"Girlhood" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ragged edges of their frayed fortunes. Then she would not be oppressed with the sense of shame, this weight of riches she shrank from using. She had murdered her own happiness; she had killed her own youth. Never again could she know the joyousness of light-hearted girlhood, while nothing the world might give her could atone for the terrible trespass which had broken the harmony of her moral nature by the perpetual sense of unatoned wrong-doing. How she wished she had never come to Castleford! True, her seeing Mr. Errington did not ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... had not fallen in love with her, for a more fascinating girl I never saw. She had only just returned from school at Compiegne, and was not yet out; her charming freshness was unsullied; she had all the simplicity and straightforwardness of unspoilt, unsophisticated girlhood. I well remember our first sight of her. We had been invited for a fortnight's yachting by Calverley of Exeter. His father, Sir John Calverley, had a sailing yacht, and some guests having disappointed him at the last minute, he gave his ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... armour of her imagination had given place to rough tweed suits and soft felt hats. And the children had looked at her, from out of the shadows, with wide, dark eyes—almost like real children. Her thoughts had shaped themselves about a figure that was not the romantic creation of girlhood—that was strong and willing and very tender. Dr. Blanchard—had he not been mistaken upon so many subjects—would have fitted ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... THE MODESTY AND DELICACY OF YOUR YOUTH.—The relations and familiarity of wedded life may seem to tone down the sensitive and retiring instincts of girlhood, but nothing can compensate for the loss of these. However, much men may admire the public performance of gifted women, they do not desire that boldness and dash in a wife. The holy blush of a maiden's modesty is more powerful in hallowing and governing a home than the heaviest ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... and though she could not smile now, could know how she would have smiled another time. Was that white king afloat upon the water still? A score of little memories of a like sort chased one another as her mind ran on, all through the childhood and girlhood of their subject. And now—it ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... never to quit that village—had it befallen me to remain for ever in that spot—I should always have been happy; but fate ordained that I should leave my birthplace even before my girlhood had come to an end. In short, I was only twelve years old when we removed to St. Petersburg. Ah! how it hurts me to recall the mournful gatherings before our departure, and to recall how bitterly I wept when ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... being kept for them, and the earl paying them impromptu and flying visits. Generous and benevolent she was, timid and sensitive to a degree, gentle, and considerate to all. Do not cavil at her being thus praised—admire and love her whilst you may, she is worthy of it now, in her innocent girlhood; the time will come when such praise would be misplaced. Could the fate that was to overtake his child have been foreseen by the earl, he would have struck her down to death, in his love, as she stood before him, rather than suffer her to ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... went through her heart, not for a lost love, but for the vanished dreams of girlhood. The chord he had hoped to touch remained mute. In view of the fact that she believed love to be dead between them, this method of stimulating an outworn romance seemed sentimental and insincere. Had he loved her, she might well have thought it boyish ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... Occasionally a friend called with a carriage and they took the charming seven-mile drive to the shore of Lake Ontario. Sunday mornings she listened to Mr. Gannett's philosophical sermons; and through the week there were quiet little teas with old friends whom she had known since girlhood, but had seen far too seldom in all the busy years. Instead of forever giving lectures she was able to hear them from others; and she could indulge to the fullest, on the big new desk, her love of letter-writing, while the immense work of the national association ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... unhappy King was wont to pace round this table for hours taking his daily exercise, leaning upon his hand, which in time ploughed a groove in its hard surface. The Amalienborg, a fine tessellated square, contains four Royal palaces, in one of which our Queen Alexandra spent her girlhood. From the windows of these palaces the daily spectacle of changing the guard is witnessed by the King ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson
... queens preferred the snug seclusion of those dainty rooms overlooking the dank inner courtyard to the frigid grandeur of their State chambers. Therein it was that Marie Leczinska was wont to instruct her young daughters in the virtues as she had known them in her girlhood's thread-bare home, not as her residence at the profligate French Court had taught her to ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... came home to her father at seventeen years of age, it would not have been easy to find a fresher, franker specimen of young girlhood. In fact, to her father's eyes she was ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... tastes and sympathies seemed to draw us closer together, and in the quietness of the store-room, amid the odour of the apples, her face flushed with all the spirit of her girlhood, and I understood her as if I had ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... girl Henry Carpenter made life almost unbearable for Belle, but as she emerged from girlhood into womanhood he lost his power over her. The bookkeeper's life was made up of innumerable little pettinesses. When he went to the bank in the morning he stepped into a closet and put on a black alpaca coat that had become shabby with age. At night when he returned to ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... Abbeway," he expounded, "as she might have been but for these queer, alternating crazes of hers—art and socialism. Her brain was developed a little too early, and she was unfortunately, almost in her girlhood, thrown in with a little clique of brilliant young Russians who attained a great influence over her. Most of them are in Siberia or have disappeared by now. One Anna Katinski—was brought back from Tobolsk like a royal princess on the first day of ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and her one son George there was a deep unexpressed bond of sympathy, based on a girlhood dream that had long ago died. In the son's presence she was timid and reserved, but sometimes while he hurried about town intent upon his duties as a reporter, she went into his room and closing the door knelt by a little desk, made ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... his daughter. She counted for nothing in his scheme of life, and there were periods when he seemed to be unconscious of her existence. She had been allowed to grow up with very little education or training. She had passed her childhood and girlhood in remote parts of England, without companions, and nobody to talk to except her mother and Thalassa, who accompanied the family everywhere. She loved her mother, but her love was embittered by her helplessness to mitigate ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... to strike her battling youth. She kept her virtue's gold, Fought hunger, fiend, and cold Unvanquished; when the might of Hell Rose in law's name and ours, she broken fell. O friend, when next you smooth the golden head Like nestled morning 'gainst your knee, Look farther,—see Fair girlhood dead. These lips, unvisited by love, were sweet As are thy fondling's; this want-hollowed cheek A little ease had made Playground of dimples, joy's rose-seat; And could these eyes ope they would speak Of one who bought her dreams of Death and paid. If blind thou shrinkest ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... light, exultant feeling in his middle-aged heart as he scampered along the deck. The girl had wonderful dark auburn hair and brown eyes, with a milk-white skin that sun and wind had sought in vain to blemish. And for all her girlhood she was a woman—bred from a race (his own people) to whom danger and despair merely furnished a tonic for their courage. What a mate for a man! And she ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... to the curb, I drew into the embrasure of the door as far as possible so as to avoid being seen by the cabman—as if it made the least difference whether he saw me or not; but such is the all-absorbing self-consciousness and vanity of girlhood. It was then that I noticed for the first time the glaring sign that had been staring at me during all these ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... by a different voice; she recognized it. It was the unmistakable drawl and nasal twang of Perley Wyman. Her girlhood memories of Perley's voice had been freshened very recently because he had been assigned to the Corson mansion by Thompson the florist as her chief aide in decorating for the reception. "Wal, I should say he was here—and then some! This was the ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... sat a woman, and your attention would have been directed to her at once if you could have been there. She was marvelously beautiful. She was very young—just at that interesting period between girlhood and womanhood, when ...
— Christmas Stories And Legends • Various
... upon this latter, but because it was by that standard of conduct chiefly, that she was enabled to judge of the minds of those who evinced so imperfect a knowledge of the female heart, when, emerging from the gaiety of girlhood, it passes into ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... now looked from one to the other, with the pleasant, genial expression of a person gifted with a natural liking for children, and the freemasonry requisite to bring him acquainted with them; and it lighted up his face with a pleasant surprise to see two such beautiful specimens of boyhood and girlhood in this dismal, spider-haunted house, and under the guardianship of such a savage lout as the grim Doctor. He seemed particularly struck by the intelligence and sensibility of Ned's face, and met his ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... stringency which Mrs. Merrithew was inclined to impute to a Providence, which, however prompt it had been in the repayment of the slight to the motherless infant, had somehow failed to protect her from its consequences. Savilla's girlhood had been devoted to nursing her father to his grave, to which he had gone down panting for release; after that she ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... first she fled from what was to her so dreadful. She crept away from the cave door near which the others sat enjoying the balmy midsummer afternoon, beckoning to one of her brothers to follow her, as the big fellow did unquestioningly, for Lightfoot had been, almost from young girlhood, the dominant force in the family, even the strong father, though it was contrary to the spirit of the time, admiring and yielding to his one daughter without much comment. The great, hulking youth, well armed and ready for any adventure, ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... at her in that thoughtful pause. How beautiful she was in her dark, glowing girlhood—how friendless, how desolate in ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... come at last to some sordid, petty end; but here sat the only one he had loved without question, without regret, purely and deeply, and as he watched her, more beautiful than she had been in her girlhood, it seemed, as he heard the fitful laughter of Joan outside, the old sorrow came storming up in him, and the ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... with money; she had money saved up, and she sent money to her parents: yet her wages, until late years, had been small. In doing her duty to others she did good to herself. A duchess would have been glad to have her in her household. She had been in farmhouse service from girlhood, and had doubtless learned much from good housewives; farmers' wives are the best of all teachers: and the girls, for their own sakes, had much better be under them than wasting so much time learning ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... daughter, Mr. Kendrick.... But it is Captain Kendrick, isn't it? Of course, I might have known. You look the sea—you know what I mean—I can always tell. My dear husband was a captain. You knew that, of course. And in the old days at my girlhood home so many, many captains used to come and go. Our old home—my girlhood home, I mean—was always open. I met my husband there.... Ah me, those days are not these days! What my dear father would have said if he could have known.... But we don't know what is in store for us, do we?... ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... to go on living in the same world with one who had taken her girlhood and her womanhood, afraid only of this frightful fever in her veins, of this ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... rarely carried forward into womanhood. The lips grow pinched and bloodless; the skin blanched against all proof of blushes; the eyes sunken, and the blithe sparkle that was so full of infectious joy is lost forever in that exhausting blaze of girlhood. But we make no prophecy in regard to the future of our little friend Rose. Adele thinks her very charming; Reuben is disposed to rank her—whatever Phil may think or say—far above Suke Boody. And in his reading of the delightful "Children of the Abbey," which he has stolen, (by favor of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... her social activities, she stopped to ask herself if she was really happy, if this nerve-racking existence of idleness and pleasure—with its bridge parties, its dinners, its opera and theatre-going—was the kind of life she had dreamed of in her girlhood days. Sometimes she felt a longing, a yearning for a more ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... though she had never left Riverboro in all the years that lay between, and had grown into the counterfeit presentment of her sister and of all other thin, spare, New England spinsters, it was something of a counterfeit, and underneath was still the faint echo of that wild heart-beat of her girlhood. Having learned the trick of beating and loving and suffering, the poor faithful heart persisted, although it lived on memories and carried on its sentimental operations ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Leslie had got letters from the Josselyns and Dakie Thayne. There was news in them such as thrills always the half-comprehending sympathies of girlhood. Leslie's vague suggestion of romance had become fulfilment. Dakie Thayne was wild with rejoicing that dear old Noll was to marry Sue. "She had always made him think of Noll, and his ways and likings, ever since that day of the game of chess that by his means came to grief. It was awful ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... enough for the body to be, so to speak, an average one, showing him at his fullest development and in the complete enjoyment of his physical powers. The men were always represented in their maturity, the women never lost the rounded breast and slight hips of their girlhood, but a dwarf always preserved his congenital ugliness, for his salvation in the other world demanded that it should be so. Had he been given normal stature, the double, accustomed to the deformity of his members in this world, would have been unable to accommodate himself to an upright carriage, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... camp-fires and how all men working or hiding or lost in the wilderness would see sweet faces in the embers and be haunted by soft voices. After all, Kells was human. And she talked as never before in her life, brightly, willingly, eloquently, telling the facts of her eventful youth and girlhood—the sorrow and the joy and some of the dreams—up to the time she ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... church-member since my girlhood, but was not satisfied that my belief would take me to heaven, as I did not have these "signs following"—and this had always troubled me; so, when I heard that an old acquaintance living at a distance had not only been raised from a dying condition to health, but her life had ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... rested, memories of a happy girlhood welled up in her soft and suffering breast. The geraniums in the window she had watered daily. The canary—she had fed it with groundsel. The brass skillets on the mantelshelf—they had been burnished ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... of March 1816, this was Lord Byron's story. He states that his wife had a truthfulness even from early girlhood that the most artful and unscrupulous governess could not pollute,—that she always panted for truth,—that flattery could not fool nor baseness blind her,—that though she was a genius and master of science, she was yet gentle ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... wearily at these enthusiasms. Nevertheless she could by now understand at least what Hen supposed she was talking about. It was as if the cataclysm in the May-time had chipped a peep-hole in the embracing sphere of her girlhood's round, and through this hole she began to discern ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... her old life again and her tears flowed unrestrained. Her pride was humbled, her spirit was broken. Her memory found but one resting place; it lingered about her young girlhood with a caressing regret; it dwelt upon it as the one brief interval of her life that bore no curse. She saw herself again in the budding grace of her twelve years, decked in her dainty pride of ribbons, consorting ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... as a young lady, fulfills the promise of her girlhood. The mutual attachment which existed between her and Robert, when boy and girl, still continues, and there is some ground for the report which comes from Millville—that they are engaged. The alliance will be in the highest degree pleasing ...
— Brave and Bold • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... apron, and held in her lap a little wooden box, with a brass ring on top for a handle. She was past sixty years of age and looked even older, but there was the same look on her face that it had sometimes worn in girlhood. She was the same Martha; her hands were old-looking and work-worn, but her face still shone. It seemed like yesterday that Helena Vernon had gone away, and it ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett
... Between the shadow of the mows, Looked on them through the great elm-boughs!— On sturdy boyhood, sun-embrowned, On girlhood with its solid curves Of healthful strength and painless nerves! And jests went round, and laughs that made The house-dog answer with his howl, And kept ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... did not know where to go or what to do. Her husband had bought her from her father, but he was dead; and as her girlhood home was far away, and she had not been there since her husband took her away, she knew nothing about any of her relatives. But even if she did, and could find some of them, it was very likely they would treat her with contempt, and perhaps persecute her. So ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... pursues in Cleveland the studies which have literally illumined the world. One of the earliest pioneers of science in geology and archaeology, Charles Whittlesey is identified with Cleveland, where the girlhood of the gifted novelist, Constance Fenimore Woolson, was passed. There, too, Charles F. Browne began to make his pseudonym of Artemus Ward known, and helped found the school of American humor. He was born in Maine; but his fun tastes of the West ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... looking at him as if she were doubting her senses. Things she had heard in her girlhood, things that floated about in the dark corners of her memory, were pressing close. Dreadful things that had been forced upon her against her will but which she reasoned could never happen to her, or to any of ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... to the vestry, they passed a woman walking briskly along in the snowy track. She was carrying her singing-books under one arm, and holding her head high with that proud lift which had seemed, more than anything else, to keep alive her girlhood's charm. ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... Lizzie Dangler's prosy platitudes, which some deemed wit—Horner, par exemple—sank into nothingness, and Baby Blake, one of the "gushing" order of girlhood, appeared as a stick, or, rather, a too pliant sapling—her inane "yes's" and lisping "no's" having an opportunity of being "weighed in the balance," and consequently, in my opinion, "found wanting." All were mediocre beside her. Perhaps I was prejudiced; but, now, the remarks of the other girls ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... driving—unless, of course, they went to call on friends.' Then tea was brought in; and, apropos of a casual reference to conventual buttered toast, the five girls talked, until nearly six o'clock, of their girlhood—of things that would never have any further influence in their lives, of happiness they would never experience again. At last Alice and Cecilia pleaded that they must be ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... secrets of feminine influence. Women seldom fail to rise to the occasion when opportunity is vouchsafed them. The late Maharani Surnomoyi of Cossimbazar managed her enormous estates with acumen; and her charities were as lavish as Lady Burdett-Coutts's. Toru Dutt, who died in girlhood, wrote French and English verses full of haunting sweetness. It is a little premature for extremists to prate of autonomy while their women are ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... of Hon. John P. Kennedy. Another daughter, who lived in New York, and who is supposed to be dead, paid a visit in 1878 to the old homestead, and sat beneath the shadow of the Columbus monument. She stated that the shaft has stood in her early girlhood as it stands now. It was often visited by noted Italians and Frenchmen, who seemed to have heard of the existence of the monument in Europe. She repeated the story of the wealthy Frenchman, and told of some of his eccentricities, and said he had put up the monument ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... woke up the next morning in the chamber where her girlhood had passed. The birds of spring were singing under her windows in the old ancestral gardens. As she recognized these friendly voices, so familiar to her infancy, her heart melted; but several hours' sleep had restored to her her natural courage. She banished ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... extremely, and taking in so little of it that it has appeared to them since as not one of the least of Dickens's glories that he could write a book about the scum of London which children may read and re-read well into their young girlhood without receiving even the shadow of an impression of any evil beyond pocket-picking and house-breaking and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... leopards withdraw when abashed. One could not picture Jane Hubbard flirting lightly at garden parties, but one could picture her very readily arguing with a mutinous native bearer, or with a firm touch putting sweetness and light into the soul of a refractory mule. Boadicea in her girlhood must have been rather like ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... apparently been peaceful, but it is unlikely that Mary Milton can have been a companion to her husband, or sympathized with such fraction of his mind as it was given her to understand. She must have become considerably emancipated from the creeds of her girlhood if his later writings could have been anything but detestable to her; and, on the whole, much as one pities her probably wasted life, her disappearance from the scene, if tragic in her ignorance to the last of the destiny that might have been ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... She had heard in the village he was killed, and she is all a-quiver now, as he can see, with excitement and suppressed feeling at his resurrection. Yes, this is Mr. Abbot, he tells her, and he is going straight to Washington that he may find them. And she shows him pictures of Bessie in her girlhood, Bessie at school, Bessie in the bonnie dress she wore at the Soldiers' Fair. Yes, he remembers having seen that very group before, at Edwards's Ferry, before Ball's Bluff. She prattles about Bessie, and of Bessie's going for his letters, and how she cried over them. ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... mother. It seemed only a few short years since he had promised her that he would take care of the baby sister. How had he kept that promise made when Betty was a little thing bouncing on his knee? It seemed only yesterday. How swift the flight of time! Already Betty was a woman; her sweet, gay girlhood had passed; already a shadow had fallen on her face, the ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... with a little basket full of flower-seeds, was going with the gardener from bed to bed, watching him plant them. No one who had seen her in the childlike loveliness of her early girlhood could have imagined the splendour of her matured beauty. She had grown "divinely tall," and the exercise of undisputed authority had added a gracious stateliness of manner. Her complexion was wonderful, ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... in her old fluty voice and little grand manner, with the old slow, faintly whimsical smile on her lips and in her eyes. It came over McKeith that he had not of late been familiar with this aspect of her, and that she was exhibiting to this man the same strange charm of her girlhood which had been to him, in the full fervour of his devotion, so wonderful and worshipful, but of which—he knew it now—the Bush had to a great extent ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... at this point, and pointed out to them a vigorous young man striding by in ulster and soft hat, who looked up and waved as he passed, showing one of those fine and manly young faces, glowing with health and hopefulness, which always challenge interest from girlhood. ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... opportunities were fine and unusual, but she also knew that in spite of some facility and much good teaching she had no genuine talent and never would fulfill the expectations of her friends. She looked back upon her mother's girlhood with positive envy because it was so full of happy industry and extenuating obstacles, with undisturbed opportunity to believe that her talents were unusual. The girl looked wistfully at her mother, ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... reddening rose in bud, Its calyx half withdrawn,— Her cheek on fire with damasked blood Of girlhood's glowing dawn! ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... it at last, helped by that Rosalind-like quality in herself. She was young, as he had wanted Elise to be, clean-hearted, joyous—girlhood at its best. ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... behalf of this class of unfortunate people he was essentially aided by Abby H. Gibbons, who resided nearer to him than his other daughters, and who had the same affectionate zeal to sustain him, that she had manifested by secretly slipping a portion of her earnings into his pocket, in the days of her girlhood. She was as vigilant and active in behalf of the women discharged from prison, as her father was in behalf of the men. Through the exertions of herself and other benevolent women, an asylum for these poor outcasts, ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... a bigger girl every day," says the old grandmother to Fanchon, "and every day I get smaller; I scarcely need now to stoop at all to touch your forehead. What matters my great age when I can see the roses of my girlhood blooming again in ...
— Child Life In Town And Country - 1909 • Anatole France
... had spoilt her figure, and that it was which spoilt his work. She listened, and staggered in her very grief. Those sittings, from which she had already suffered so much, were becoming unbearable torture now. What was this new freak of crushing her with her own girlhood, of fanning her jealousy by filling her with regret for vanished beauty? She was becoming her own rival, she could no longer look at that old picture of herself without being stung at the heart by hateful envy. Ah, how heavily had that picture, that study ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... world is so changed since our girlhood!" rejoined the other: "young people have such old heads now. But to return, Monsieur. Madame Pelet will mention the subject of your giving lessons in my daughter's establishment to her son, and he will speak to you; and then to-morrow, you will step over to our house, and ask to see my daughter, ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... you will have of its liberty!" returned the cousin sarcastically. "After having passed a girlhood of wholesome restraint in the rational society of Europe, you are about to return home to the slavery of American female life, just as you are about ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... nothing much to talk about but themselves, and, while she received a liberal education concerning Arctic travel and gold-mining, he, in turn, touch by touch, painted an ever clearer portrait of her. She amplified the ranch life of her girlhood, prattling on about horses and dogs and persons and things until it was as if he saw the whole process of her growth and her becoming. All this he was able to trace on through the period of her father's failure and death, when she had been compelled to leave the university and go into office ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... certain church, in the city of New York which I have always regarded with peculiar interest on account of a marriage there solemnized under very singular circumstances in my grandmother's girlhood. That venerable lady chanced to be a spectator of the scene, and ever after made it her favorite narrative. Whether the edifice now standing on the same site be the identical one to which she referred I am ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... wrecked and whose mind automatically closed itself against everything associated with her tragedy, or subsequent to it. In her madness she, too, protected herself against pain by living in expectation of the lover's return. Because that expectation was restricted to her girlhood, she remained a girl in appearance for over fifty years. Fifty years, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Wyndfell Hall," he had gone on, "for she spent a very lonely, dull girlhood there. But it's a delightful place, and I hope to live there as soon as I can get the people out to whom it is now let. 'Twon't be an easy job, for they're devoted ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... in the advantages which the royal couple sought. It was in the Isle of Wight, which her Majesty had loved in her girlhood, with the girdle of sea that gave such assurance of the much-courted, much-needed seclusion, as could hardly be procured elsewhere— certainly not within a reasonable distance of London. It was a lovely place by nature, with no end of capabilities for the practice of the Prince's pleasant faculty ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... Canadian, his native parish being St. Sulpice, in the Island of Montreal, where he was born in the year 1827. On the mother's side he is said to draw his descent from the daughter of a habitant on the St. Lawrence River called Duhamel, who was stolen in girlhood by the Ojibway Indians, and subsequently taken to wife by their chief, to whom she bore two sons. By mere accident, her uncle, who was one of a North-West Company trading party on Lake Huron, met her at an Indian camp on one of the Manitoulin islands, ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... their New York City residence in 1777, had sprung in part from a powerful longing for the country and in part from a dream which had reawakened strongly her love for the old house of her birth and of most of her girlhood. The peril of her resolve only increased her determination to carry it out. Her parents, brothers, and sisters stood aghast at the project, and refused in any way to countenance it. But there was no other ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... sexual thoughts may bring to the neural life, especially of the unbalanced, is tremendous. Broken health and a distorted view of the social world with an unsound, unclean, and ultimately immoral emphasis on the sexual relations may thus be the sad result for millions of girls, whose girlhood under the policy of the past would have remained untainted by the sordid ideas ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... that the Puritan woman imbibed from girlhood to old age went further than this; it taught the theory of a personal devil. To the New England colonists Satan was a very real individual capable of taking to himself a physical form with the proverbial tail, horns, and hoofs. ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... ear that Hammet and Judith wanted worsted socks. When he was listening in fancy to the "sea-maid's song," and weaving thoughts to which a world still stands reverentially to listen, she was buzzing behind him, and bidding him go card the wool, and weeping that, in her girlhood, she had not chosen some rich glover or ale-taster, instead of idle, useless, wayward Willie Shakespeare. Poor fellow! He did not write, I would swear, without fellow-feeling, and yearning over souls ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... The third number of Mrs. Clarke's interesting series of tales, entitled, The Girlhood of Shakspeare's Heroines. {127} Every-day Wonders, or Facts in Physiology which all should know: a very successful endeavour to present a few of the truths of that science which treats of the structure of the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 68, February 15, 1851 • Various
... Virginia wept no more, but her face settled into an expression of stern sadness. It seemed as if her girlhood had died out of her, and that she was about to begin the same struggle with work and worry which had marked the lives of all the women she had known in ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... Ville Marie! Spread wide thine ample robes of state; The heralds cry that thou art great, And proud are thy young sons of thee. Mistress of half a continent, Thou risest from thy girlhood's rest; We see thee conscious heave thy breast And feel ...
— Thoughts, Moods and Ideals: Crimes of Leisure • W.D. Lighthall
... saw the day with jaundiced eyes, scorned herself, cried "Liver!" and took medicine. She was glued to her books all day, returned late to her lodging, and found herself in tears. She discovered a tenderness, a yearning; she lay awake dreaming of her childhood, of her girlhood, of Vicky, of her father's knee, of Senhouse, her dear, preposterous friend, whose grey eyes quizzed while they loved her. Golden days with him—golden nights when she dreamed over his eager, profuse, interminable letters! All these sweet, seemly things were dead! Ah, no, not ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... healthful there can be no attraction in great towns that may not be dwarfed by the great pulsing of the lands sought by the lovers of rod and gun. Here she had gathered new ideas and unwonted thoughts. She is the best example I have ever seen of the sturdy, beautiful girlhood of modern life, and is an utter pleasure ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... against the window-frame and sent her wearier thoughts upward to the stars; there were the points of light that the Chaldeans watched upon their plains by night, and named with mystic syllables of their weird Oriental tongue,—names that in her girlhood she had delighted to learn, charmed by that nameless spell that language holds, wherewith it plants itself ineradicably in the human mind, and binds it with fetters of vague association that time and chance ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... hair, and she tore at it so savagely that at last her silky, black tresses clung to her white temples in big, smooth waves. Then she twisted the plaits in a huge coil at the nape of her neck; that was the way she had worn her hair in her girlhood, ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig
... remains of dolls. But a doll is seldom given to Kojin during the lifetime of its possessor. When you see one thus exposed, you may be almost certain that it was found among the effects of some poor dead woman—the innocent memento of her girlhood, perhaps even also of the girlhood of her mother and ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... very girlhood, had a thirst for adventure, and her aim was high. When fourteen, she married Domitius, a Roman noble, thirty years her senior. He was as worthless a rogue as ever wore out his physical capacity for sin in middle life, and filled his dying ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... They were great pals, these two; had been since they met in Portland, five years ago. He was on his way to Stanford, and had seen her doing a singing and dancing act in a wretched vaudeville company. That vision of a girlhood, beset and embattled, the pitifulness of its acquired hardness, had called to his western chivalry and made him her champion. Ever since he had helped and encouraged, his belief and friendship a spur to the ruthless energy, the driving ambition, that had ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... him with such force that she stumbled and fell full length on the ground, where she lay, a bewildered heap of indignant girlhood. ...
— Nan Sherwood at Palm Beach - Or Strange Adventures Among The Orange Groves • Annie Roe Carr
... dining room, and Virginia paused a moment to look at her. Something about Leigh made most people want more than a glance. Tonight, as she stood in the doorway, Virginia could think of nothing but the pink roses that grew in the rose garden of the old Thaine mansion house of her girlhood. A vision swept across her memory of Asher Aydelot—just Thaine's age then—of a moonlit night, sweet with the odor of many blossoms, and the tinkling waters of the fountain in the rose garden, and herself a ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... I ask you to think of her, I ask you to put self out of your thoughts, to forget your own interests for once, and to think of my mother, waiting in the old home in the quiet village street where you knew her in her bright girlhood. Remember that she awaits your answer; forget me if you will, but remember what it means to her, I say, and then if there is a stone in your breast, instead of a human heart, ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... Jerome, who had seen his sister every day of his life, looked at her as if for the first time, and she looked in the same way at him. Elmira's Aunt Belinda Lamb had given her, some time before, a white muslin gown of her girlhood. ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... table at last, side by side, and ate the delightful lunch. Under the influence of the bottle of claret, from The Gaffs cellar, her courage came and her animation was beautiful to him—something that seemed more of girlhood than womanhood. He drank it all in—hungry—heart-hungry for comfort and love; and she saw ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... with responsibilities to the community? It's time that you were married, settled down and took your proper place in New York. I had hoped that you would have matured and forgotten the childish pastimes of your girlhood ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... his revenge, tasting it, finding it sweet to savor. "To-night I will deliver into your care a young girl, proud of her purity, strong in her simple innocence. It shall be your task to make her into a courtesan like yourself, shaming and staining the flower of her girlhood into a flaming rose of ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Cassandra?-Bethink thee with what mirth Thy happy schoolmates gather around the warm bright hearth; How the crimson shadows tremble on foreheads white and fair, On eyes of merry girlhood, half hid ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... a very lovely little picture. It is not a study of costume, but a picture of dreamy girlhood musing in a wood. The sentiment of this charming little picture is best described in a little poem with which its first appearance was accompanied, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... talents of her mother. The productions of her pen and pencil seem to justify this assertion, so far as the precocity of such a mere child may warrant the ungarnered fruits of future years. But with her parent's person she received the frailties of its constitution; and, ere girlhood had fairly opened upon her way of life, she succumbed to the same malady that had wrecked ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... my heart. That she had told me the truth I could no longer doubt for one moment: it was impossible for her crystal nature to be anything but truthful. The number of her years mattered nothing to me; the virgin sweetness of girlhood was on her lips, the freshness and glory of early youth on her forehead; the misery was that she had lived thirty-one years in the world and did not understand the words I had spoken to her—did not know what love, ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... had certainly not run so fast since her girlhood as she did with Anna towards the spot in the field where they had last seen Letty. A crowd had gathered round it, they could see, an excited, gesticulating crowd. But they found her apparently unhurt, sitting on the ground, surrounded by sympathisers, and ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... girlhood hours as I have passed here! After all there is nothing like the home feeling, is there, for us women at any rate! We're the natural conservatives, who cling to the simple, elemental satisfactions, and there's a heart-hunger that can only be satisfied by a ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... the village she went, across the tracks, and up to the river road. It had been a favourite walk of hers in her girlhood. Then she had gone with a quick, light step; now she went slowly, ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... was a washerwoman-widow, in whom Honoria Fraser had interested herself in her Harley Street girlhood. Bertie was the eldest of six, and his father had been a coal porter who broke his back tumbling down a cellar when a little "on." Bertie—he now figured as Mr. Albert Adams in the cricket lists—was a well-grown youth, rather blunt-featured, but with honest hazel eyes, fresh-coloured, shock-haired. ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... father's step, her father's way of breathing, the rustle of his newspaper as he hastily turned it over, coming through the lapse of years; the silence of the night. She knew that she had the little writing-case of her girlhood with her, in her box. The treasures of the dead that it contained, the morsel of dainty sewing, the little sister's golden curl, the half-finished letter to Mr. Corbet, were all there. She took them out, and looked at each separately; looked ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... when she got out of bed and stood on her feet. She had not had a maid in her girlhood so she could dress herself, much as she detested to do it. After she had begun however she could not help becoming rather interested because the dress she had worn the day before had become crushed and she put on a fresh one she had not ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... exhilarating sunshine and the sting of gentle, wide-swept breezes, the pleasure of swift motion and the ring of that exultingly boyish voice beside her, combined to call the youth in her to rejoice. Firm in the saddle she rode, as graceful a picture of piquant girlhood as could be conceived, thrilling to the silent voices of the desert. They traveled in a sunlit sea of space, under a sky of blue, in which tenuous cloud lakes floated. Once they came on a small bunch of hill cattle which went flying like ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... sir, I'd rather be the little girl. I"—with a pathetic tremble in her voice, "I'm barely twenty yet, and I've never had much of a girlhood." ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... politeness frowns on too abrupt a departure from a lady, particularly one whom we have companioned thus distantly from the careless simplicity of girlhood to the equally careless but complex businesses of adolescence. The world is all before her, and her chronicler may not be her guide. She will have adventures, for everybody has. She will win through with them, for everybody does. She may even meet bolder and badder men than the policeman—Shall ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... in the girlhood of this delightful heroine that carry Rebecca through various stages to her ...
— Tom Swift and his Wizard Camera - or, Thrilling Adventures while taking Moving Pictures • Victor Appleton
... without justification. Lois's prosperity was, however, deeply mystifying. It flashed upon him suddenly that he did not in the least know this Lois of whom Phil had been speaking: she was certainly not the young woman, scarcely out of her girlhood, who had so shamelessly abandoned him. And over this thought stumbled another: he had never known her! As he reflected, his eyes roamed to a large calendar on the wall over Phil's head. This was the 12th of April, his wedding-day. The date interested him only ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... Her face was turned towards me. She wore a low-cut black chiffon evening dress—the thing had mere straps over the shoulders—an all but discarded vanity of pre-war days. I had never before noticed what beautiful arms she had. Perhaps in her girlhood, when I had often seen her in such exiguous finery, they had not been so shapely. I have told you already of the softening touch of her womanhood. An exquisite curve from arm to neck faded into the shadow ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... house a flowery fane, A bridal bower, a pearly pleasure-dome, They built, and furnished it with gold and grain, And bade all spirits of beauty hither come, And winged Love to enter with his train And bless their pillow, and in this his home Make them his priests as Hero was of yore In her sweet girlhood by the blue ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... week, a month, or six months, and they were suited with corresponding doses. The vendors were chiefly women, of whom the most celebrated was a hag named Tophania, who was in this way accessory to the death of upwards of six hundred persons. This woman appears to have been a dealer in poisons from her girlhood, and resided first at Palermo and then at Naples. That entertaining traveller, Father Lebat, has given, in his letters from Italy, many curious particulars relating to her. When he was at Civita Vecchia, in 1719, the Viceroy of Naples discovered that poison was extensively sold in the latter ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... to laugh merrily; and her musical voice once used to mingle with Rupert's and my own more manly and deeper notes, in something like audible mirth; not that Lucy was ever boisterous or loud; but, in early girlhood, she had been gay and animated, to a degree that often blended with the noisier clamour of us boys. With Grace, this had never happened. She seldom spoke, except in moments when the rest were still; and her ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... commonplace. I can tell it you in a few sentences. I married when I was seventeen at my father's command, to save him from ruin. My husband, like my father, was a city merchant. I did not love him, but then I did not know what love was. My girlhood was a miserable one. My father belonged to the sect of Calvinists. Our home was hideous, and we were poor. Any release from it was welcome. John Drage, the man whom I married, had one good quality. He was generous. He bought me pictures, ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... lights on the soft clouds that float tranquilly into the white moonlight, out of the warm gloom which lies motionless around the horizon. Margaret's room had been the day nursery of her childhood, just when it merged into girlhood, and when the feelings and conscience had been first awakened into full activity. On some such night as this she remembered promising to herself to live as brave and noble a life as any heroine she ever read or heard of in romance, a life sans peur et sans reproche; it had ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... fruit too often has a bitter taste, or ere we can grasp it is turned to dust and ashes. Bryda's longings were to be satisfied, but not as she had imagined. The way was to be made plain for her departure from Bishop's Farm; the home of her childhood and early girlhood was to ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... the last time looked at the home of her girlhood, over which the St. Petersburg twilight was descending. Defying the commands of her mother, the traditions of her family, she had decided to elope with the man of her choice. With a last word of farewell to her maid, she wrapped her cloak round her and disappeared into ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... government. His ability and fidelity were soon recognized. He was promoted rapidly, and finally reached the highest office in the gift of the Mogul—that of prime minister of the empire—which he filled with conspicuous ability, wisdom and prudence for many years. As his daughter grew to girlhood she attracted the attention of Prince Jehanghir, who became violently in love with her, and, to prevent complications, the emperor caused her to be married to Shir Afghan Kahn, a young Persian of excellent family, who was made viceroy of Bengal, and took his wife ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... to dinner, he soon managed to introduce her name, and found those about him very willing to talk of her. It seemed so natural in that house. John recalled some of the anecdotes of her joyous girlhood for Dorothea's benefit; they laughed over them together. They all talked a good deal that evening of Emily, but this made no difference to John's intention; it ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... intimate communion with his fine intellect; she had felt her own weaknesses grow less, as if she had absorbed some of his strength of character; and she had recognised the very dawn of principles and opinions which had been unknown to her in the days of her thoughtless, ignorant, inexperienced girlhood. And yet with all her love, with all her matured intelligence, she had never lost a certain awe of her husband, which his seniority had perhaps first implanted, and alas! one fatal circumstance had gone far to ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... as Roderick St. Jean—he dropped the 'de Roche' in time—that he returned here in 1830. His wife was dead, worn out while yet in her youth by the horrors of her girlhood. But Roderick brought with him a ten-year-old boy who had the right to both the name of Ralestone and that of ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... early girlhood she had been married to an elderly and jealous soldier. Her false position in the midst of a gay Court had doubtless done something to bring a veil of sadness over a face that must once have been bright with the charms of quick-pulsed life and love. She had been compelled ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... more than most girls of the shabby side of life, of the perpetual tendency of want to cramp the noblest attitude. Poverty and misfortune had overhung her childhood and she had none of the pretty delusions about life that are supposed to be the crowning grace of girlhood. This very competence, which gave her a touching reasonableness, made Glennard's situation more difficult than if he had aspired to a princess bred in the purple. Between them they asked so little—they knew so well how to make that little do—but they understood also, and she especially did not ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... revelation were fraught with fate. Grief, shame, remorse, and passionate regret for the lost love and squandered happiness that might have been hers, were all revealed in the thrilling, pathetic, deprecating gaze with which she once more met the eyes of her girlhood's young worshiper, her worshiper ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... half-past four o'clock in the morning, Mrs. Browning died. A great invalid from girlhood, owing to an unfortunate accident, Mrs. Browning's life was a prolonged combat with disease thereby engendered; and had not God given her extraordinary vitality of spirit, the frail body could never have borne up against the suffering to which it was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... the second of seven children. Of her infancy and girlhood little is known. Her own earliest recollections were associated with the name of Calabar. Mrs. Slessor was a member of Belmont Street United Presbyterian Church, and was deeply interested in the adventure going forward in that foreign ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... as to some extent it has led in my Russian correspondent, to an abnormal feeling of the sexual attraction of girls who have only or scarcely reached the age of puberty. The sexual charm of this period of girlhood is well illustrated in many of the poems of Thomas Ashe, and it is worthy of note, as perhaps supporting the contention that this attraction is based on Christian feeling, that Ashe had been a clergyman. An attentiveness ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... hummed with preparations for the following day; but in the twilight Anne slipped away. She had a little pilgrimage to make on this last day of her girlhood and she must make it alone. She went to Matthew's grave, in the little poplar-shaded Avonlea graveyard, and there kept a silent tryst with old ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery |
