paid domestic. Indeed, perhaps their one distinction is that ...
— Different Girls • Various
... more congenial good; this feminine excellence; this secondary and more valuable self; this woman who has appropriated to herself every desire, every emotion of my soul: what hope remains with regard to her? Shall I ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... for her husband, and dressing for other women was more a matter of perfect detail than attempted beguilement. She was curious, she told herself, to see whether a man like Hilmer would be impressed by feminine artifice... Did a black silk gown, with spotless lace at wrist and throat, spell the acme of Hilmer's ideal of womanhood? Was woman to him something durable and utilitarian or did his fancy sometimes carry him ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... the bottle, then me, with a strange expression: a little pity—not patronizing—but mostly feminine understanding. "Soda pop? Of course. You don't like ...
— Question of Comfort • Les Collins
... in her earlier career: she starts in life, probably a girl of thirteen, with some small tradesman's wife as her mistress, just a step above her in the social scale; and although the class contains among them many excellent, kind-hearted women, it also contains some very rough specimens of the feminine gender, and to some of these it occasionally falls to give our maid-of-all-work her first lessons in her multifarious occupations: the mistress's commands are the measure of the maid-of-all-work's duties. By the time she ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... livelier and more vivid in his performance than the tragedian.[64] The two were usually sharply differentiated.[65] Specialization arose, too, and we hear of actors who confined their efforts to feminine roles,[66] though naturally every performer was cast for parts to which ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... Englishwoman, resembling a delicate halo, through almost imperceptible gradations to the deep, shining blue-black of the Sicilian, and portraits in every form which fashion has devised during the last twenty-five years, and from which the eternal feminine looked, lured, and smiled in a hundred charming embodiments. A circle of spectres rose from these drawers and whirled around him, stretching white arms toward him and fixing upon him tearful or glowing eyes. All these cheeks had flushed beneath his kisses, all these bosoms ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... rosy-cheeked child, who passed for good-looking enough; but Ann Mary was slender and dark and a real beauty, although Hillsboro people did not realize it. She looked fragile, as if she could not do much hard work and that is always a serious blemish in feminine beauty to the ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... explanation of the mystery of the early-morning doings at the old tower. The footprints of a woman who wore fashionable and elegant boots? Addie Chatfield, of course! Was she not old Peter's daughter, a chip of the old block, even though a feminine chip? And did not he and Gilling know that she had been mixed up with Peter at the Bristol affair? Great Scott!—why, of course. Addie was an ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... eye every morning when he opened the door of his bedroom; it was there when he came home late at night, and seemed to be sitting up for him, in the reproachful, feminine fashion. When he was writing his letters, there it was, with a prim, furtive air of looking on. It was not like a mere slipper; it had traits and an individuality of its own; there were moments when the jet beads in the buckle ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... her own wedding, but she did not know it. The General seemed in no hurry. He had carefully observed the conventions; had hired a housekeeper and a maid, and there was, of course, the day nurse. Having thus surrounded his betrothed with a sort of feminine bodyguard, he spoke of the wedding as happening in the spring. And he was hard to move. As has been said, the General had once commanded a brigade. He was immensely entertained and fascinated by the lady who was to ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... described as "small in stature, in figure graceful, in countenance dignified." "In manner he was most modest; in eloquence most sweet; in chastity without stain." We may readily imagine his appearance; with that feminine austerity of expression which, as has been well said, belongs so peculiarly to the features of ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... one of those shops which have, more than all the others, enshrined Paris in feminine hearts. And never was lingerie selected with more loving care than that which Virginia picked out that afternoon. A tear fell on one particularly lovely robe de nuit—so soothingly soft, so caressingly luxurious, ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... given a bewitching softness to her manners, a delicacy so truly feminine, that a man of any feeling could not behold her without wishing to chase her sorrows away. She was timid and irresolute, and rather fond of dissipation; grief only had ...
— Mary - A Fiction • Mary Wollstonecraft
... not know a feminine—from the piney woods of Maine to the Neuces—so given to popularity, newspaper philippics, and city item bombards, as Aunt Nabby Folsom, of the town of Boston. The name and doings of Aunt Nabby are linked with ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... bearing no likeness whatever to her mother. Her features were regular, and her full, clear eyes had a brilliance of their own, looking at you always steadfastly and boldly, though very seldom pleasantly. Her mouth would have been beautiful had it not been too strong for feminine beauty. Her teeth were perfect,—too perfect,—looking like miniature walls of carved ivory. She knew the fault of this perfection, and shewed her teeth as little as she could. Her nose and chin were finely ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... demanded the rejection of the throne, which had, thus far, ever trampled upon their rights, and for the establishment of a republic, from which alone they hoped for redress. A scene of indescribable confusion ensued, cries rising upon all sides. The duchess endeavored to speak. Her tremulous feminine voice was heard exclaiming, "I have come with all I hold dear in the world," but the remainder of her words were drowned ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... was that everybody should see the situation from their own viewpoint only. Captain Moggs from the military; Gail had a newspaper-woman's angle tempered with feminine compassion. And he was fascinated by the innumerable possibilities the technology of the children's race suggested. He yearned for a few days alone with some low-temperature apparatus. The hand-tool of ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... that the cab had been playing died away. "Paratime Building, just below," it said, in a light feminine voice. "Which landing stage, please?" Vall leaned forward and punched at the buttons in front of him. Something in the cab's electronic brain gave a rapid series of clicks as it shifted from the general Paratime Building beam to the beam of the Paratime Police landing ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper
... fact that he is a confirmed old bachelor, and all women and children are to him pure ideals, as much sweeter than all other ideals as they are more substantial? He poses, to be sure, as a depreciator of woman. "Just like a woman," "women's frivolity," "useless little feminine trinkets," are phrases always on his lips. But watch his caressing expression as he listens to the chatter of Cousin Thisbe, the most empty-headed little creature who ever wore glowing cheeks and bright curls. ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... Juan and told him to put it on the desk in her office library; then she changed her mind, moved by an impulse of feminine curiosity. ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... flushing with annoyance. Camilla, leaning on the garden fence, had suddenly buried her face in both arms. In feminine plumpness, when young, there is usually something left of ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... Sat Hilda's sisterhood. Clustering they shone, White-veiled, and pale of face, and still and meek, An inly-bending curve, like some young moon Whose crescent glitters o'er a dusky strait. In front were monks dark-stoled: for Hilda ruled, Though feminine, two houses, one of men: Upon two chasm-divided rocks they stood, To various service vowed, though single Faith:— Not ever, save at rarest festival, Their holy inmates met. 'Is this the man Favoured, though late, with gift of song?' thus spake ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... the night was not at all impossible; and this was the first thought that entered her mind. She recollected, too, that Vauquelas and Coursegol had just gone out, that the servants were in bed and that she was to all intents and purposes alone in the house. The feminine mind is quick to take fright; and night and solitude increased the terror which is so easily aroused by a fevered imagination. Her usual courage deserted her; she turned pale ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... The business relations of her husband and himself were known to all, and her own reputation was above suspicion. Indeed, few women were more popular. She was domestic, she was prudent, she was pious. In a country of great feminine freedom and latitude, she never rode or walked with anybody but her husband. In an epoch of slang and ambiguous expression, she was always precise and formal in her speech. In the midst of a fashion of ostentatious decoration, ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... her eyes; the Lady Ysolinde, deeper taught in the mysteries of existence, more conscious of power, not so beautiful, but oftentimes giving the impression of beauty more strongly than her fairer rival, compact of swift delicate graces, half feline, half feminine (if these two be not the same). All these passed like clouds over the unquiet sea of her nature, reflecting the changing skies of circumstance, and were fitted to produce a fascination ever on the verge of repulsion even when ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... said. He raised the heavy, dull-gold band, and placed it upon Dolores's brow with the courtly homage of a born noble. It fitted to perfection—as indeed it should, since the loving fingers that had fashioned it had crept around the girl's sleeping head many times to that end—and feminine vanity would not permit Dolores to ignore the fit. She stepped over to a long gilt-framed mirror, and her beautiful face grew dark and her violet eyes dusky at the glorious reflection ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... growing during the many days they had been together. Captain Davenport was an autocrat of the sea, fearing no man, never bridling his tongue, and now he found himself unable to curse in the presence of this