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More "Middle-aged" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Ripley—Miss Rebecca and Miss Caroline, or Carry, as she was invariably called. They were among the oldest summer residents, for their father had been among the first to recognize the attractions of The Beaches, and their childhood had been passed there. Now they were middle-aged women and their father was dead; but they continued to occupy season after season their cottage, the location of which was one of the most picturesque on the whole shore. The estate commanded a wide ocean view and included some charming woods ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... middle-aged painter, Charles Godin, with his model Georgette Belli, aged 16, has led to a remarkable charge of murder. Georgette became a mother, and when the painter died a few months later he ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... Paradise now came up to me again, followed by a square man, middle-aged, and hum-drum, who, I found was Lord Say and Sele, afterwards from the Kirwans, for though they introduced him to me, I was so confounded by their vehemence and their manners, that I ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... I am a middle-aged woman, and conscious that I may use my privileges as such. But he has become quite an old man,—not in health so much as in manner. But he will be very glad to see you." So saying she led him into ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... the fact is, I am past the age when men ought to be subjected to the hardships and discomforts of the sea. Seagoing is one of those constant strifes which none but the vigorous, the hardy, and the hopeful—in short, the youthful, or at most, the middle-aged—should be engaged in. The very roar of the wind through the rigging, with its accompaniments of rolling and tumbling, hard, overcast skies, gives me the blues. This is a double anniversary with me. It was on the 8th of September that I received ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... help laughing a little to myself as I went out of the room to tell Patience to bring in the tea, and yet that sentence of Uncle Keith touched me somehow. Were middle-aged people capable of that sort of love? Did youth linger so long in them? I had imagined those two such a staid, matter-of-fact couple; they had come together so late in life, that one never dreamt of any possible romance ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 354, October 9, 1886 • Various
... hotel the same afternoon, met Mrs. Engel in the hall; her formal bow, in which frosty disapproval of the sin, and a widow's tenderness for the middle-aged sinner, if repentant, were discreetly mingled, amused if it scarcely flattered him. He was still smiling at his recollection of the interview when the Swiss porter, accosting him in elaborately bad English, informed him that a lady and gentleman, who had left ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... a very decent, but rather elaborate diddle, of which our own city was made the theatre, not very long ago, and which was subsequently repeated with success, in other still more verdant localities of the Union. A middle-aged gentleman arrives in town from parts unknown. He is remarkably precise, cautious, staid, and deliberate in his demeanor. His dress is scrupulously neat, but plain, unostentatious. He wears a white cravat, an ample ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the front door, and a middle-aged man entered, accompanying and partly shoving forward a more diffident and younger one. Neither appeared to be a sailor, although both were dressed in that dingy respectability and remoteness of fashion affected by second and third ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... "No—only middle-aged." This morning, after her master had left the house, she actually asked me what I thought of my brother-in-law! I told her, as coldly as possible, that I thought he was very kind. She was quite insensible ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... a man and woman, young and middle-aged, who is not satisfied with himself—he wants to go on farther, he wants to learn more. But his daily work won't allow him to complete his education because of the inconvenient hours of the classes and lectures ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... wife. When I reached the top of the stairs, I took off my shoes, and entered a small, comfortable room, the walls of which consisted almost entirely of windows. The viceroy's wife, who was only fifteen years of age, sat upon a plain easy chair, not far from her stood a middle-aged woman, the duenna of the harem, and an easy chair was placed for me ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... Parkman, Curtis, Norton, James, Eliot,—all teachers in various ways. Through their lectures, books, and speeches, they influenced college students at an impressible age; they appealed to young and to middle-aged men; and they furnished comfort and entertainment for the old. It would have been difficult to find anywhere in the country an educated man whose thought was not affected by some one of these seven; and their influence on editorial writers ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... left were taken by Mrs. de Vaux and Colonel Stryker: the lady, a middle-aged woman, fashionably dressed; the gentleman, rather more than middle-aged in his appearance, and decidedly less so ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... Middle-aged men tell interminable stories about money or smart strokes of business; youngsters wink and look unspeakably wise as they talk on the subject of the spring handicaps; wild spirits tell of their experiences at a glove-fight in some ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... a very ordinary and commonplace life until he was a middle-aged man, and then something remarkable happened to him. It happened on the twenty-fifth of January, in a very cold winter. Jules was forty-five years old, that year, and he remembered the day of the month, because in the morning, before he started out to his work, he ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... her shoulders, coming nearer for a closer inspection of the big lumbering stage. It had been new, when the present proprietor of the hotel, then a young man, now a middle-aged one, had come into his inheritance. Fresh back from a winter in town, he had indulged high hopes of booming his sleepy little village as a summer resort, and had ordered the stage—since christened the Folly—for the convenience and enjoyment of the guests—who had never come. A long ...
— The S. W. F. Club • Caroline E. Jacobs
... inside, however, a hoarse, continuous noise was issuing, which resolved itself as we crossed the threshold into a man's voice. The speaker was out of sight, in an upper room to which a ladder gave access, but his oaths, complaints, and imprecations almost shook the house. A middle-aged woman, scantily dressed, was busy on the hearth; but perhaps that which, next to the perpetual scolding that was going on above, most took my attention was a great lump of salt that stood on the table at the woman's elbow, and seemed to be evidence ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... once to the post-office, where he went in, leaving me outside to watch the rather meagre stream of goers and comers who at that time of day make the post-office of a country town their place of rendezvous. Among these, for some reason, I especially noted one middle-aged woman; why, I cannot say; her appearance was anything but remarkable. And yet when she came out, with two letters in her hand, one in a large and one in might be induced to give a bed to a friend of mine who ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... hour in the day, a tall, handsome, distinguished, middle-aged man, wearing for the occasion the uniform of a colonel in the Imperial Guard, a blood-stained, tarnished, battered, battle-worn uniform, be it observed, comes into the room. He is more often than not attended ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... to her middle-aged repose, I sat up and went through imaginary scenes, and reviewed the situation a hundred times, and tried to convince myself of what I wanted to believe, and ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris
... have held the place; but Charlock House no longer stood for what it had used to stand in the days of Sir Hugh Channice's forbears. Mrs. Grey, of Pangley Hall, had never held any but the first place and a consciousness of this fact seemed to radiate from her competent personality. She was a vast middle-aged woman clad in tweed and leather, but her abundance of firm, hard flesh could lend itself to the roughest exigences of a sporting outdoor life. Her broad face shone like a ripe apple, and her sharp eyes, her tight ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... was sufficiently superstitious to lend a half belief to the idea that the place was haunted, and that was his reason for haste. The electrician was only sorry that so much time had been purely wasted; that was his reason. He was a middle-aged man, spare, quick, and impatient, but he looked at Alec Trenholme in the light of the engine lamp, when they came up to it, with some ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... whose distress seemed to receive a sudden calm from the sympathy the young princes betrayed, the Hakim led the way to another part of the town, where he entered a house of rather better description, in a small room of which they found a pale, middle-aged man, who was engaged in making a coarse sort of netting for trees. Hearing the noise of the entrance, he looked up, and asked who it was, but with no change of countenance, or apparent recognition of anyone there. But as soon as the Hakim had ...
— Aunt Judy's Tales • Mrs Alfred Gatty
... indeed, to be more nervous after the crisis had passed than they were before it arose, although their alarms did not greatly affect the incurable sang-froid of the British public; and the way in which the middle-aged shouldered the unnecessary burdens imposed upon them by the improvidence of their Government, was as exemplary as the eagerness with which youth had volunteered early in the war. Their acceptance of the new obligations had its value in stimulating America to dispatch her hundreds ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... dear Miss Matty, independently of the conjuror, and most particularly anxious to prevent her from disfiguring her small, gentle, mousey face with a great Saracen's head turban; and accordingly, I bought her a pretty, neat, middle-aged cap, which, however, was rather a disappointment to her when, on my arrival, she followed me into my bedroom, ostensibly to poke the fire, but in reality, I do believe, to see if the sea-green turban was not inside the cap-box with which I had travelled. It was in vain that I twirled the cap ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... The old were middle-aged, the elderly were in their prime, then, thirty years since, when yon royal George was still fighting the dragon. As for you, my pretty lass, with your saucy hat and golden tresses tumbled in your ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... curtain, and we entered a small room, simply furnished with a couple of tables, a bookcase, one or two easy-chairs, and a divan. The walls were dark, and the color of the curtains and carpet was a dark green, but two large lamps illuminated every corner of the apartment. At one of the tables a middle-aged woman sat reading; as we entered she looked up at us, and I saw that she was one of the nurses in charge of Madame Patoff. She wore a simple gown of dark material, and upon her head a dainty cap of ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... wives and daughters of saddlers or farmers, perhaps—have more often the patrician look than English duchesses. Now there, for example," warming to the subject, "that woman to whom you bowed just now, the middle-aged one in blue cloth. Some Mrs. Smith or Pratt, probably. A homely woman, but there is a distinction in her face, a certain surety of good breeding, which is lacking in the ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis
... contained an appetising title. As it was a sunny and warm day she walked to New Oxford Street from the nearest Metropolitan station. Whilst waiting at the library counter, she heard a familiar voice in her proximity; it was that of Jasper Milvain, who stood talking with a middle-aged lady. As Amy turned to look at him his eye met hers; clearly he had been aware of her. The review she desired was handed to her; she moved aside, and turned over the pages. ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... defaulter they have a friendly feeling, unless, of course, he turns savage in his cups. As long as he is cheerful he is rather a figure of fun to them than anything, or he is an object of wondering interest. On a certain August Bank Holiday I saw one of our villagers staggering up the hill—a middle-aged man, far gone in drink, so that all the road was none too wide for him. Other wayfarers accompanied and observed him with a philosophically detached air, and between whiles a woman grabbed at his coat between the ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... tucked themselves in a corner from which through a hole where the tiles had fallen off the roof, they could see down into the barnyard, where white and speckled chickens pecked about with jerky movements. A middle-aged woman stood in the doorway of the house looking suspiciously at the files of khaki-clad soldiers that shuffled slowly into the ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... seen Mrs. Pinkerton appear to so good advantage as she did on this occasion. Her natural good manners and her intelligence made her attractive in such a company, and she was the centre of a bright group of middle-aged Brahmins throughout the entire evening. Mr. Desmond appeared grateful for the assistance she rendered in making his party pass off pleasantly, and as for me, I began to feel that I had never quite appreciated her best qualities. ...
— That Mother-in-Law of Mine • Anonymous
... the man who belongs to no particular nation, speaks every language, and knows every body—a shabby-genteel, middle-aged man, of no ostensible occupation, but always occupied. "Sare," said he, "I perceive you are an Englishman. I always very glad am to meet with Englishmen. I two years spent in London." "Indeed!" said I; "you speak English very well, considering you learned it in England!" "Yes, sare—in London—I ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... ward seemed to be invalids, and, going up-stairs, we found more of them in the same or a worse condition than the little creature just described, with their mothers (or more probably other women, for the infants were mostly foundlings) in attendance as nurses. The matron of the ward, a middle-aged woman, remarkably kind and motherly in aspect, was walking to and fro across the chamber—on that weary journey in which careful mothers and nurses travel so continually and so far, and gain never a step of progress—with an unquiet baby in her arms. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... sense of doing that?" argued one middle-aged widow of a practical turn of mind. "You can save funeral expenses by letting the Germans do ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... Mordecai's hospitality and his daughter's taste had provided for us—and a most costly display of plate and pine-apples it was—when our entertainer was called out of the room by a new arrival. After some delay, he returned, bringing in with him a middle-aged officer, a fine soldierly-looking figure, in the uniform of the royal guard. He had just arrived from France with letters for some of the party, and with an introduction to the Jew, whom I now began to regard as an agent ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... There was a dancing lamp-post, a dancing apple tree, a dancing ship. One would have thought that the untamable tune of some mad musician had set all the common objects of field and street dancing an eternal jig. And long afterwards, when Syme was middle-aged and at rest, he could never see one of those particular objects—a lamppost, or an apple tree, or a windmill—without thinking that it was a strayed reveller ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... on board two manly-looking middle-aged men, with their bateau, who had been exploring for six weeks as far as the Canada line, and had let their beards grow. They had the skin of a beaver, which they had recently caught, stretched on an oval hoop, though the fur was not good at that season. I talked with one of them, telling him ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... pleasing appearance. There was the youthful, elegant, dark, intellectual-browed John Moreton, who had doctorates of divinity from half a dozen big theological seminaries at home and abroad; and there was the business man of the two—Stephen, middle-aged before his time, staid and formal ... to the latter, the twin schools: the seminary for girls and the preparatory school for boys—and the revivalistic religion that Went with them, meant a, sort of exalted business functioning ... this I say not at all invidiously ... the practical ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... shipped a large and valuable invoice of the goods I had bought. The Morrow was an English ship with, of course, but little accommodation for passengers, of whom there were only myself, a young woman and her servant, who was a middle-aged negress. I thought it singular that a traveling English girl should be so attended, but she afterward explained to me that the woman had been left with her family by a man and his wife from South Carolina, both of whom had died on the same day at the house of the young lady's ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... room of the place where they had invited us to return, there was quite a flutter of excitement, and we instantly saw that there was a number of girls present, all very young, and several mere children. On our left a fat, middle-aged Chinese man sat, with two or three little girls, one in his lap and one on either side of him, in his arms; two more were throwing something that resembled dice on a table within the front alcove, and the rest were sitting on the opium couches. ...
— Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers • Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell
... most pleasant memories the writer has kept of her Hopi story-tellers is that of wholesome Mother Sacknumptewa of Oraibi. She must be middle-aged, and is surprisingly young-looking to be the mother of her big family of grown-up sons and daughters. She wore a brand-new dress of pretty yellow and white print, made in the full Hopi manner, and her abundant black hair was so clean and well brushed that it was actually glossy. Her ...
— The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi • Hattie Greene Lockett
... with disdain; but the old lady persisted in maintaining her own opinion. Her daughter at last relinquished the argument, by saying, "That the Squire, with his grave serious face, and stiff polite manners, might suit the taste of a middle-aged woman; but he never would win the regard of ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... So that he desired, in his mature age, to learn book keeping, compound addition, subtraction, and multiplication. He had no partners, so that he did not want division. But it is difficult—say, well-nigh impossible—for a middle-aged merchant, not trained in the graces of letter-writing, to inspire a young lady with personal regard, even though she is privileged to follow the current of his thoughts day by day, and to set ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... write by lantern light in the tent, there having been no conference tonight on account of rain. Most of the squad are away, exploring the city; but Corder is already abed and sleeping— "as insurance," he said to me, explaining his middle-aged caution. I shall follow ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... freely there. It is not a country weighed down with standing armies and conscriptions and fortifications. How could one live in a town like Coblentz, or Metz, or Brest? The poor wretches marching this way and marching that—you watch them from your hotel window—the young men and the middle-aged men—and you know that they would rather be away at their farms, or in their factories, or saw-pits, or engine-houses, working for ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... you. A tall middle-aged man, Moto, said that he was with us in the boat in 1859, and he and I remembered the one-eyed ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 11.45 A.M. (e), which bracketed letter means Saturdays excepted. By it you will travel on Tuesday morning. Then, in the afternoon, you will seek a taxi, but either the drivers will have as fares middle-aged contractors, good for a fat tip, or they will claim a lack of petrol, lady. You will therefore fight for place in a bus, which must be left at the corner of Whitehall and Queen Victoria Street. Next you will ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... widow, with a personal fascination beyond that of her banking account. I, with the mellow leniency of—let me see?—twenty-six, find this pathetic. But Patsey on the sunny slope of nineteen can't even envisage my viewpoint. For her, a woman over thirty is middle-aged. When she's forty she is old, and there's an end of it. How much the poor baby has to learn! I hope she won't do it in being outrivalled with her best young man some day, by a dazzling siren of forty-five who knows all the tricks of the trade and looks younger than ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... appear that evening, and Howat sat informally before a blazing hearth with his mother, Gilbert Penny and Caroline. Myrtle had retired with a headache. Howat felt pleasantly settled, almost middle-aged; he smoked a pipe with the deliberate gestures of his father. He wondered at the loss of his old restlessness, his revolt from just such placid scenes as the present. Never, he had thought, would he be caught, bound, with invidious affections, ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... be the modest speech of a middle-aged lover. Years later the written reminiscences of the two daughters unmistakably impute the attentions of the brilliant American to something more than friendliness. It is certain that he had a very warm feeling for somebody or ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... place, but this will not be needful for some years, if things are properly managed. There is another thing, Mr. Hackett, which I wish you would see about for them. Look around and find a respectable middle-aged couple that will be capable of giving the necessary help about the house and grounds. The place needs a man around it to keep it in order, and if his wife looked after the work in the house they would give better satisfaction ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... countenance lighting up with a new thought, "but I have several times visited the artist's rooms, though I have never been so fortunate as to get sight of the mysterious connoisseur. Those who have met him, describe him as being a middle-aged gentleman, of foreign birth, very marked in his polite, graceful manners; yet there appears to be a great mystery hanging about him, and some have ventured to remark that his is no common history, that he is ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... be it observed, were George Hewlett's daughters, the most civilised, if the dullest-witted, of the flock. Polly, Betsy, and Judy were the children of Dan Hewlett. As a rule, all the old women of the parish were called Betty, all the middle-aged Lizzie, and the ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fatigue and self-denial of training. Probably the way he lives and his aversion to athletics, more than the length of his course of study, account for his elderly appearance, for he is not only obviously older than the average undergraduate, but begins to look positively middle-aged both in face and figure almost before ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... civilization drop for these coarse occupations of hers, now? How could she have let life coarsen her, as it had, how could she have fallen into such common ways, with her sun-browned hair, and her roughened hands, and her inexactly adjusted dresses, and the fatal middle-aged lines beginning to show from the corner of the ear down into the neck, and not an effort made to stop them. But as to wrinkles, of course a woman as unrestrained as Marise was bound to get them early. She had never learned the ABC of woman's wisdom, ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... not even middle-aged, on the hither side of thirty; yet his attitude was that of one who had already crossed the great divide of the average mortal span: he looked backward upon a life, never forward to one. To him his history seemed a ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... transaction were men well known in their own professions. Browne, particularly, was a real-estate lawyer of some distinction, and an editor of what were known as the old "New York Civil Procedure Reports." He was a middle-aged man, careful in his dress, particular in his speech, modest and quiet in his demeanor, by reputation a gentleman and a scholar, and had practised at the New York ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... and refined farce, in a world which, being frankly to the last degree improbable, makes no urgent demand for belief. Sometimes indeed (as I have observed before with Mr. J.E. BUCKROSE) the characters themselves are more credible than the way in which they carry on. Thus while Mr. Tubbs, the middle-aged and high-principled champion of distress, is both human and likeable, I was never persuaded that any more real motive than regard for an amusing situation would compel him to saddle himself with the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... before known at Shadywalk, had come out with a milking pail. To her Norton marched up, and addressed her in French; Matilda could not understand a word of it; but presently Norton went off into the farm-house. Here, in the kitchen, they found the rest of the family. A pleasant-faced, middle-aged woman was busy with supper; a young pretty girl was helping her; and two men, travel-worn and bearing the marks of poverty, sat over the fire holding their heads. Norton entered into conversation here again. It was very amusing to Matilda, the ...
— Opportunities • Susan Warner
... the finality of the tone, sighed and yielded. Already Bishop was moving down the line. For Mr. Blood, as for a weedy youth on his left, the Colonel had no more than a glance of contempt. But the next man, a middle-aged Colossus named Wolverstone, who had lost an eye at Sedgemoor, drew his regard, ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... Judith gave a glad laugh. "It's just as everybody told the master," said she. "A fine, strong, handsome man, like him, wasn't likely to be laid down for life like a baby, when he was hardly middle-aged. These doctors here be just so many muffs. When I get too old for work, I'll go to Germany myself, Miss Constance, and ask 'em ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... before noticed the two men who were with Sandy, now he observed them more closely. They were tall, middle-aged men, with serious, placid, unemotional faces. Each carried a long white staff, the end of which rested upon the ground. There was about them something somehow different from anything Colonel Singelsby had ever seen before. They were most quiet, courteous men, but there ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... man, closely shaven, with stooping shoulders, at least fifteen years older, with a black poodle at his heels, as well shorn as his master, newly risen from lying outside the church door; a gentle, somewhat drooping lady in black, not yet middle-aged and very pretty; a small eager, unformed, black-eyed girl, who could hardly keep back her words for the outside of the church door; a tall self-possessed handsome woman, with a fine classical cast of features; and lastly, a brown-faced, wiry hardworking clergyman, without an atom of ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... they could move to do so, in strode a lean, middle-aged Norwegian Larry sensed must be Captain Petersen himself, and on his weathered face was an expression of such gravity that it was obvious to ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... remarks were received rather coolly. A temporary boarder from the country, consisting of a somewhat more than middle-aged female, with a parchment forehead and a dry little "frisette" shingling it, a sallow neck with a necklace of gold beads, a black dress too rusty for recent grief, and contours in basso-rilievo, left the table prematurely, and was reported ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... the great "parlor chambers" of the boarding-house, at about eight o'clock that evening, a middle-aged gentleman and lady, with a fair, sweet-faced girl of about nineteen, were sitting near an open window, very much as if they were waiting ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... Hal acknowledged the introduction. Elias M. Pierce, receding a yard or so into perspective, revealed himself as a spare, middle-aged man who looked as if he had been hewn out of a block, square, and glued into a permanent black suit. Under his palely sardonic eye Hal felt that he was being appraised, and in none ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the priest arrived with his acolytes—a middle-aged man, with a large bald spot on his head, who coughed loudly in the vestibule. The ladies immediately came out of the boudoir in a row, and asked him for his blessing. Lavretsky bowed to them in silence, and they as silently returned his greeting. The priest remained a little longer where he was, ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... A Middle-aged Man (wandering behind the Orchestra). It's beastly dull, that's what it is—none of the give-and-take humour and practical fun you get in Paris or Vienna!... That's a nice, simple-looking little thing in the seat over there. (The simple-looking little thing peeps at him, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 23, 1892 • Various
... the most idiotic fancy. You see, it was so unlike you; none more exact in habit. All day. I didn't get to the Historical Society, it seemed so devilish far off. I'd never blame you for leaving an old man without any gumption." He must never think that again, she replied. Wasn't she, too, middle-aged? ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... but this before him was associated with something beyond love, which tended to increase rather than diminish it. When at last they left the room he did what was very unusual with him. He was reticent, like the ordinary middle-aged New-Englander. He took his wife's little, thin, veinous hand and clasped it tenderly. Her bony fingers ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... robes of soft material that are the usual wear of common adult Utopian women; they are both dark and sallow, and they affect amber and crimson in their garments. Their faces strike me as a little unintelligent, and there is a faint touch of middle-aged coquetry in their bearing that I do not like. Yet on earth we should consider them women of exceptional refinement. But the botanist evidently sees in this direction scope for the feelings that have wilted a little under my inattention, and he begins that petty intercourse of ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... One thing that our middle-aged men, and in fact many of us who have not yet reached that way mark, have entirely forgotten is that Nature is very chary of her favors. Our primal mother is just and kind, but she has little use ...
— Keeping Fit All the Way • Walter Camp
... a lady of a little property which she had acquired, together with much distinction in the neighbourhood, by having her heart severely lacerated and her feelings mangled by a middle-aged baker resident in the vicinity, against whom she had, by the agency of Mr Rugg, found it necessary to proceed at law to recover damages for a breach of promise of marriage. The baker having been, by the counsel for Miss Rugg, witheringly denounced on that occasion up to the ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... Greece in her struggles for independence against the Turks. In celebrating the heroic death of Bozzaris, Halleck chose a subject that was naturally fitted to appeal to all whose liberties were threatened. This poem has been honored with a place in almost all American anthologies. Middle-aged people can still remember the frequency with which the poem was declaimed. At one time these lines were perhaps as often heard as any in ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... large, old-fashioned frame building, square as a packing-box, and surrounded, as all country dwellings at the South are, by a broad, open piazza. Our summons was answered by its owner, a well-to-do, substantial, middle-aged planter, wearing the ordinary homespun of the district, but evidently of a station in life much above the common 'corn-crackers' I had seen at the country meeting-house. The Colonel was an acquaintance, and greeting us with great cordiality, our host led the way directly to the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... at the failings of others naturally leads them to judge themselves more charitably. They find an apology for their short-comings and wrong-doings in another consideration. They know very well that they are not the same persons as the middle-aged individuals, the young men, the boys, the children, that bore their names, and whose lives were continuous with theirs. Here is an old man who can remember the first time he was allowed to go shooting. What a remorseless young ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... family, standing by the grave, artlessly described to the Nestorians the affecting scenes he had witnessed, and all were bathed in tears. "In all the families of the village," wrote Miss Fidelia Fiske, "Judith had taken a deep interest, and several of the middle-aged women had been taught by her in the Sabbath-school. Indeed, she had greatly endeared herself to all the scores and hundreds of Nestorians who knew her, and was a universal favorite among the people. A Nestorian of a distant village said, on hearing of her death, ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... too. She was in a little trim white pongee street suit, with a close little hat above a little rosy, powdered, cheerful face. He had rather heavy shoulders and a shock of carefully brushed straight light hair, and looked about one year out of Harvard. They didn't at all belong with the middle-aged roomful. As a matter of fact, her mother knew Mrs. Havenith a little, and so they had dashed in here to save her suit from the rain. They were sitting and smiling at each other against a background of Mark Twain's life-sized head in a broad gilt frame. They ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... many years; so many, that that fact alone seemed a holy seal and testimony to the purity and immortality of the bond which united them. Esther must have been a middle-aged woman when, as the saddened letters revealed, her health failed and she was ordered by the physicians to go to Europe. The first letter which my uncle had read, the one which Princess found, was the letter in which she bade farewell to her lover. There was no record after that; only two letters ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... a middle-aged man with iron-gray hair. He was carrying his hat in his hand and enjoying the beauty and fragrance of the late evening ...
— The Girl Scouts in Beechwood Forest • Margaret Vandercook
... by about twenty persons, the majority of whom were visitors, inhabitants of Tudela or of neighbouring country-houses. With four or five exceptions, the party consisted of men, for the most part elderly or middle-aged. One of the ladies and a young officer of the royal guard were the singers, and their performance seemed partially to interrupt the conversation of a group of the seniors who were seated round a card-table at the further end of the apartment. The cards, however, if they had ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... was located at what is now 1225 Broadway. Negroes to be offered for sale were driven to Columbus in droves—like cattle—by "Nawthon speckulatahs". And prospective buyers would visit the "block" accompanied by doctors, who would feel of, thump, and examine the "Nigger" to see if sound. A young or middle-aged Negro man, specially or even well trained in some trade or out-of-the-ordinary line of work, often sold for from $2000.00 to $4000.00 in gold. Women and "runty Nigger men" commanded a price of from $600.00 up, each. A good "breedin ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... GUSHBY, ANDREW JARP, and HALL, have come to prove by their presence the sympathy of the Amateur Stage. On the last night but one they had concluded their series of performances at Blankbury. The Chairman of the Banquet is a middle-aged Peer, who is a regular attendant at first nights, and occupies a subordinate office in the Ministry. The Guest of the Evening has not yet arrived. A buzz of conversation fills the air. The Secretary of the Banquet, an actor, is anxiously hurrying ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various
... cover their Nakedness, several of the Men have a deal of Hair thereon. It is to be observ'd, that the Head of the Penis is cover'd (throughout all the Nations of the Indians I ever saw) both in Old and Young. Although we reckon these a very smooth People, and free from Hair; yet I once saw a middle-aged Man, that was hairy all down his Back; the Hairs being above ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... kiss a middle-aged man alternately upon each cheek; an incident that is common in European social life, and that shows how the affections of the heart are cultivated and find expression. In Brussels I saw a son rest his hand affectionately upon his mother's shoulder, ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... Pavilion, in the grounds, where they were hard at it mending and washing their white dresses, and could be seen hanging them out to dry between the trees, like a lot of washerwomen. They looked very much like middle-aged washerwomen on the platform, too. But the girl had been living in the main building along with the boss, the director, the fellow with the black beard, and a hard-bitten, oldish woman who took the piano and was understood to ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... place, I'm thinkin', you're that thick, (There is a noise from the stairs in the hall.) Whisht! It's the doctor comin' down from Eileen. What'll he say, I wonder? (The door in the rear is opened and Doctor Gaynor enters. He is a stout, bald, middle-aged man, forceful of speech, who in the case of patients of the Carmodys' class dictates rather than advises. Carmody adopts a whining tone.) Aw, Doctor, and how's Eileen now? Have you got her ...
— The Straw • Eugene O'Neill
... not think I had noticed anything unusual about him beforehand. He had not been very well for some months, but we thought little of it, and he never dwelt upon it himself. I was in the fifth form at the time, and almost grown up. Sweep was a middle-aged dog, the wisest and handsomest of his race. The Rector always dined with us on Sunday, but one evening he excused himself, saying he felt too unwell to come out, and would prefer to stay quietly at home, especially as he had a journey ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... crossed to the other side of the street, she would have returned to the charge, but was prevented by the immediately following entrance of the Rev. Clement Sclater—the minister of her parish, recently appointed. He was a man between young and middle-aged, an honest fellow, zealous to perform the duties of his office, but with notions of religion very beggarly. How could it be otherwise when he knew far more of what he called the Divine decrees than he did of his ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... maiden, whether native or Italian; and as for such delicacy of imagination as to work up a lovely damsel out of the withered remnant that forty odd years of Italian life can spare, I can assure my middle-aged friends, (and it may serve as a caveat,) I can lay ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... built nearly at the bottom of a hill. Part of it, close by the gateway, was a farmhouse occupied by a tenant of the Latimers. His wife, a pleasant middle-aged woman, came out to meet them as they dismounted, and a rosy daughter of sixteen or seventeen lingered shyly in the little garden, which was full to overflowing of old-fashioned flowers and humming with multitudes ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... cannot agree, for something supernatural has happened to me myself," said a bald, corpulent middle-aged gentleman of medium height, who had till then sat silent behind the stove. The eyes of all in the room turned to him with curiosity and surprise, and there was ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... brushwood cover to the northward stepped three men. One was a middle-aged man, a mountaineer if dress and ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... broke off short as a series of shrieks in a high-pitched feminine voice issued from the pantry of the big farmhouse. An instant later a hired girl, followed by a middle-aged cook, came flying ...
— The Rover Boys at Colby Hall - or The Struggles of the Young Cadets • Arthur M. Winfield
... the dulled and dreamy condition of her own brain. Snow was falling softly when she had met Richard Carter at the office, at half-past ten, and snow lisped against the windows of the limousine as they two, with Irving Fox, Richard's kindly, middle-aged, confidential clerk, were whirled out of the city, and on and on through the bare little wintry towns. They had all talked together, sometimes of herself and her sister, sometimes of Nina and Ward, of Fox's amazing grandchildren, and of business. Fox had had some papers to which they occasionally ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... Tiger should spring at me during my descent; still, I rose to my feet, feeling still a little giddy and confused, climbed down to the foot of the haystack, and walked a little timidly towards the gate, where I could distinctly see the tall, stoutly-built figure of a middle-aged man in the light of ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... her detractors, and the folly of an attachment to such a woman, of which the fruition could never bring him happiness for above a week, there was yet a charm about this Circe from which the poor deluded gentleman could not free himself; and for a much longer period than Ulysses (another middle-aged officer, who had travelled much, and been in the foreign wars), Esmond felt himself enthralled and besotted by the wiles of this enchantress. Quit her! He could no more quit her, as the Cymon of this story was made to quit his false one, than ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... paused, rang a bell, and remained silent until a quiet-looking, middle-aged man who might have been a highly respectable butler entered the room: then he ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... in reflection, in dreaming, in spiritual acquiescence, life was passing in sombre shadows for this middle-aged man who had been hopelessly crushed in Christ's service; and who had never regretted that service, never complained, never doubted the wisdom and the mercy of his Leader's inscrutable manoeuvres with the soldiers who ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... were in bloom. I had no premonition of danger. The adventure, reduced to its elements of canned food, alcohol lamp, sleeping-bags and toothbrushes, seemed no adventure at all, but a peaceful and pastoral excursion by three middle-aged women into ...
— More Tish • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Things as they are may be fun for lawyers and politicians and court people and—douaniers; they may suit the loan-mongers and the armaments shareholders, they may even be more comfortable for the middle-aged, but what, except as an inconvenience, does that matter ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... group, he let his gaze and thoughts wander from one to the other of them again. For the majority of the advanced students, he reflected, the Institute of Insight wasn't really too healthy a place. But it offered compensations. Middle-aged or past it on the average, financially secure, vaguely disappointed in life, they'd found in Dr. Al a friendly and eloquent guide to lead them into the fascinating worlds of their own minds. And Dr. Al was good at it. He had borrowed as heavily from yoga and western mysticism as from ...
— Ham Sandwich • James H. Schmitz
... A middle-aged man in rusty black of semi-clerical cut held the receiver, and the effect of the names as given over the wire was, to put it mildly, electrical. His jaw dropped and he stared across the table at a man who was seated there. At the repetition of the name, the other ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... an integral portion of Julia Vickers's nature; admiration was all she lived for: and even in a convict ship, with her husband at her elbow, she must flirt, or perish of mental inanition. There was no harm in the creature. She was simply a vain, middle-aged woman, and Frere took her attentions for what they were worth. Moreover, her good feeling towards him was useful, for reasons ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... start of surprise. A tall, middle-aged man, with a single streak of white hair through the brown, was gazing ...
— Madge Morton's Victory • Amy D.V. Chalmers
... of Eleanor and Jane here put an end to the conversation, which was not renewed till the evening, when the younger, or as Claude called it, the middle-aged part of the company were sitting on the lawn, leaving the drawing-room to the elder and more prudent, and the terrace to the wilder and more active. Emily was talking of Mrs. Burnet's visit of the day before, and her opinion of the Hetherington festivities. 'And what an interminable visit ...
— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge
... followed, taking a position under her lee. A quarter-boat was lowered, and in five minutes its oars were tossed at the packet's lee-gangway, when the commander of the corvette ascended the ship's side, followed by a middle-aged man in the dress of a civilian, ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... it seems), and to the comfortably furnished Victorian drawing-room a middle-aged maid-servant in cap and apron brings a lamp, and proceeds to draw blinds and close curtains. To do this she passes the fire-place, where before a pleasantly bright hearth sits, comfortably sedate, an elderly lady whose countenance and attitude suggest the very acme of genteel repose. She is a ...
— Angels & Ministers • Laurence Housman
... church steeple catching the morning sun. And, by this, "the boarders" had assembled, and we found ourselves at breakfast in a cheery company of three workmen, who were as bright and full of fun as boys out for a holiday. They were presently joined by a fourth, a hearty, middle-aged man, who, as he ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... when perfectly ripe, from middle-aged trees of the best sorts, are to be laid on the ground under shades, and after the roots and middle shoots, with two branches, have appeared, the sooner they are planted the better. Out of 100 nuts, only two-thirds, on an average, will be found to vegetate. ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... first-rate horsewoman, an exquisite waltzer, good at croquet, archery, billiards, and all games requiring accuracy of eye and aim, and Lady Sophia brought down her bird in a single season. She went home to Heron's Nest a duchess in embryo. The Duke of Dovedale, a bulky, middle-aged nobleman, with a passion for fieldsports and high farming, had seen Lady Sophia riding a dangerous horse in Rotten Row, and had been so charmed by her management of the brute, as to become from that hour her slave. A pretty girl, with such a seat in her saddle, and such a light ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... last summer to do rather a foolish thing for a middle-aged spinster—I undertook to chaperon a volatile young niece upon a continental tour. We travelled the usual course up the Rhine into Switzerland, which we enjoyed rapturously. Then passing the Alps, we spent a few days at Milan, and next proceeded to Verona. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... An iron-gray, middle-aged gentleman stands before me, more vigorous, more full of healthy life than two-thirds of the puny youth, nourished on sherry and bitters, of the present small generation, but with no wish, no smallest effort to take away one from the ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... was a good deal older than the company in which he found himself. Without being one of the hoary youths who play Falstaff to every fresh heir's Prince Harry, he was a middle-aged man, too obviously accustomed to the society of boys. His very dress spoke of a prolonged youth. A large cat's-eye, circled with diamonds, blazed solitary in his shirt-front, and his coat was cut after the manner of the contemporary reveller. His chin was clean ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... the trip had been strange, and her stopping-place and its people were stranger than all. The male population of Middle Bethany, as is usual with small New England villages, consisted almost entirely of very young boys and very old men. But here at Bottle Flat were hosts of middle-aged men, and such funny ones! She was wild to see more of them, and hear them talk; yet, her wildness was no match for her prudence. She sighed to think how slightly Toledo had spoken of the minister on the local committee, and she piously admitted to herself that Toledo and ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... suggest one of the well-known papers. Opposite this figure danced two giants, X and Z, and these letters were pinned on their coats, but what the letters meant remained unexplained. "Honest Russian thought" was represented by a middle-aged gentleman in spectacles, dress-coat and gloves, and wearing fetters (real fetters). Under his arm he had a portfolio containing papers relating to some "case." To convince the sceptical, a letter from abroad testifying ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the floor. Each man had an Indian woman. One was middle-aged; the other, a comely young girl with heavy silver earrings, was laughing noisily as her companion dragged her to a standstill in ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... the Darling are by far the most expert at stealing; and notwithstanding my marks of respect to them in particular, they were not the less the instigators and abettors of everything wrong. A mischievous old man is usually accompanied by a stout middle-aged man and a boy; thus the cunning of the old one, the strength of him of middle age, and the agility of the youth are combined with advantage; both in their intercourse with their neighbours and in seeking the means ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... didn't I, Nanny?' she cried, turning to her maid, a highly respectable, middle-aged woman, with as good-humoured a face as her young charge.—'Sarah, I said the minute you saw us come out of a third-class carriage you would put on that shocked face of yours. That's ...
— Sarah's School Friend • May Baldwin
... relieve her loneliness, and it was Crane's eligibility in this respect that she was considering. Beauty was but skin deep, as Mrs. Brown was practical enough to admit, and she was not overstocked with that attractive quality herself. Though Crane did not know it, the resolute, middle-aged female, from whom he hoped to obtain a gratuitous dinner, was making up her mind to offer him ...
— The Young Miner - or Tom Nelson in California • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... actively until about twenty years since; but, owing to the character of the country, it already possesses many of the better features of a long-inhabited region. There are stumps, of course, for new fields are constantly coming into cultivation; but on the whole, the appearance is that of a middle-aged, rather than that of a ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... the love scenes, to have his trials and his difficulties, and to win through them or not, as the case may be. I am too old now to be a hard-hearted author, and so it is probable that he may not die of a broken heart. Those who don't approve of a middle-aged bachelor country doctor as a hero, may take the heir to Greshamsbury in his stead, and call the book, if it so please them, "The Loves and Adventures of Francis ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... buying a wig, I have one to sell you," said the landlady. "I used to be in the theatrical business, and had all those things. I will show you how to make up for a middle-aged woman, so that even your own folks wouldn't know you ...
— Pretty Madcap Dorothy - How She Won a Lover • Laura Jean Libbey
... cut in two by dividing railings, marched westward and skirted the restricted districts with the formality of an army flanking. Grand Avenue, once the city's limit, now girded its middle like a loin-cloth. The middle-aged inhabitant who could remember it when it was a corn-field now beheld full-blasted breweries, cinematograph theaters, ten-story office-buildings, old mansions converted into piano-salesrooms and millinery emporiums, business ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... seemed to take a new lease on life. Decrepit, drawn-faced, hump-shouldered and dried up before their time, the few who reached the age when the law made them their own masters, looked not like men and women who stand on the threshold of life, but rather like over-worked middle-aged beings of ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... of the speaker sparkled, but otherwise she looked round with challenging serenity on the English and Americans around her. Madame Variani—stout, clever, middle-aged, and disinterested—had a position of her own in Rome. She was the correspondent of a leading French paper; she had many English friends; and she and the Marchesa Fazzoleni, at the Ambassador's right hand, had just been doing wonders for the relief of the ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in most cases they receive three per cent. of the purchase money, but that is a very poor sinking fund to provide for a middle-aged gentleman, who has probably a family to support; and absolute bankruptcy must be the result if there is, as on several large properties, an agent with a ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... straightway sets to work to learn. Then, too, the Backfisch is the ideal German maiden, cheerful, docile, and facetious; and constantly on the jump (springen is the word she uses) to serve her elders. Middle-aged Germans used to have a most tiresome way of expecting girls to be like lambs in spring, always in the mood to frisk and caper: so that a quiet or a delicate girl had a bad time with some of them. Ein junges Maedchen muss immer heiter ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... are in clover when their proprietor happens to be a good and sensible woman, but are to be pitied when they get into the hands of the selfish or the foolish. As very young men, they too often fall victims to bad-tempered chorus girls or to middle-aged matrons of the class from which Pope judged all womankind. They make capital husbands when well managed; treated badly, they say little, but set to work, after the manner of a dissatisfied cat, to find a kinder mistress, generally succeeding. The Earl of —- adored ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... had followed the law of such middle-aged groups of familiars, and separated by sexes. The men drifted over to the piazza, lit cigars, hoisted their knees, and talked, first, of the prune picking, their trouble with help, the rather bootless effort of a group ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... always wondering about something. One day it was, "Do fishes love Jesus?" followed by "What is a soul?" The conclusion was, "It's the thing we love Jesus with." When they first come to us they invariably think that mountains grow like trees: "Stones are young mountains, aren't they? and hills are middle-aged mountains." Later on, every printed thing on a wall is a text. We were in a railway station, on our way to the hills: "Look! oh, what numbers and numbers of texts! But what queer pictures to have on texts!" One was specially perplexing; it was a well-known advertisement, and ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... are blind, and deeply pitted, others but lightly marked. Apparently the disease has worn itself out, for only the oldest members of the tribes have suffered. None seem to have it now, nor are the marks of the disease to be seen on the middle-aged men. The ravages of this scourge must have been confined to the coast tribes, as no evidence of its having been amongst the natives of the interior is to be found. The belt of dry country separating ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... ball given by some society people for charity. He had known her at once for an American, and finally had obtained an introduction. Her name was Kate Gilbert, and she lived in New York. It was understood that she was of a wealthy family and traveling for her health. She was accompanied only by a middle-aged maid, a giant of a woman who seemed to be maid and chaperon and general protector ...
— The Brand of Silence - A Detective Story • Harrington Strong
... eyes.' And he said, 'You wouldn't make it a handsome face, would you?' and she says, 'A very handsome face.' And says he, 'Middle-aged?' and says she, 'Twenty-nine.' And I mind him saying, 'A little bald on the top?' and she says, says she, ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... passed, but the Secretary was in and would see Senator Rickrose. He came forward to meet him—a tall, middle-aged, well-groomed man, with sandy hair, whose principal recommendation for the post he filled was the fact that he was the largest contributor to the campaign fund in his State, and his senior senator ...
— In Her Own Right • John Reed Scott
... stopped in his walk and turned sharply. He was a middle-aged man, gaunt and thin, of a pale yellow complexion, but as he answered Clarke and faced him, there was ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... without as much as a glance at the dead man, he left the room, and again visited the telephone box. He was engaged in it for a few minutes. When he came out he heard steps coming up the staircase, and looking over the banisters he saw the senior partner, Eldrick, a middle-aged man. Eldrick ...
— The Talleyrand Maxim • J. S. Fletcher
... puzzled a little by the somewhat convulsive gurgle that burst from Anne's lips. "I beg your pardon. I just happened to think of something." She turned away to say good-bye to the last of her remaining visitors,—two middle-aged ladies who had not made her acquaintance until after her marriage to Templeton Thorpe and therefore were not by way of knowing Mrs. Wintermill without the aid of opera-glasses. "Do come and see ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... process of 'tying' it is impossible to explain on paper; but I can assure my readers it afforded great scope for taste and ingenuity. Few, indeed, could do it properly, though the singles of some were very neat. The best 'tyer' in our party, and indeed in the district, was a little, middle-aged woman, who was a diligent, rapid gatherer, and generally the first to finish her handful. Her singles were perfectly round, and as flat at the top as if laid with a plummet. Having finished tying, we laid down our singles according to order, so that no difficulty might be felt in collecting ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various
... man in the doorway, a short, sturdy, middle-aged Frenchman, with strong features, a tuft of grey beard, heavy eyebrows, and dark, prominent eyes, with a hot, shining ...
— "Fin Tireur" - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... both for physical and sentimental reasons, this last experience quite demoralized Miss Dwyer, and she sat down and cried. Now, a few tears, regarded from a practical, middle-aged point of view, would not appear to have greatly complicated the situation, but they threw Lombard into a panic. If she was going to cry, something must be done. Whether anything could be done or ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... left the Bardon house, he saw a middle-aged man entering the Langmore mansion. The man was well dressed ...
— The Mansion of Mystery - Being a Certain Case of Importance, Taken from the Note-book of Adam Adams, Investigator and Detective • Chester K. Steele
... Kaiserin Elizabeth, more than 300 men, who had left Tsing-tau by railroad before Austria decided to join her ally in the Far East as well as in Europe, hurried back in small groups and in civilian clothes to escape detection. Squads of the Landsturm, the last reserve, middle-aged men who had left their families and their business in all parts of China joined the ranks and went to drilling in preparation for the hard fighting expected as soon as the invading fleet passed the outer defenses ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... tumblers in California and the tin-type man somewhere on the plains. But David was a friend of his of years' standing, and he was a dog I should call naturally gifted, and with that of a friendly nature, sober, decent, middle-aged, comfortable, and one who took things as they came. But Flannagan had hair that was wild and red, and his complexion was similar. He was large and bony. His voice was windy, his manner oratorical, and his nature ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton
... child, who went willingly with Harold, and was soon ushered into the large upper room, which was used as both nursery and school-room, for Mrs. Tracy could not allow her two sons, Tom and Jack, to come in contact with the boys at school; so she kept a governess, a middle-aged spinster, who, glad of a home, and the rather liberal compensation, sat all day in the nursery and bore patiently with Tom's freaks and Jack's dullness: to say nothing of the trouble it was to have the three-year-old Maude toddling about ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... cheapest paper for the YOUNG, MIDDLE-AGED, and OLD, now published. Full of splendid Stories, Sketches, Incidents, Anecdotes, Scientific Articles, and Puzzles. A Brilliant Serial Story now commencing. Only 40 cents a year, postpaid. Specimen ...
— The Nursery, No. 103, July, 1875. Vol. XVIII. - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... to play a joke on some of our family for being jealous and wanting to get him caught by Mr. Painter—whatever it was, that medicine had an awful power and did even more than he said it would. When every one had taken a good swallow, except the last one in line—he being a middle-aged person named Waters, who had to take what was left, which was only about a spoonful and very disappointing to Mr. Waters—they all felt the curling sensation begin, and commenced the new muscle-practice ...
— Hollow Tree Nights and Days • Albert Bigelow Paine
... kindred-looking girl with darker hair on the right of Mr. Direck who impressed him at the very outset as being still prettier, and—he didn't quite place her at first—somehow familiar to him; there was a large irrelevant middle-aged lady in black with a gold chain and a large nose, between Teddy and the tutor; there was a tall middle-aged man with an intelligent face, who might be a casual guest; there was an Indian young ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... start now," said the middle-aged man, "for I am lame, and it will take me all night to ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... there between the few chinks left in the barrier I could catch glimpses of the Hall, and once I saw a rough-looking, middle-aged man standing at a window on the lower floor, whom I supposed to be Israel Stakes, the coachman. There was no sign, however, of Gabriel or of Mordaunt, and their absence alarmed me. I was convinced that, unless they were under some restraint, they would have ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... The middle-aged lover stood bending forward, his face impatiently eager and his attitude as stiffly alert as that of a bird dog when the quail scent strikes ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... deterred from the course that she fully believed to be the just and true one. Of the great leaders in this movement she alone remains.... Spanning a distance of forty years stood at her side Mrs. Catt, the younger woman who has taken up the battle, and grouped around were earnest young girls and middle-aged women fired with her enthusiasm and looking up to her with a reverence that was very beautiful and a most gracious tribute from youth to old age. When Miss Jean Gordon advanced to present her with a ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... to be so carried away by their feelings, as to be jealous of a submissive looking little man like this. Yet, having fallen in love with him once herself, and forgetting that youth had flown, and that the husband of her youth was only a plodding, middle-aged family man, it was not so very remarkable that a naturally jealous woman, like Mrs. Charles Burton, should imagine that her especial property was coveted by all those of her own sex who ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... covered the coffin with their laurels. The ceremony was at an end. The torches were extinguished; the crowd dispersed. But, by the light of two candles still burning on the altar, might be seen the form of a small, now middle-aged woman who had flung herself upon the bier, whilst a pale young man ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... must not expect middle-aged men to be as demonstrative as very young ladies; but he has as much real affection for you as ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... said, with a calm, middle-aged self-possession. "It is the thing Peter and I like best in ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... old Lady Mary MacScrew, and those middle-aged young women her daughters; they are going to cheapen and haggle in Belgium and up the Rhine until they meet with a boarding-house where they can live upon less board-wages than her ladyship pays her footmen. But she will ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... "Two middle-aged couples. Business partners, from Trenton, and their wives. We got the names from him and checked. They really are partners, in a used-car business. Sorry, Rick. Looks like another dead end. The Coast Guard drew a blank ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... urbane, a wonderful type of the supreme success of mediocrity; a couple of young soldiers, light-hearted and out for a good time, of whom Julian took charge; an Oxford don, who had once been Lord Maltenby's tutor; and last of all the homely, very pleasant-looking, middle-aged lady, Princess Torski, followed by her niece. There were a few introductions ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... her feet and rang the bell, and Burden came in and led her along the broad corridors and across the main hall. A middle-aged woman in a stiff, black dress stood waiting for her, and gave her ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... the Molly Swash," as they called themselves; not more than a dozen, including those aft, as well as those forward. A peculiar feature of this crew, however, was the circumstance that they were all middle-aged men, with the exception of the mate, and all thorough-bred sea-dogs. Even Josh, the cabin-boy, as he was called, was an old, wrinkled, gray-headed negro, of near sixty. If the crew wanted a little in the elasticity of youth, it possessed the steadiness and experience of their time of life, every ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... appearance, was almost the exact reverse of Mr. Hamilton. He was a middle-aged man with the iron gray hair and piercing dark eyes that go to make up what is perhaps the handsomest type of Americans. He was a tall man, strong, lean and sinewy, with a bearing of dignity and decision. Both these men were well-dressed to the point of affluence, and, as near ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... got far from the shore before the tide swept us clean out into the Atlantic. We were shortly in a situation sufficiently perilous for the heroic. There we were, three lads, whose united years would not have made up those of a middle-aged man, in a very little boat, in a very high sea, with a strong gale that would have been very favourable for us, if we had wished to steer for New York. As we could not make head at all against the combined strength of an adverse wind, tide, and sea, we left off pulling, and threw all ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... Americans, and at the time of this story were middle-aged people and very fond of seeing in each other's company whatever there was of interest or beauty around us. We had a son about twenty-two years old, of whom we were also very fond; but he was not with us, being at that ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... Pamela—especially if during the interval she had bettered her social condition—with what ardour must she have hailed the advent of what, with all its shortcomings, was a book worth gold. Perhaps she went to Vauxhall with it in her muff, and shook it triumphantly at some middle-aged lady of her acquaintance. Perhaps she lived long enough to see one great novel after another break forth to lighten the darkness of life. She must have looked back on the pompous and lascivious pages of Eliza Haywood, with their long-drawn palpitating intrigues, with positive ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... dancing on the floor. Each man had an Indian woman. One was middle-aged; the other, a comely young girl with heavy silver earrings, was laughing noisily as her companion dragged her to a standstill in front ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... saw a middle-aged man sitting in the kitchen doorway, with a lad of ten or twelve years leaning against his knees. She could tell little of his appearance, save that he had a high forehead, and hair that waved well back from it in rather an unusual fashion. ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... at the Adelphi Hotel, at Liverpool, was a very respectable middle-aged man, with a white neck-cloth; he looked like a Methodist parson. He waited upon us for five days with great gravity, and then another waiter told us that we could give our waiter what we pleased. We were charged L1 for 'attendance' in the bill, but I very innocently gave half as ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... irritated by continued scratching that secondary lesions, such as papules and slight thickening and infiltration, may result. It is much more common in advanced life—pruritus senilis. In such cases, as well as in those cases in younger and middle-aged individuals in which the itchiness develops at the approach of cold weather and disappears upon the coming of the warm season (pruritus hiemalis), the pruritus is usually more or less generalized, although not infrequently in the latter the ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon
... had strayed through the trees close to the outskirts of another picnic party. Mr. Charles immediately ran to ask some fair volunteer to come to the assistance of Mrs. Wimbush, who had fainted. At hearing the name, an active middle-aged lady sprang up and followed him. It was Mrs. Marrables. The sight of her mother brought Mrs. Wimbush round quicker than any smelling bottle could have ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 1, January 5, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... Dain, the solicitor who practised at Hanbridge. Stanway's cob, always quicker to start than to stop, had been pulled up with difficulty, drawing his cart just clear of the other one, so that the two portly and middle-aged talkers were most uncomfortably obliged to twist their necks in order to see one another; the attitude did nothing to ease the obvious asperity of the discussion. She thought the spectacle undignified and silly; and she marvelled, as all women marvel, that men who conduct themselves so magisterially ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... being prisoners burnt alive, after being scalped, their nails pulled out by the roots, and other torments; one of these latter supposed to be of a rebel clergyman; his band being fixed to the hoop of his scalp. Most of the farmers appear by the hair to be young or middle-aged men; there being but sixty-seven grey heads among them all, which makes ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... the Mercers had come to Avonlea in the spring—the Maxwells. There were just Mr. and Mrs. Maxwell; they were a middle-aged couple and very well off. Mr. Maxwell had bought the lumber mills, and they lived up at the old Spencer place which had always been "the" place of Avonlea. They lived quietly, and Mrs. Maxwell hardly ever went anywhere because she was delicate. She was ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the feelings with which he took his wife home, they were at least those of a gentleman; and it were a good thing indeed, if, at the end of five years, the love of most pairs who marry for love were equal to that of Cosmo Warlock to his middle-aged wife; and now that she was gone, his reverence for her memory was something surpassing. From the day almost of his marriage the miseries of life lost half their bitterness, nor had it returned at her death. Instinctively he felt that outsiders, those even who respected him ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... and pointing to the tent, said, 'Oh, sir! my dying mother!' 'What?' said his Majesty, dismounting, and fastening his horse up to the branches of the oak, 'what, my child? tell me all about it.' The little creature now led the king to the tent; there lay, partly covered, a middle-aged female Gipsy in the last stages of a decline, and in the last moments of life. She turned her dying eyes expressively to the royal visitor, then looked up to heaven; but not a word did she utter; the organs of speech ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... urgent demand for belief. Sometimes indeed (as I have observed before with Mr. J.E. BUCKROSE) the characters themselves are more credible than the way in which they carry on. Thus while Mr. Tubbs, the middle-aged and high-principled champion of distress, is both human and likeable, I was never persuaded that any more real motive than regard for an amusing situation would compel him to saddle himself with the continued society of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... the world. Yet Veronica had observed that he was critical of looks in other women, and she thought his criticisms generally just and in good taste. For her part, however, if he chose to consider her middle-aged aunt lovely, Veronica would not contradict him, for she was cautious in a certain degree, and in spite of herself she distrusted ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... know him; what is to be done?" C—— insisted that he should know him by instinct; and so after we reached the depot, we told him to sally out and try. Sure enough, in a few moments he pitched upon a cheerful, middle-aged gentleman, with a moderate but not decisive broad brim to his hat, and challenged him as Mr. Sturge; the result verified the truth that "instinct is a great matter." In a few moments our new friend and ourselves were snugly ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... the approach of the victim of the pursuit of knowledge. As for him, he would have liked to caress and fondle her. To him there was always present a remembrance of her early beauty and the golden mist of memory shone before his eyes and he did not see that she was a heavy, middle-aged woman with coarse features and coarse figure. Animal beauty she had once had. The beauty had utterly flown, but the animal all remained. She had a shifty and wandering eye, burned out and lusterless, that told of dreams that were of men, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... the increasing substitution of steam for water, prove that the monster has now entered on the final stage of its career; for here, as on the terraces, we are surrounded by specimens of life, decay, and death. The young, the middle-aged, the old, the dead,—they ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... him, never dream of him, as anything more than a mere acquaintance? I don't wish for a lover or a husband—at least not yet," with a gasp; "I don't wish to leave home, and go away from all of you, though you are so unkind and teasing—not for a long, long time, till I am quite a middle-aged woman. I don't see why I should be plagued about it when Annie here, who is two years older than I am, and ever so much prettier, as everybody knows, ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... new inmates were added to the manor house family. Young Cecil Vyvyan, a cousin of Anna's, who was of the same age as herself, and his tutor, Dr. Strickland, a grave, middle-aged Scotch doctor of philosophy. The boy's parents were in India, which caused the widow to suggest to them that he should, for a few years, make his home with her, in order that she might watch over his ...
— Peak's Island - A Romance of Buccaneer Days • Ford Paul
... persuaded that I edit it myself!"[179] Truly Lowell had a good company: Emerson, Parkman, Curtis, Norton, James, Eliot,—all teachers in various ways. Through their lectures, books, and speeches, they influenced college students at an impressible age; they appealed to young and to middle-aged men; and they furnished comfort and entertainment for the old. It would have been difficult to find anywhere in the country an educated man whose thought was not affected by some one of these seven; and their influence on editorial writers for newspapers was ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... done what he could to mend the matter, and the time had come for philosophical submission. It was now his duty to keep up Miss Graham's spirits. They were both Americans, and from the national standpoint he was simply the young girl's middle-aged bachelor friend. There was nothing in the situation for him ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... welcome news that the Governor-General would grant us an interview. Accompanied by an aide-de-camp, we drove to the Palace on the banks of the Angara, and were ushered into the presence of the Tsar's Viceroy, who governs a district about the size of Europe. General Panteleyeff was a middle-aged man, with white moustache, light blue eyes, and a spare athletic figure, displayed to advantage by a smart dark green uniform. The General is a personal friend of the Emperor, and the cross of St. Andrew and a tunic covered with various orders bore witness ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... came up and then they all approached me and almost kissed me. My heart was filled with joy, but my attention was especially caught by a middle-aged man who came up to me with the others. I knew him by name already, but had never made his acquaintance nor exchanged a word with him ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... think of nothing further to say. The thing was incomprehensible to her, appalling, yet strangely touching. This twenty-year-old girl, groping her way toward safety, that refuge of the middle-aged, as eagerly as other young things grasp at happiness, at romance!—She recalled phrases spoken by another startled mother to another girl quite as headstrong: "You are only a child! He is twice your age! ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... entered, and took a seat well toward the front. The room was half filled with people, and the mass of them were elderly and middle-aged women. There were rows of their homely, faded, and strong-lined faces set in sober bonnets, a sprinkling of solemn old men, a few bright-ribboned girls, and in the background a settee or two of smart young fellows. Right in front of Mrs. Field sat ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... He was a middle-aged man of most pleasant features—benign, good-natured, and yet shrewd. He dressed well for a cowman, and from his pink, bald crown and gray chin whiskers down to his neat shoes, he looked the part ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor
... number remained, grouped around the honorable Tarbox. They were St. Pierre, Bonaventure,—Maximian detaining a middle-aged pair, Sidonie's timorous guardians,—and two others, who held back, still waiting to ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... the plot sat, in state, Dick and Mary, March and the vision in leather, their respective thrones being empty flour-casks. Around them danced the youth and beauty of the settlement. These were enclosed by a dense circle, composed of patriarchal, middle-aged, and extremely juvenile admirers. The background of the picture was filled up with the monstrous fire which saturated that spot in the forest with light—bright as the broadest day. The extreme foreground was composed of the trunk of a fallen tree, on which sat our friend the artist, delineating ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... arm. And though there would have been glory in that, the other glory was more to her taste. It was the first time in her life that she had ever seen a Cabinet Minister, and I think that she was a little disappointed at finding him so like other middle-aged gentlemen. She had hoped that Mr. Monk would have assumed something of the dignity of his position; but he assumed nothing. Now the bishop, though he was a very mild man, did assume something by the very facts of his apron ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... [Enter a middle-aged Arab, dressed in the most indescribable rags and in the last stage of exhaustion. He is followed at long intervals by his family to two generations, who watch his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various
... as they passed within the deep shadows they became erect again and their faces grew more youthful. It was a marvelous transformation, but Harry read their secret. All the rest of the Invincibles were lads, or but little more, and they two middle-aged men felt that they were responsible for them. In the face of defeat and irretrievable disaster they recovered their courage, and refused ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... fifteen!" "O true believers, here is a Syrian steed which will give renown to the purchaser!" Strolling loosely about were dealers in sugar-cane and pea-nuts, which are called gooba in Africa as in America, pipe peddlers and venders of rosaries, jugglers and minstrels. At last we came to a middle-aged woman seated on the ground behind a basket containing beads, glass armlets, and such trinkets. She was dressed like any Arab-woman of the lower class, but was not veiled, and on her chin blue lines were tattooed. Her features and expression were, ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... the greatest donkey in the entire collection, it is obvious that we shall find him in the middle-aged party of 1936, who is gadding about in inflated trunks and with a fan in his hand. If it were not for the gloves and polka-dot neck-wear we should assume that this costume was a particularly fantastic bathing-suit. The youth of the ensuing year, ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... introduce you to Pompey," said he. "Pompey is the pride of the local draghounds—no very great flier, as his build will show, but a staunch hound on a scent. Well, Pompey, you may not be fast, but I expect you will be too fast for a couple of middle-aged London gentlemen, so I will take the liberty of fastening this leather leash to your collar. Now, boy, come along, and show what you can do." He led him across to the doctor's door. The dog sniffed round for an instant, and ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... ale-glasses, with a plate of tobacco, sat some half-dozen men, enjoying their pipe and glass. In the chimney corner sat Thomas Dickons, the faithful under-bailiff of Mr. Aubrey, a big broad-shouldered, middle-aged man, with a hard-featured face and a phlegmatic air. In the opposite corner sat the little grizzle-headed clerk and sexton, old Hallelujah—(as he was called, but his real name was Jonas Higgs.) Beside him sat Pumpkin, the gardener at the Hall, a very frequent guest at the Aubrey ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... impressions, apparently of GLOSSOPTERIS BROWNII. On descending to the camp, I was informed that the cattle-watering party came suddenly upon two natives, one of whom was a placid old man, the other middle-aged. Corporal Graham did all he could to allay their fears, and convince them that they were in no danger from such strangers. The elder at length handed his little bundle to the younger and sat down, on seeing the Corporal's green bough; meanwhile the other walked ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... of the men who hemmed the table in. Every type of face presented itself—the fleshy cheeks of middle-aged Jews, of pale clerks and salesmen, prosperous-looking men who might have been commercial travellers, and here and there a ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... who slept soundly on, asking no questions. But to the old men he had died a youth, full of promise. They remembered well the eager buoyancy with which he and his comrades had set out for the gold fields. Middle-aged men and women remembered his school days in Reedsville, when he was one of them, when they were all healthy, merry boys ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... citizen of London, healthy, middle-aged, successful in business, whose interest in golf is as keen, according to his lights and limitations, as the absorption of Rembrandt in art. Suppose this citizen, having one day a loose half-hour of time to fill in the neighbourhood ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... Bay neighbourhood, four modes of disposing of the dead obtain, according to Mr. Meyer:—old persons are buried; middle-aged persons are placed in a tree, the hands and knees being brought nearly to the chin, all the openings of the body, as mouth, nose, ears, etc. being previously sewn up, and the corpse covered with mats, pieces of old cloth, nets, etc. The corpse being placed in the tree, a fire is made underneath, ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... announcement that this is the identical "little cot where she was born." Inside is an ordinary tent, with a rough platform at the further end, whereon is an empty chair, at which a group of small Boys, two or three young Women, and some middle-aged Farm-labourers, have been solemnly and patiently staring for the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 10, 1892 • Various
... raucously and swerved around him. The driver leaned out to curse and Malone waved at him, dimly recognizing a private eye he had once known, a middle-aged man named Archer. Wondering vaguely what Archer was doing this far East, and in a jeep at that, Malone watched the vehicle disappear down the street. There were more cars coming, but what difference did that make? Malone didn't care about cars. After all, ...
— Brain Twister • Gordon Randall Garrett
... a little start of surprise. A tall, middle-aged man, with a single streak of white hair through the brown, was gazing at ...
— Madge Morton's Victory • Amy D.V. Chalmers
... Urania, lounging on the deck-chairs, having luncheon, or dinner or supper, or lost in the smoke of cigars in the smoking room. This elusiveness made the personality of the traveller puzzling and interesting, and we bestowed the title of "Our American" now on one, now on another of the middle-aged American gentlemen. Of course, we marked as candidates the more interesting and typical figures. The Urania had been on the ocean for quite some time when my friend at last said to me: "I have found out which American is ours. Here ...
— The Shield • Various
... wife out of the cab, and they passed through into the broad, vaulted passage which connected the street with the courtyard of the hotel. By the dim light afforded by an old-fashioned hanging lamp Nancy Dampier saw that three people had answered the bell; they were a middle-aged man (evidently mine host), his stout better half, and a youth who rubbed his eyes as if sleepy, and who stared at the newcomers ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... crowd a strong-looking, middle-aged man, dressed very well, very snugly in a grey overcoat, grey silk scarf, thick gloves and dark felt hat, marched up and down, twirling his folded umbrella. He seemed to be the leader of the little crowd on the wharf and at ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... young and middle-aged, who dare not be seen by day, for whom the police hold "warrants," for they have absconded from wives and children, leaving them ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... gala night; the elderly fairies, as I said before, were chatting among the honeysuckles; the young were flirting, and dancing, and making love; the middle-aged talked politics under the mushrooms; and the queen herself and half-a-dozen of her favourites were yawning their pleasure from a little mound covered with the ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... out of his mournful eyes and murmured, "Patienza, lieber Herr." Then spying a vacant place behind the chairs at the baccarat table, he darted thither, and I followed in his wake. There must have been about a couple of hundred louis in the bank, which was held by a dissipated, middle-aged man who, having once been handsome in a fleshy way, had run to fat. His black hair, cropped short, stood up like a shoebrush, and when he leaned back in his chair a roll of flesh rose above his collar. I disliked ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... dissipations, and with the gift of fascination, whatever that may mean, in place of the simpler attributes of a few decades ago. And the heroine!—There is no more book-muslin and innocence. She has, as a rule, green eyes; she is middle-aged, and if she has not been married before, she has had her affairs. Everything obvious in life, from politics to mutton-chops, is absolutely barred by anyone with any pretensions to ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... airs of you and the racket of you tire me, I want to be done with you, and to be back in quiet Quality Street, of which I am a part; it is really pleasant to me to know that I shall wake up to-morrow slightly middle-aged.' With the entrance of CAPTAIN BROWN, however, she is at once a frivol again. He frowns ...
— Quality Street - A Comedy • J. M. Barrie
... half concealed by heavy curtains. But the occupants were by no means youthful spinsters or bachelors; they were generally married women, guests of the hotel, receiving other people's husbands whose wives were "in the States," or responsible middle-aged leaders of the town. In the elaborate toilettes of the women, as compared with the less formal business suits of the men, there was an odd mingling of the social attitude with perhaps more mysterious confidences. The idle gossip about them had never affected Barker; rather he had that innate ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... to a tent or to the lighthouse or anywhere to sleep. Much sleep could not be expected for some time to come. He saw the boat land with the ladies on board; he took off his hat as they walked past. There were old ladies, middle-aged ladies, young ladies. Well, there always is this combination. Then he went on with his work. But he had a curious sensation, as if something of the past had been revived in his mind. It is, however, not an ...
— Stories by English Authors: The Sea • Various
... spoke with deliberation and coldness—occasionally with a sort of sarcastic brusquerie, carefully avoiding the least movement of hands or head during converse. This was exceedingly difficult of attainment to me, and took me an infinite deal of time and trouble; but I had for my model a middle-aged Englishman who was staying in the same hotel as myself, and whose starched stolidity never relaxed for a single instant. He was a human iceberg—perfectly respectable, with that air of decent gloom about him which is generally worn by all the sons of Britain while sojourning in a foreign ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... crew. A Martian hovered in the background, and Lancaster didn't notice him at first. Berg introduced the humans casually. There was a stocky gray-haired man named Friedrichs, a lanky space-tanned young chap called Isaacson, a middle-aged woman and her husband by the name of Dufrere, a quiet Oriental who answered to Hwang, and a red-haired woman presented as Karen Marek. These, Berg explained, were the technicians who would be helping Lancaster. This end of the space station was devoted to the labs and factories; for security reasons, ...
— Security • Poul William Anderson
... resignation to the will of God, seems to have been throughout, since the introduction of Christianity, a characteristic of the Irish people. It is often witnessed in our own days, and manifested, equally by the young, the middle-aged, or the old. The young, closing their eyes to that bright life whose sweetness they have as yet scarcely tasted, never murmur at being deprived of it, though hope is to them so alluring; the middle-aged, called away in the midst of projects yet unaccomplished, ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... canoe being among these islands seeking for game, espied a drove of these men swimming from one island to another; for they have no boats, canoes, or bark-logs. They took four of them, and brought them aboard; two of them were middle-aged, the other two were young men about eighteen or twenty years old. To these we gave boiled rice, and with it turtle and manatee boiled. They did greedily devour what we gave them, but took no notice of the ship, or any thing in it, and when they were set on land again, they ran away as fast as ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... occasionally, of "Homes for Aged Women," and more rarely "Homes for Aged Men." The question sometimes suggests itself, whether it would not be better to begin the provision earlier, and see that homes are also provided, in some form, for the middle-aged and even the young. The trouble is, I suppose, that as it takes two to make a bargain, so it takes at least two to make a home; and unluckily it takes ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... knocked. I peeped out, and it was Sally—quiet, unassuming little Sally, with her middle-aged airs—looking like one of Stan's Gaiety Girl photographs, in a short, low-necked dress of bright poppy colour, with silk legs as shiny as an Archdeacon's, only with quite a ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... not only his hands, but even his head, far below the sill of this window, nor could anyone so support themselves, without something to hold on to. But all that is beside the question. The people in the apartment below are friends of Mrs. Morton's, a middle-aged man and his wife, with two young children. They are eminently respectable people, ...
— The Film of Fear • Arnold Fredericks
... you say, Catherine? If you did not love a man at all, if he was absolutely nothing to you, would you give yourself to him? Yourself? That means all your life, all your days, your young days, your middle-aged years, your old age, always, till death parts you. Would you do that, Catherine? Speak for yourself; ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... your pigs so little? They are vastly engaging at the age. I was so myself. Now I am a disagreeable old hog, A middle-aged gentleman-and-a-half; My faculties (thank God!) ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... monotonous sameness; or, if they brought mutation, it was of a slow, and decaying, and depressing kind. Old Peggy died. Her silent sympathy, concealed under much roughness, was a loss to Susan Dixon. Susan was not yet thirty when this happened, but she looked a middle-aged, not to say an elderly woman. People affirmed that she had never recovered her complexion since that fever, a dozen years ago, which killed her father, and left Will Dixon an idiot. But besides her gray sallowness, the lines in her face were strong, and deep, and hard. The movements of her ...
— Half a Life-Time Ago • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Throckmorton went to her middle-aged repose, I sat up and went through imaginary scenes, and reviewed the situation a hundred times, and tried to convince myself of what I wanted to believe, and ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris
... me just like a querulous, vulgar, middle-aged woman in her talk; she repeats herself in the same scolding sort of way; and she's so eager to blame somebody besides Bartley for Bartley's wickedness that, when she can't punish herself, she punishes ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... castle. I don't care what Mr. Jerry said," she told Aunt Kate as they went up the steps and into the principal's office where a pleasant-faced middle-aged lady looked questioningly at Mary Rose and ...
— Mary Rose of Mifflin • Frances R. Sterrett
... and Prejudice. Every one does not get a Bingley, or a Darcy (with a park); but a good many sensible girls like Elinor pair off contentedly with poor creatures like Edward Ferrars, while not a few enthusiasts like Marianne decline at last upon middle-aged colonels with flannel waistcoats. George Eliot, we fancy, would have held that the fates of Elinor and Marianne were more probable than the fortunes of Jane and Eliza Bennet. That, of the remaining characters, there is certainly none to ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... nineteen, who abstained from food from April, 1874, until December, 1877, although continually using morphia. Throughout her fast she had periodic convulsions, and voided no urine or feces for twelve months before her death. There was a middle-aged woman in England in 1860 who for two years lived on opium, gin, and water. Her chief symptoms were almost daily sickness and epileptic fits three times a week. She was absolutely constipated, and at her death her abdomen was so distended as to present the appearance of ascites. After death, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... gymnasium-instructor to make them, what they would never be, men; for some one to give them an aim and an ideal beyond cigarettes, socks, and giggling "gels" or "gals" or "garls" or "gyurls" or "gurrls" according to their social sphere. Vast-stomached middle-aged men of all classes, and all crying aloud in fat-lipped silence of indulgence, physical sloth, physical decay before physical prime should have been reached, of mental, moral, and physical decadence from the great Past incredible, and who would ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... The master was middle-aged, about the same height and weight as his valet. He wore a full dark beard, something after the style of the early eighties of last century. His was also a serious countenance, tanned, dignified too; but his eyes were no match for his valet's; too dreamy, introspective. ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... up, but again the heavens were bare and clear. Then he looked down and saw walking near them a heavy, middle-aged, bearded man to whom all the German officers paid great deference. The man's manner was haughty and overbearing, and John understood at once that in the monarchical sense he was ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... might never meet, for her to know. Or one day in the Alps they might meet, a middle-aged couple, he famous, she regretful only to have fallen below his lofty standard. "For, Mr. Whitford," says she, very earnestly, "I did wish at that time, believe me or not, to merit your approbation." The brows of the phantom Vernon whom she ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... carriage suddenly drove up and stopped a few paces in front of him. The footman sprang down and opened the door. Two ladies got out; they were dressed in evening costume, and were returning from a ball. One was middle-aged, the other young and rather pretty. They stood for a moment on the pavement, the ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... which the modern house-decorator endeavors to protect the doors of more elegant apartments by glass "finger-plates." A grating, almost stopped up with some compound similar to the deposit with which a restaurant-keeper gives an air of cellar-bound antiquity to a merely middle-aged bottle, only served to heighten the general resemblance to a prison door; a resemblance further heightened by the trefoil-shaped iron-work, the formidable hinges, the clumsy nail-heads. A miser, or a pamphleteer at strife with the world at large, ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... for hard work and long work, whether in the hunting-field or Indian campaign, like a broad seated English hunting saddle, there is no doubt that its smooth slippery surface offers additional difficulties to the middle-aged, the timid, and those crippled by gout, rheumatism or pounds. There can be very little benefit derived from horse exercise as long as the patient travels in mortal fear. Foreigners teach riding on a buff leather ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... name he had never before heard, and when he reached the door he looked inquiringly at the middle-aged gentleman who ...
— Five Hundred Dollars - or, Jacob Marlowe's Secret • Horatio Alger
... is a boy who wants board," announced Dick, as he threw open a door. Then the pair entered a living room, where a middle-aged woman sat by ...
— From Farm to Fortune - or Nat Nason's Strange Experience • Horatio Alger Jr.
... sufferer, whose distress seemed to receive a sudden calm from the sympathy the young princes betrayed, the Hakim led the way to another part of the town, where he entered a house of rather better description, in a small room of which they found a pale, middle-aged man, who was engaged in making a coarse sort of netting for trees. Hearing the noise of the entrance, he looked up, and asked who it was, but with no change of countenance, or apparent recognition of anyone there. But as soon as the Hakim had uttered the words 'It is I,' a ...
— Aunt Judy's Tales • Mrs Alfred Gatty
... Melville with a striking chapter. Discussing the matter in my presence once, the captain of a frigate said, "There is one reply to objectors; if they do not wish to conform, they can leave the service." Clearly, however, a middle-aged man cannot throw up his profession ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... been about a year and a half after the marriage of his daughter—Felix Millsap was on his way home from work, a middle-aged figure, moving with the clunking gait of a tired laborer who wears cheap, heavy shoes, his broad splayed hands dangling at the ends of his arms as though in either of them he carried an invisible ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... which of you boys was it that had the idea of keeping a middle-aged woman perishing on a doorstep before daylight ...
— The Great Adventure • Arnold Bennett
... heard that afternoon surpassed my comprehension. I knew that artistic matters were at a low ebb in New York, yet I never realized the lowness thereof until then. I was introduced to a half-dozen smartly dressed men, some beardless, some middle-aged, and all dissipated looking. They regarded me with curiosity, and I could hear them whispering about my clothes, I got off a few feeble jokes on the subject, pointing to my C-sharp minor colored collar. ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... we returned to the divan, and while pipes and coffee were handed round, a noise in the court yard denoted a visiter, and a middle-aged man, with embroidered clothes, and silver-mounted pistols in his girdle, entered. This was the Natchalnik, or local governor, who had come from his own village, two hours off, to pay his visit; he was accompanied by the two captains under his command, ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... of a big man, as tall as he and far heavier of build: a magnificent big head, heavily marked features, a short-cropped black beard that gave him dignity. A middle-aged man, about forty-five, and still in the prime ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... 7. If middle-aged gentlemen are musical or political, they can dislocate a tune in something between a bark and a grumble, or endeavour to provoke an argument by declaring very loudly that Lord R—— or the Duke "is a thorough scoundrel," ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 4, 1841 • Various
... seemed to me that many thousands of people were passing along that road towards the country. Parties of laughing boys and girls pedalled northwards on bicycles, swerving in and out through the traffic. Stout, middle-aged men, with fat, middle-aged women beside them, drove sturdy ponies, or lean, high-stepping horses, in curious old-fashioned gigs. Motor cyclists, young men with outstretched chins and set faces, sped by us, outstripping our car. Others we passed, riders who had side cars attached to their ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... or of unhappiness might befall her. If she allowed herself to be taken to a new home at Basle she could still work and eat and drink,—and working, eating, and drinking she could wait till her unhappiness should be removed. She was sufficiently wise to understand that as she became a middle-aged woman, with perhaps children around her, her sorrow would melt into a soft regret which would be at least endurable. And what did it signify after all how much one such a being as herself might suffer? The world would go on in the same way, and her small troubles ...
— The Golden Lion of Granpere • Anthony Trollope
... others) that very charming young man, Prosper Vane—known locally as Alfred Briggs until he took to the stage. Prosper played the young hero, Dick Seaton, who was actually wooing Winifred. Mr. Levinski himself took the part of a middle-aged man of the world with a slight embonpoint; down in the programme as Sir Geoffrey Throssell, but fortunately still Mr. Levinski. His opening words, as he came on, were, "Ah, Dick, I have a note for you somewhere," which gave the audience an interval in which ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... great "parlor chambers" of the boarding-house, at about eight o'clock that evening, a middle-aged gentleman and lady, with a fair, sweet-faced girl of about nineteen, were sitting near an open window, very much as if they ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... single mule team haul it in places over those cursed mountain roads. That's why we worked in crews. On the average we worked eighteen hours a day. In summer this was long, in winter it seemed perpetual; but I was in it and I was going to stick—or thought I was. The other three in my gang were middle-aged men,—hard drinkers, good swearers, tough as oak themselves. The boss was a little tobacco-eating, bow-legged Irishman. I never, before or since, knew a man who could swear as he could, or drink so when he struck town. It seems to go with the logging business; ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... you to just anger was the spectacle of wealthy people making money and so taking the bread out of the mouths of people who needed It. The only apparent blots on existence at Putney were the noise and danger of the High Street, the dearth of reliable laundries, the manners of a middle-aged lady engaged at the post office (Mrs. Challice liked the other ladies in the post office), and the absence of a ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... ranging in age from sixteen to twenty, when Mason caught sight of her pretty, fatigued, but resolutely courteous face, and came instantly to her rescue. He was very fond of Blanche, and teased and petted her with almost cousinly freedom. He felt himself a middle-aged man beside her, and admired her sweet face, and gentle unselfishness as unreservedly as he would have done those of a child. Moving her draperies aside with a kindly, if unceremonious hand, he ensconced himself beside her right willingly and devoted his best energies to ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... carried out in harlequin flannel surmounts a full brim of restful willow-green. Garnished with intertwined laurel and St. John's-Wort, and decorated with the tail feather of a Surrey fowl, it makes a comfortable and distinguished headdress for a middle-aged gentleman. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 22, 1920 • Various
... of a twitter," this pretty but rather faded middle-aged little mother of Penny's. A gentle dignity and patient sadness, which Dundee was sure were habitual to her, lay in the faded blue eyes and upon ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... bottom of the window, and they looked in. The rain blurred the pains on the outside, and the moisture had condensed within, so that it was not easy to see clearly; but they made out that a Creole woman was singing to a group of topers who sat by the fire in a corner of the room. She was middle-aged, but sang sweetly, and was accompanied on the ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... Robert Wynn. 'What a peculiar accent he has! and the national swagger too.' And Mr. Wynn, feeling intensely British, left his box, and walked into the midst of the room with his newspaper, wishing to suggest the presence of a third person. He glanced at the American, a middle-aged, stout-built man, with an intelligent and energetic countenance, who returned the glance keenly. There was something indescribably foreign about his dress, though in detail it was as usual; and his manner and air were those of ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... she would have returned to the charge, but was prevented by the immediately following entrance of the Rev. Clement Sclater—the minister of her parish, recently appointed. He was a man between young and middle-aged, an honest fellow, zealous to perform the duties of his office, but with notions of religion very beggarly. How could it be otherwise when he knew far more of what he called the Divine decrees than he did of his own heart, or the needs and miseries of human ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... anything that she should command.... There followed then the strangest life for me. Lovers in the fullest sense we were and yet it was different from any love that I had ever known. When I ask myself why, in what, it differed I cannot answer. Two old grey middle-aged people who happened to suit one another.... Not romantic.... But I think in the end of it all the reason was that she never revealed herself to me entirely. I was always curious about her, always felt that other people knew more of her than I did, always ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... her, a sad-faced mulatto, middle-aged and respectable- looking, went patiently round the room, doing or seeming to do some trifles of business, then stood still and looked at the child, who was intent ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... rushed a girl—such a girl! One of those radiant creatures who explain the cult of womanhood; who make it difficult even for sober-minded, middle-aged men and matrons to realize that this is nothing but flesh and blood like themselves; one of those beautiful creatures who claim worship as a right and who repay it with kindness and brightness ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... be, but it has ceased to be," he answers coolly. "Trix, go out like a good child, and get me the evening paper. Among my other staid, middle-aged habits, Lady Catheron, is that of reading the Post every evening religiously, ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... a pair of middle-aged pantaloons. It is needless to say that girls who may have a literary tendency will find ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... Her rooms were cheerful and elegant; a motherly, middle-aged woman had been engaged to remain with her as companion and nurse during her husband's absence; she had an abundance of money at her command, and Dr. Knox had promised to look in upon her every day. Surely she had nothing to complain ...
— Virgie's Inheritance • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... spite of a splendid arrangement of magic lanterns, then a novelty, got up regardless of expense) Arbaces swore like an intoxicated mariner, rather than a necromaunt accustomed to move in the highest circles and pentacles. Nancy, Miss Broughton's heroine, tells her middle-aged wooer, among other things, that she accepts him, because "I did think it would be nice for the boys; but I like you myself, besides." After this ardent confession, he "kissed her with a sort of diffidence." Many men would have preferred to go out and ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... confession should be forced from me!—of winning the heart of any maiden, whether native or Italian; and as for such delicacy of imagination as to work up a lovely damsel out of the withered remnant that forty odd years of Italian life can spare, I can assure my middle-aged friends, (and it may serve as a caveat,) I can lay no claim ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... be liable to relapse in matters of prudence, seemliness, or in any of the highest cares of his functions; and by way of return for these benefits to the pupil, it will often happen that the zeal of a middle-aged or declining incumbent will be revived, by being in near communion with the ardour of youth, when his own efforts may have languished through a melancholy consciousness that they have not produced as much good among his ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... SIR,—As a middle-aged mother I do not appeal for your sympathy, I merely wish to describe my position, the difficulties of which might no doubt be paralleled in hundreds of other households. I have three children whose characteristics may be thus ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 1st, 1920 • Various
... impertinence of whose presence many of us have had painful proof, is the third or last molar, so absurdly misnamed the wisdom tooth. If there be any wisdom involved in its appearance it is of the sort characterized by William Allen White's delicious definition: "That type of ponderous folly of the middle-aged which we term 'mature judgment.'" The last is sometimes worst as well as best, and this belated remnant is not only the last to appear, but the first to disappear. In a considerable percentage of cases it is situated so far back in the jaw that ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... these fine mornings. As they are now, I have to look along every shelf in the search for the book which I want. To come to Keats is no guarantee that we are on the road to Shelley. Shelley, if he did not drop out on the way, is probably next to How to Be a Golfer Though Middle-aged. ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... fellow looked up with so much perplexity in his face at the idea of this grave, middle-aged gentleman asking advice of him, that Mr. Middleton hastened ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... at any rate, he assuredly informed his friends and neighbours, who had been absent from that performance, that they had missed very much indeed, and had by no means seen Thespis at his best. Even nowadays, middle-aged playgoers, old enough to remember the late Mr. Macready, are trumped, as it were, by older playgoers, boastful of their memories of Kemble and the elder Kean. And these players, in their day and in their turn, underwent disparagement ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... middle age except a depth of expression in her eyes, the features having become thickened by age. Some among those who, like Dickens, first saw her in her later years and still looked for the semblance of a heroine of romance, failed to find the muse Lelia of their imaginations under the guise of a middle-aged bourgeoise. But such impressions were superficial. Her portrait in black and white by Couture, engraved by Manceau, seems to reconcile these apparent discrepancies. Beauty is not here, but the face is so powerful and comprehensive that we perceive there at once the mirror of a ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... know," said the doctor; "some people change very much, from boys to middle-aged manhood, others alter ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... dreamily. Mrs. Cunningham's "at home" was of no particular interest. The guests were all middle-aged people whom the M.P. had known in his boyhood and Margaret, in her presumptuous youth, thought it would be a very prosy affair, although it had made quite a sensation in quiet little Murraybridge, where people still called an "at home" ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... so bad as that, however. Farmer Eames turned in at the farmyard gate and led the two strangers into a good-sized kitchen, where the table was already set, in a homely fashion, for dinner. A stout, middle-aged woman, with a rather sharp face, turned from the fire, where she was superintending ...
— Great Uncle Hoot-Toot • Mrs. Molesworth
... round the chamber. Grandmamma, in brocaded black silk, sat where she always does, at the side of the fire, and my Uncle Charles—who for a wonder was at home— and my Aunt Dorothea were receiving the people as they came in. The Bracewells were there already, and Hatty, and Mr Crossland, and a middle-aged lady, who I suppose was his mother, and Miss Newton, and a few more whose faces and names I know. Sir Anthony and my Lady Parmenter came in just after ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... was the bitterest truth. Where on this wide earth with its forth-shooting fruits and grains, its fragrant lands and shining seas, could this dwarfed, bent, broken, middle-aged woman go? Nobody wanted her, nobody cared for her. But the wind kissed her drawn lips as readily as those of the girl, and the blooms of clover nodded to her as if ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... honourable offices, in his due place on the right of the present baronet, the latter figured in a character so strange and so incongruous that it seemed as if one day the dignified array of Landales—old, young, middle-aged, but fine gentlemen, all of them—must turn their backs upon ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
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