old man with the feminine brown eyes and the voice of a dove. When he realized this, Captain Davenport experienced a distinct shock. This old man was merely the seed of McCoy, of McCoy of the BOUNTY, the mutineer fleeing from the hemp that waited him in England, the McCoy who was a power for evil in the early days of blood ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... took close heed to all things, as—the fit and excellence of his clothes; the unconscious grace of his attitude; the hair that curled so crisp and dark at his temples; the woeful droop of his lips;—a long, inquisitive look, a look wholly feminine. Yes, he was certainly handsome, handsomer even than she had thought. And finding him so, she frowned, ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... unhappy little establishments to which our typical engineers will tend, and so prevent many women from becoming mothers of a regenerating world. The huge secretion of irresponsible wealth by the social organism is certain to affect the tone of thought of the entire feminine sex profoundly—the exact nature of this influence we ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... a dimple on the face of earth, The seal of beauty, and the shrine of mirth; Nature is delicate and graceful there, The place's genius feminine and fair: The winds are awed, nor dare to breathe aloud; The air seems never to have borne a cloud, Save where volcanoes send to heaven their curled And solemn smokes, like ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... of study she had made a considerable advance. Yet her intellect was less remarkable than the nobility and sweetness of her mind; other mothers loved their sons because their own ambition was gratified by their honours, and their feminine wants supplied by their riches; but Helvia loved her sons for their own sakes, treated them with liberal generosity, but refused to reap any personal benefit from their wealth, managed their patrimonies with disinterested ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... for the dignified (leisurely) bearing and poly presence that are by vulgar tradition associated with opulence in mature men. These traits are in some measure accepted as elements of personal beauty. But there are certain elements of feminine beauty, on the other hand, which come in under this head, and which are of so concrete and specific a character as to admit of itemized appreciation. It is more or less a rule that in communities which are at the stage of economic development at which women are valued by the upper class for their ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... the upper regions and he called down airily: "Doors open, ladies. World renowned aggregation of feminine wearing apparel, including one pair of the very latest hoops and the youngest thing in ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... painters showing too many signs of femininity in their appreciation and the conception of art in painting. Art is neither male nor female. Nevertheless, it is pleasing to find women artists such as I wish to take up here, keeping to the charm of their own feminine perceptions and feminine powers of expression. It is their very femininity which makes them distinctive in these instances. This does not imply lady-like approach or womanly attitude of moral. It merely means that their quality ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... you," said she, with her hand upon the dog's grizzled head, and in that frank and simple statement there was more charm than in all the false feminine ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, as his intimate and confidential friend, had two terriers of the pepper-and-mustard breed, or rather, as we prefer him to any other character Sir Walter Scott has delighted us with, the Dandy Dinmont breed. These dogs (for we avoid the feminine appellation when we can) were strongly attached to their excellent master, and he to them. They were mother and daughter, and each produced a litter of puppies about the same time. Mr. Morritt was seriously ill at this period, and confined to his bed. Fond as these dogs were of their puppies, they ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... Bragkhidas}, i.e. the priests of the temple. The name of the place {Bragkhidai} is feminine, cp. ch. 92.] ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... coins, some specimens of weights and measures, some children's toys, a London directory, a bundle of newspapers, the photographs of the twelve most beautiful women of the period, a box of hairpins and other articles of feminine adornment, a razor, a parchment containing a translation of the hieroglyphics on the obelisk itself—the hieroglyphics that so puzzled Moses and me—and last, but not least, a text! Yes, a text; and ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... between the sexes. The differences may be due to physical organization, but the structural divergence is but a faint type of deeper separation in mental and spiritual constitution. That which makes the charm and power of woman, that for which she is created, is as distinctly feminine as that which makes the charm and power of men is masculine. Progress requires constant differentiation, and the line of this is the development of each sex in its special functions, each being true to the highest ideal for itself, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... were acts of virtue While one's friends urge moderation Who the "people" exactly were Whole revenue was pledged to pay the interest, on his debts Wish to sell us the bear-skin before they have killed the bear With something of feline and feminine duplicity Word peace in Spanish mouths simply meant the Holy Inquisition Words are always interpreted to the disadvantage of the weak World has rolled on to fresher fields of carnage and ruin Worn nor caused to be worn the collar of the serf ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley |
