"Slatternly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... passing in his mind, a drowsy, slatternly charwoman, in an old black straw bonnet and grey bed-gown, opened one of the shutters, and throwing up the sash of the window by where Mr. Sponge sat, disclosed the contents of the apartment. The last waxlight was just dying out in the centre of a splendid ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... in one of the ruinous old houses, and startle me by a gaze of wonder or some unintelligible speech addressed to herself. Probably a human being had not been seen in that vicinity for the last month. Sometimes a slatternly servant-girl would appear in the distance, her dress bedraggled with slops, a tub of water on the pavement close by, and a long-handled mop in her hand, with which she seemed to be vigorously engaged in scrubbing the green slime and tufts of moss off the window-sills; but catching a sight ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... period—things sometimes almost grotesque, were they not so sad. The composer lived a solitary life, and was very much at the mercy of his servants on account of his self-absorption and deafness. He was much worried by these prosaic cares. One story of a slatternly servant is as follows: The master was working at the mass in D, the great work which he commenced in 1819 for the celebration of the appointment of the Archduke Rudolph as Archbishop of Olmutz, and which should have been completed by the following year. Beethoven, however, ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... the board of a lumbermen's hotel, filled with house-flies and slatternly waiter-girls, who talked familiarly while they served greasy food. The Abwees were yet sore in their minds at the thoughts of the smelly beds up-stairs, and discouragement sat deeply on their souls. But ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... him a half-eagle. His companions proceeded to imbibe a variety of compounds, while he poured out nearly a glass full of raw whiskey, and drank it down at a swallow. As he replaced the glass on the counter, a slatternly negro woman thrust her head ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the edge of the 'pike, with its gate-pole ready to be lowered by a rope, looking like any other toll place. But the woman was very brisk and Yankee-like, and different from the many slatternly persons who had before taken toll. She said her people came from "down East," but she herself was born in Ohio. She thought the old lady would like a cup of strong tea, and her dinner was just ready, and it did get lonesome eating by a body's ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... nap. From this little town to "The Gap" is the worst sixty-mile ride, perhaps, in the world. She sat in a dirty day-coach; the smoke rolled in at the windows and doors; the cars shook and swayed and lumbered around curves and down and up gorges; there were about her rough men, crying children, slatternly women, tobacco juice, peanuts, popcorn and apple cores, but dainty, serene and as merry as ever, she sat through that ride with a radiant smile, her keen black eyes noting everything unlovely within and the glory of hill, tree and chasm without. ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... work. She was rather pretty, and very intelligent, though extremely indolent; and though she had no stockings, would consent to wear nothing but dirty white satin shoes, too short for her foot. Once a week, her mother, a tall, slatternly woman, with long tangled hair, and a cigar in her mouth, used to come to visit her, accompanied by a friend, a friend's friend, and a train of girls, her daughters. The housekeeper would give them some dinner, after which they would ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... rough, but it's clean. We could promise you a clean pan, sir. My missus she's a good one for cleaning; she's not one of them slatternly, good-for-nothing lasses. There's heaps of them here, sir, idling away their time. She's a good girl is my Polly. Why, if that isn't little John a-clambering up the steps ...
— Christie, the King's Servant • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... with complacency that the landlord saw his house given over to the destructive caprices of a drunken and uncontrollable mob. He had no means of freeing himself of his guests. When his slatternly wife had complained: "Them miners an' loggers jest louzes up a body's house," he had wagged his head dejectedly and spread his great black-nailed hands. "If that's ther wu'st thing they does hit'll be a plum God's blessin'," he replied. "Ther law p'intedly fo'ces a tavern-keeper ter sleep ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... home. He was aware of the fact that funds were low and needs were increasing. The home needed another nurse and a higher-priced cook, who would prepare the food with more care than the present slatternly incumbent. It needed several hospital wards, where children could be isolated when attacked by contagious diseases. The doctor had known his family, varying from thirty to fifty, all down at one time with bad ...
— Mary Louise and Josie O'Gorman • Emma Speed Sampson
... and a slatternly-looking woman of sinister aspect appeared at the threshold. Florence took no particular notice of her appearance, but asked, ...
— Ben's Nugget - A Boy's Search For Fortune • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... the one thick slice she offered, slipped the handle of the tin of tea on his arm, and with the big basin, tied up in a blue handkerchief, in his other hand, marched off in the direction of the tin works, while slatternly Mrs. Fowley went back into ...
— Dick Lionheart • Mary Rowles Jarvis
... had got as far as a protest Alice turned in to the entrance of a building and climbed a flight of stairs. She pushed a button. A woman of rather slatternly appearance came ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... the name of Pratt over a shop-window in a house that had once seen better days, but which looked so forlorn, that Mr. Kendal would not look the slatternly maid in the face while so absurd a question was asked as whether Mr. ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... it must have been her mother that I saw that morning when little Felix dragged me to a cigar-shop in quest of an ornamental crab-a handsome, slatternly hag sort of woman, who might have been on the stage," ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... praising spring in its words. You are happy because you have sold a poem, probably for more than it is worth. But why do you praise spring? What do you fellows do it for? You know perfectly well that it is the most capricious, the most treacherous, the most delusive, deadly, slatternly, down-at-heels, milkmaid-handed season of the year, without decision of character or fixed principles, and with only the vaguest raw-girlish ideals, a red nose between crazy smiles and streaming eyes. If it did not come at the end of winter, ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... ivy that clambered over the porch so covered it with leaves and berries that I could not at all make out its burden. I gave a sharp ring to the bell, and heard the echo repeated from the deserted stable-court; there was the yelp of a hound somewhere within, and presently a slatternly-dressed woman received me, and, conducting me down a bare hall, showed me into a great dingy parlor, where a murky fire was struggling in the grate. A score of roistering travellers might have made the stately parlor gay; and I dare say they did, in years gone; but now I had only ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... Ii Kamon no Kami, one of the great actors in recent historic events, who was assassinated not far off, outside the Sakaruda gate of the castle. Besides these, barracks, parade-grounds, policemen, kurumas, carts pulled and pushed by coolies, pack-horses in straw sandals, and dwarfish, slatternly-looking soldiers in European dress, made up the Tokiyo that I saw ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... fountains which gush cool water at most of the street corners. Theirs is a highly necessary task, for few or no houses have their own water supply; and around each fountain one can see half a dozen by no means slatternly maidens, splashing and flirting the water one at another, while they wait their turn with the pitchers, and laugh and exchange banter with the passing farmers' lads. Many in the street crowds are rosy-cheeked ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... among the collection was a strip of the identical silver ribbon which had encircled Pepin's throat—I called the dog Pepin—on the night I rescued him from the streets. Without hesitation I entered the shop and questioned a slatternly woman who sat behind the counter munching gruyere cheese and garlic. "Will you tell me, madame," said I with my most agreeable air, "whether you recollect having sold any of that tinsel ribbon lately, and to whom?" She was not likely to have much custom, I thought, and her clients would be easily ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... at all to-night," he answered, in a hard, dry voice that travelled along the dingy passage with a penetrating distinctness. The landlady murmured to the slatternly maidservant an ejaculatory diatribe on the dissipatedness of young literary gentlemen as the door banged. Trenchard disappeared in the gathering darkness, and soon ...
— The Collaborators - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... appearance, she looked extremely pale, and somewhat emaciated; yet, for the first time in several months, she wore a tight-fitting dress, and her father, unconscious of her crimes, good-naturedly expressed his joy at seeing her 'once more dressed like a Christian lady, and not in the loose and slatternly robes she had so long ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... A slatternly, slipshod girl answered the bell, and having received her orders and the united available funds of the two comrades, speedily returned with a brace of frothing pint pots. The major ruminated silently ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... wretched profit of the workers did not seem so out of proportion. It was usury in a nutshell, so infinitesimal as almost to escape detection. Fanny worked every minute which she could secure on these wrappers—the ungainly, slatternly home-gear of other poor women. There was an air of dejected femininity and slipshod drudgery about every fold of one of them when it was hung up finished. Fanny used to keep them on a row of hooks in her bedroom ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... during this time been following the guidance of Toby down the half-rural villa-lined roads which lead to the metropolis. Now, however, we were beginning to come among continuous streets, where laborers and dockmen were already astir, and slatternly women were taking down shutters and brushing door-steps. At the square-topped corner public houses business was just beginning, and rough-looking men were emerging, rubbing their sleeves across their beards after their ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... shift to afford better quarters, perhaps, but it was to my original lodging in Bloomsbury that I drove from Waterloo. Some few belongings of mine were there, and I entertained a friendly sort of feeling for my good-hearted but slatternly landlady, and for poor, overworked Bessie, with her broad, generally smutty face, and lingering remains of a Dorset accent. The part of London with which I was familiar had resumed its normal aspect now, and people were ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... bell was answered by a rather slatternly maid, who informed the visitor that she guessed Mr. Pearson was in; he 'most always was around lunch time. So Captain Elisha waited in a typical boarding-house parlor, before a grate with no fire in it and surrounded by walnut ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Waynflete that a woman who broke her arm at the church door was a housewifely maiden who became a slatternly housewife after marriage. "There's no fear of Jane doing that," she replied; "she's as good as the guineas ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... at Hammersmith, occupying a very plain and shabby little house, in a contiguous range of others like it, with no prospect but that of an ugly village-street, and certainly nothing to gratify his craving for a tasteful environment, inside or out. A slatternly maid-servant opened the door for us, and he himself stood in the entry, a beautiful and venerable old man, buttoned to the chin in a black dress-coat, tall and slender, with a countenance quietly alive all over, and the gentlest and most naturally courteous manner. He ushered us into ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... began the girl doubtfully, "and—How dy, Dick! is that you?" The interruption was caused by her recognition of the ostler, and she lounged into the room. In spite of a skimp, slatternly gown, whose straight skirt clung to her lower limbs, there was a quaint, nymph-like contour to her figure. Whether from languor, ill-health, or more probably from a morbid consciousness of her own height, she moved with a slightly affected stoop that had become ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... insisted on her own plan of benevolence, she yielded, and rather sullenly led the way homeward. Ah, what a way it was! down one dirty street and up another,—through vile courts and alleys reeking with filth, swarming with idle, loud-voiced men, wretched-looking women, slatternly girls, and forlorn children. Bessie's heart grew sick and her courage failed her. If she had known the way back, she would gladly have ...
— Stories of Many Lands • Grace Greenwood
... circumstances allow. Many folks make what they are pleased to call unconventionality a mere cloak for selfish disregard of the feelings and tastes of others. Bohemianism too often means piggish sloth or slatternly ineptitude. ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... he could leave the dock early, he made another effort. He stopped before one in a dingy row of small houses, uniformly depressing, in a street that ran into the Commercial Road, and rang the bell, which tinkled aggressively. A slatternly woman, with a bandage round her head and an air of drunken servility, responded to his inquiry for "Mrs. Crichton" by ushering him into a small back parlour, in which a pale girl in black sat with ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... debauched complexion, who showed a most unwelcome curiosity in his customer. As a last fatality, he wore a peaked cap like my own, and turned out to be an ex-sailor. I should have fled at the sight of him had I had the chance, but I was attended to first by a slatternly girl who, I am sure, called him up to view me. To explain my muddy boots and trousers I said I had walked from Esens, and from that I found myself involved in a tangle of impromptu lies. Floundering down an old groove, I placed my sister this time on ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... latter days, was a place of bad drainage, bad drinking, bad living and bad dying. The men who haunted its dirty, narrow little streets were loafers and idlers and castaways. The women were, most of them, no better than they should be, and the children were the most slatternly and ill-bred in the whole of Glebeshire. Small credit to the Canons and the Town Councillors and the prosperous farmers that it was so, but in their defence it might be urged that it needed a very valiant Canon and the most fearless of Town Councillors ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... hers; for the city is a careless nurse and teacher, who thinks more of the cut of a coat than of the habit of mind; who feeds her children on colored candy and popcorn, despising the more wholesome porridge and milk; a slatternly nurse, who would rather buy perfume than soap; who allows her children to powder their necks instead of washing them; who decks them out in imitation lace collars, and cheap jewelry, with bows on their hair, but holes in their stockings; ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... to swell the ranks of the rioters; another half—slatternly women and unkempt children—swarmed in the single street and gazed upward at the heights. Every ledge about the threatened buildings was black with men, men furious with hate and mad with liquor, men needing only ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... me to that haven for gents only. There were other landladies—landladies fat and German; landladies lean and Irish; landladies loquacious (regardless of nationality); landladies reserved; landladies husbandless, wedded, widowed, divorced, and willing; landladies slatternly; landladies prim; and all hinting of past estates wherein there ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... the rickety stairs, which groaned and creaked beneath their weight, and found Mother Guttersnipe lying on the bed in the corner. The elfish black-haired child was playing cards with a slatternly-looking girl at a deal table by the faint light of ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... the doors of which were open to the air—here, however, none of the sweetest. Everywhere was shadow; everywhere one or another evil odour; everywhere a look of abject and dirty poverty—to an English eye, that is. Everywhere were pretty children, young, slatternly mothers, withered-up grandmothers, the gleam of glowing reds and yellows, and the coolness of subdued greens and fine blues. Such at least was the composite first impression made on Mr. and Mrs. Porson. As it was ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... Aurora. Slatternly slavey frock, soiled white apron, cap awry, large slippers tied on with string. (During Act 3: changes to grotesque colored ...
— Oh! Susannah! - A Farcical Comedy in Three Acts • Mark Ambient
... De Vac paced the length of this black alley in search of the little doorway of the building he sought. At length he came upon it, and, after repeated pounding with the pommel of his sword, it was opened by a slatternly old hag. ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... hiring some one. His children had married or "run off" and left him. So the old wife went back into the treadmill. She was obsessed with the idea of work. She would not sleep. Sometimes she would spring out of the bed in the dead hours of the night, kindle a fire in the slatternly stove, and "start breakfast." She was always hurrying from ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... homes, as there are American homes, that are slatternly and badly managed, and there are Cuban homes that are as spick and span and as orderly in their administration as any home in this country. Their customs, as are ours, are the result of environment and tradition. To some of us, a rectangle of six or ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... to be a small, slatternly-looking craft, her hull and spars a dingy black, rigging all slack and bleached nearly white, and everything denoting an ill state of affairs aboard. The four boats hanging from her sides proclaimed her a whaler. Leaning carelessly over the ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... art and sound, the appeal of ancient buildings, the waving of tall trees, the faces of bright flowers, the songs of lively birds in the thicket—ay, and the intimations of death and decay as well, all that was ugly and wretched in humanity, the coarse song from the alehouse, the slatternly woman about her weary work, the crying of a child that had been punished, the foul oozings of the stockyard. These were all as real, as true impressions as the others. To strike some balance, neither to forget the ideal in the real, or to lose sight of the real in the ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the edge of the Taufusi swamp, was a small collection of huts, jumbled together in squalor and dirt, with pigs dozing in the ooze and slatternly women beating out siapo in the shade. It was a dunghill of out-islanders, Nieues, Uveans, Tongans, Tapatueans, banded together in a common poverty; landless people of other archipelagoes, despised of the Samoans, and paying ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... up with her mother all that evening. The good little shrill woman, tender-eyed and slatternly, had to help try on dresses, and run about for pins, and express her critical taste in undertones, believing all the while that her daughter had given up music to go mad with vanity. The reflection struck ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... had casually learned that Landy had had to work as a boy, as a youth, and as a young man, that he had accumulated enough so that he could now enjoy the play-days once denied him. Yes, she would change her notes to say: "uncouth verbiage and slatternly dress are often assets in gaining information and are no hindrance in granting ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... have seen a big man with square shoulders and a small head, pushing about in a crowd, he shouts and works his arms, he seems to be doing a great deal, in reality he is doing nothing; so Mr Meredith appears to me, and yet I can only think of him as an artist; his habit is not slatternly, like those of such literary hodmen as Mr David Christie Murray, Mr Besant, Mr Buchanan. There is no trace of the crowd about him. I do not question his right of place, I am out of sympathy with him, that is all; ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... peasants are made of reed and straw; the hay-ricks are mere slovenly heaps, partially thatched; the fences are made up of odds and ends. As for order, the whole place might have been strewn with the debris of a whirlwind and not have looked worse. As a natural consequence of all this slatternly disorder, fire is no uncommon occurrence; and when a fire begins, it seldom stops till it has licked the whole place clean—a condition not attainable by ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... thing, to remark in how many people there is too much resignation. It kills out energy. It is a weak, fretful, unhappy thing. People are reconciled, in a sad sort of way, to the fashion in which things go on. You have seen a poor, slatternly mother, in a way-side cottage, who has observed her little children playing in the road before it, in the way of passing carriages, angrily ordering the little things to come away from their dangerous and dirty play; yet, when the children disobey her, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... be considered as indirectly substantiated by what has been said of the Frenchman's two whales. Elsewhere in this volume the slanderous aspersion has been disproved, that the vocation of whaling is throughout a slatternly, untidy business. But there is another thing to rebut. They hint that all whales always smell bad. Now how did this odious stigma originate? I opine, that it is plainly traceable to the first arrival of the Greenland whaling ships in London, more than two centuries ago. ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... be the centre of attraction? She is a short, stout woman, whose cheeks as she walks wobble with fat, whose face is ever dirty, and dress (at home) slatternly. But mayhap her heart is in the right place, and when Hodge is missed from his accustomed seat by the fire of an evening, when it is bruited abroad that he is down with illness, hurriedly slips on her bonnet, and saying nothing, ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... suddenly very small and very, very helpless—she was utterly spent. But there was something in her wide gray eyes—a dignity and a command—that completely dominated the shrewish wife of the hump- shouldered tailor, something that made the slatternly creature back out of the room, for Felicia Day, with her hand on the battered iron railing of the bed, had said ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... Sally grew slatternly with increasing maternity. She spent her time in a rocking-chair, dipping snuff—a consolation imported from her former home—and lamenting the bad marriage she had made. Rodney ascribed his ill-fortune to unjust ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... away into trowsers. I felt as if my legs were in the stocks, and kicked them off in disdain—simply remarking—'what fools men are!' So, you don't like my short petticoats? and I hate your long ones. First, because they are slatternly and inconvenient; secondly, because they make your stockings dirty; and thirdly, because they give you the idea that they are intended to conceal crooked legs. So don't say one word ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... entered, she had been hard at work, nor had she let up once throughout the conversation. Undoubtedly she was a busy woman. "Up at half-past five," "to bed the last thing at night," "workin' fit ter drop," thirteen years of it, and for reward, grey hairs, frowzy clothes, stooped shoulders, slatternly figure, unending toil in a foul and noisome coffee-house that faced on an alley ten feet between the walls, and a waterside environment that was ugly and sickening, to say ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... Opposite to the fire-place on the left side is another door leading into Daniel Murray's workshop, and beside this door is a large dresser with crockery, &c. At the back beneath the window is a table near which KATE, the servant, a slatternly dressed girl of some thirty years of age or more, is seated. She is carefully examining some cakes of soda bread, and has a bucket beside her into which she throws ...
— The Drone - A Play in Three Acts • Rutherford Mayne
... almost with her first look at Rose. Rodney's attempts at description of her had been well meaning; but what he had prepared his sister for, unconsciously of course, in his emphasis on one or two phases of their first acquaintance, had been a sort of slatternly Amazon. But the effect of this was, really, very happy; because when a perfectly presentably clad, well-bred, admirably poised young girl came into the room and greeted her neither shyly nor eagerly, nor with any affectation of ease, a girl who didn't ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... A large slatternly woman stood in the back doorway, a woman who might possibly have been a pretty girl once but whose passing charms had long been utterly sponged out. A perceptible growth of hair lent a somewhat repulsive appearance to a face which ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... it would be for you to conceive, even if I could describe, the careless desolation which pervaded the whole place; the shaggy unkempt grounds we passed through to approach the house; the ruinous, rackrent, tumble-down house itself, the untidy, slatternly all but beggarly appearance of the mistress of the mansion herself. The smallest Yankee farmer has a tidier estate, a tidier house, and a tidier wife than this member of the proud southern chivalry, who, however, inasmuch as he has ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... if the fruits were meagre that was the fault of the rainy summer, perhaps. The market- place was very dirty, and so was the narrow street leading down from it to the Rhine, which ran swift as a mountain torrent along a slatternly quay. A bridge of boats crossing the stream shook in the rapid current, and a long procession of market carts passed slowly over, while a cluster of scows waited in picturesque patience for the draw ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... mansion still erect, with some insignia of its former state—some scutcheon, some holy or courageous motto, on the lintel. The local antiquary points out where famous and well-born people had their lodging; and as you look up, out pops the head of a slatternly woman from the countess's window. The Bedouins camp within Pharaoh's palace walls, and the old war-ship is given over to the rats. We are already a far way from the days when powdered heads were plentiful ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... palette do not always a picture make; mediocrity loves to mask itself behind artistic innovations. For the world at large impressionism spells improvisation—an easy-going, slatternly, down-at-the-heel process, facile as well as factitious. Albert Wolff must have thought these things when he sat for his portrait to Manet. His surprise was great when the artist demanded as many sittings as would have done the painstaking Bonnat. Whistler shocked Ruskin when ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... it that started the "tassel manufactory" in New York, where it had been meant to open a physician's office. Only thirteen years old when she left school, she had but little aid beside a steady purpose in preparing for her career. We hear of her slatternly habits; but who would ever guess them, who remembers the quiet, tasteful dress of ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... you may take care to be extremely well dressed; that is, as the fashionable people are; this does by no means consist in the finery, but in the taste, fitness, and manner of wearing your clothes; a fine suit ill-made, and slatternly or stiffly worn, far from adorning, only exposes the awkwardness of the wearer. Get the best French tailor to make your clothes, whatever they are, in the fashion, and to fit you: and then wear them, button ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... splendor, despite facile arguments to the contrary, is a very real and worthy achievement. It is regrettable, by the way, that the entrances and foyers to these grandiose interiors should be so paltry, slatternly, and inadequate. If the entrances to the great financial establishments reminded me of opera-houses, the entrances to opera-houses ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... all that was homelike and comfortable passed from our little house. For three days after the funeral the neglected clothes still hung on the line in the back yard, but on the fourth morning a slatternly girl, with red hair and arms, came from the grocery store at the corner, and gathered them in. My little sister was put to nurse with Mrs. Cudlip next door, and when, at the end of the week, President went off to work somewhere in ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... and a greater against this, that it is contrary to truth. Few, or none of our English ladies of pleasure exercise the mystery of painting, and bating the odoriferous particles of gin, which sometimes exhale from their breaths, there are many of them, without any disparagement, as little slatternly in their persons, as most other fine ladies in a morning; indeed, if such descriptions had the same effect on the minds of youth, that raw-head and bloody-bones have upon children, to frighten them from the objects they ...
— Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela (1754) • Anonymous
... or eight years of age, naked and not ashamed. Captain Guzman, who spoke Spanish as well as the American, explained that they desired food and lodging for the night. The husband told them they were welcome, while the slatternly helpmate said nothing, but did her part with commendable diligence. No fire was burning, nor was one started, though the cinders on the outside showed that food was sometimes cooked after the manner of civilized peoples. ...
— Up the Forked River - Or, Adventures in South America • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... his hat and obeyed. A few yards down the street Pamela found her destination, and entered a gloomy little shop. A slatternly woman looked at her curiously ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... conduct and idleness, as his friend the stern Colonel of the Twentieth Regiment. O blessed idleness! Divine lazy nymph! Reach me a novel as I lie in my dressing-gown at three o'clock in the afternoon; compound a sherry-cobbler for me, and bring me a cigar! Dear slatternly, smiling Enchantress! They may assail thee with bad names—swear thy character away, and call thee the Mother of Evil; but, for all that, thou art the ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was what is called rather a fine woman: a woman of large scale and full development; whose slatternly habit left her coarse black hair to tumble in snake-locks about her face and shoulders half the day; who, clad in half-hooked clothes, bore herself notoriously and unabashed in her fullness; and of whom ill things were said regarding the lodger. The gossips had their excuse. ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... and they made war on him in concert. This would have interested the citizens but it was too many on one to amount to anything as a fight, and so they commanded the peace and the foreign dog coiled his tail and took sanctuary under the wagon. Slatternly negro girls and women slouched along with pails deftly balanced on their heads, and joined the group and stared. Little half dressed white boys, and little negro boys with nothing whatever on but tow-linen shirts with a fine southern exposure, came from various directions and stood ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... regrettable moment of absent-mindedness she bore to the Professor a son, whom she brings up on Spartan principles, and little else. Her home is a centre of slatternly discomfort. She rises early, but, having locked herself into her study, for the better composition of a discourse on "The Sacred Right of Revolt for Women," she forgets that both the tea and the coffee are locked in with her, and learns subsequently with surprise, but without regret, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 29, 1890 • Various
... pleasure in visions untidy, A wrapper all hole-y, a buttonless shoe, A slatternly matron with nothing to do; And all the ill-luck charged to ominous Friday Can never compare with the ills that ensue On wretched housekeeping and ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... sluggish evening breeze. Nothing can be more suggestive of lazily industrious Jewry than this short, thick-set clothier, with the curved nose, and spiral, oily hair, who sits out on the sidewalk and blows clouds from his meerschaum pipe. The women who lounge here are generally stoutish and slatternly, with few clothes on, but plenty of frowzy hair. Here and there one may see a pretty face among the younger girls; and it is sad to reflect that these little Hebrew maids will become stout and slatternly by and by, and have hooked noses ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... confessed by those who suffer from it or who are participants, as mere witnesses, in its tyranny. It is the obsession of man by the flower. In the shape of the flower his own paltriness revisits him—his triviality, his sloth, his cheapness, his wholesale habitualness, his slatternly ostentation. These return to him and wreak upon him their dull revenges. What the tyranny really had grown to can be gauged nowhere so well as in country lodgings, where the most ordinary things of design and ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... treason thirty years ago. Calm, grim, and silent, conscious of their power, merciful in their strength, superb in their disdain of insult, their contempt of danger, their indifference to absolute outrage,—for maddened men showered the ranks with mud and gravel, and foul-mouthed, slatternly women—vile, unclean harpies of the slums—dipped their brooms in the reeking gutters and slashed their filth into the stern, soldierly faces,—for hours, for days, they coolly held that misguided, drink-crazed, ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... trained college woman. And the reason why such homes and such villages are so often barren of grace and variety is just because these fine qualities have not ruled them. The higher graces of civilization halt among us; dainty and finished ways of living give place to common ways, while vulgar tastes, slatternly habits, clouds and despondency reign in the house. Little children under five years of age die in needless thousands because of the dull, unimaginative women on whom they depend. Such women have been ...
— Why go to College? an Address • Alice Freeman Palmer
... has undulated the horizon in so many artificial mole-hills, that it is full as unnatural as if it was drawn with a rule and compasses. Nothing is done to the house; there are not even chairs in the great apartment. My Lord Anson is more slatternly than the Churchills, and does not even finish children. I am going to write to Lord Beauchamp, that I shall be at Oxford on the 15th, where I depend upon meeting you. I design to see Blenheim, and Rousham, (is not that the name of Dormer's?) and Althorp, and Drayton, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... use of the "comforter," for should it roll in the dirty gutter she promptly returns it to its proper place, the baby's mouth. Untidy, slatternly girls, not over-clean, not over-dressed, and certainly not over-fed, we leave them to their play ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... chance; here at last was regular employment. It was one step forward. Would he be able to hold it? This seemed doubtful on the morrow after he had realized the nature of his surroundings. He was set to work in a large room full of men, boys, and slatternly-dressed girls. He was both scolded and laughed at for the inevitable awkwardness of a new beginner, and soon his name and history began to be whispered about. During the noon recess a rude fellow flung ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... pretty good sense, but of slatternly habits. She had been so long without a lady to guide her that her original training was either forgotten or entirely disregarded. Once, when starting to Conacanarra for Christmas, I charged her to take advantage of the fine weather to give the passage floors a thorough scrubbing; they were bare ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... till its threatful mass had sunk to an abject heap. Thus all devouring Death—nay, nay! it is all sheltering, all restoring mother Nature, receiving again into her mighty matrix the stuff worn out in the fashioning toil of her wasteful, greedy, and slatternly children. In her genial bosom, the exhausted gathers life, the effete becomes generant, the disintegrate returns to resting and capable form. The rolling oscillating globe dips it for an aeon in ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... reeked with unwholesome winter damps below, and peered curiously out with frowzy heads and beautiful eyes from the high, heavy-shuttered casements above. Every court had its carven well to show me, in the noisy keeping of the water-carriers and the slatternly, statuesque gossips of the place. The remote and noisome canals were pathetic with empty old palaces peopled by herds of poor, that decorated the sculptured balconies with the tatters of epicene linen, and patched the lofty ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... the house from morning to night on days not made sacred by the use of the carriage. Now Lotta Luxa was clean in the midst of her work; and one would have thought that the cleanliness of the maid would have shamed the slatternly ways of the mistress. But Madame Zamenoy and Lotta Luxa had lived together long, and probably knew each ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope
... author intended or would, perhaps, allow. In private life this is seen in the preference shown for diamond earrings and Paris toilettes over neat and effective household service. The contrast between the slatternly, unkempt maid-servant who opens the door to you and the general luxury of the house itself is sometimes of the most startling, not to say appalling, description. It is not a sufficient answer to say that good servants are not so easily obtained in America ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... nursery without a nurse, too, so that partly accounted for it. Meg, the eldest, was only sixteen, and could not be expected to be much of a disciplinarian, and the slatternly but good-natured girl, who was supposed to combine the duties of nursery-maid and housemaid, had so much to do in her second capacity that the first suffered considerably. She used to lay the nursery meals ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... back to his comfortless lodgings aflame with bewilderment, indignation and despair. He fell upon Mrs. Buttershaw, a slatternly and sour-visaged woman, and hurled at her a tornado of questions. She responded with the glee of a hag, and Aristide learned the amazing fact that in the matter of sheer uncharitableness, unkindness and foulness of thought Beverly Stoke, with its population of three hundred hinds, could ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... care to go without you. You wouldn't have her like one of those slatternly women you see standing at the corners, with their fists in their sides and their elbows sticking out, ready to talk to anybody that comes ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... leave on the hearth stone a piece of money as a reward behind them. But should the house be dirty, never would the Fairies enter it to hold their nightly revels, unless, forsooth, they came to punish the slatternly servant. Such was the popular opinion, and it must have acted as an incentive to order and cleanliness. These ideas have ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... where nature had made so little difference, circumstances should have made so much, and that her mother, as handsome as Lady Bertram, and some years her junior, should have an appearance so much more worn and faded, so comfortless, so slatternly, so shabby. But Sunday made her a very creditable and tolerably cheerful-looking Mrs. Price, coming abroad with a fine family of children, feeling a little respite of her weekly cares, and only discomposed if she saw her boys run into danger, or Rebecca ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... slatternly and dirty, with hair uncombed, dress disordered, shoes down at heel, lolling, lounging, stooping in various attitudes, were some half-dozen women, Alice being nearest the fire on one side. Most of them ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... winter's noon was more night-like than the depth of summer's night; dim-purple brooded the low skies over the white earth, as Susan rode up to what had been Michael Hurst's abode while living. It was a small farm-house carelessly kept outside, slatternly tended within. The pretty Nelly Hebthwaite was pretty still; her delicate face had never suffered from any long-enduring feeling. If anything, its expression was that of plaintive sorrow; but the soft, light hair had scarcely a tinge of gray; the wood-rose tint of ...
— Half a Life-Time Ago • Elizabeth Gaskell
... If I had seen in one of those mills (but I did not, though I looked for something of this kind with a sharp eye), the most lisping, mincing, affected, and ridiculous young creature that my imagination could suggest, I should have thought of the careless, moping, slatternly, degraded, dull reverse (I HAVE seen that), and should have been still well pleased ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... in the dining-room to invite the criticism of Helen and her aunt, even though they had been disposed to be critical; there was no evidence of slatternly management. Everything was plain, but neat. The ceiling was high and wide; and the walls were of dainty whiteness, relieved here and there by bracket-shelves containing shiny crockery and glassware. ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... hither by curiosity, and of gamblers of all grades from the professional expert to the "tin-horn," Houston found his way around the corner of the building, down into an alley, dark, dismal and reeking with filth. Here were groups of slatternly, unkempt women, some of whom stared at him with brazen faces, while others slunk away, not ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... charity of the thoughtless almsgiver, whose unsteady hand would give them a feast to-day and a famine to-morrow. There is deep satisfaction in cooperating with such families to conquer difficulties. There is a deeper satisfaction, however, in turning a sham home into a real one; in teaching the slatternly, irresponsible mother the pleasure of a cleanly, well-ordered home; in helping a man who has lost his sense of responsibility toward wife and children to regain it. Even at the risk of drawing a too gloomy picture, I dwell in this ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... Within, a fire of good Wessex logs crackled cheerily upon the hearth. Old ABRAHAM PEEP sat on one side of the fireplace, his figure yet telling a tale of former vigour. On the other sat POLLY, his wife, an aimless, neutral, slatternly peasant woman, such as in these parts a man may find with the profusion of Wessex blackberries. An empty chair between them spoke with all an empty chair's eloquence of an absent inmate. A butter-churn stood in a corner next to an ancient clock that had ticked ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 102, May 7, 1892 • Various
... the house. It was a rambling, dilapidated, two-story structure, sadly in need of paint and repairs, and bespeaking occupancy by a family none too well blessed with the better things of existence. They proceeded to the door and rang the bell. A slatternly woman answered their summons, ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... take so much pride, one would suppose they would desire to see their children able to support themselves. But it is just the reverse; the poorer folk are, the less they seem to care to try to do something. 'You come home if you don't like it;' and stay about the hovel in slatternly idleness, tails bedraggled and torn, thin boots out at the toes and down at the heels, half starved on potatoes and weak tea—stay till you fall into disgrace, and lose the only thing you possess in the world—your birthright, your character. ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... affrighted at the wide, empty space overhead and round about them, finding the air too little medicated with smoke, soot, and graveyard exhalations, to be breathed with comfort, and feeling shelterless and lost because grimy London, their slatternly and disreputable mother, had suffered them to stray ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... and maternal to Peter; but to-night she was more so than usual. Looking at her as she stood in her loose, slatternly neglige, beneath the extravagantly blazing chandelier, the red bundle cuddling a round black head into her neck, her grey eyes smiling at him, lit with love and laughter and a pity that lay deeper than both, Peter was caught into ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... of the passengers his seat was his temporary home, and most of the passengers were slatternly housekeepers. But one seat looked clean and deceptively cool. In it were an obviously prosperous man and a black-haired, fine-skinned girl whose pumps rested ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... Vive la France!" They waved flags—not the tri-colour, but flags which had been given them in Switzerland. They clung together dazed, women with slatternly dresses, children with peaked faces, men unhappy and unshaven. A woman caught sight of my uniform. "Vive l'Angleterre," she cried, and they all came stumbling forward to embrace me. It was horrible. They creaked like automatons. They gestured and mouthed, but the soul had been ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... of wholesomeness and comfort, he chose to spend the hours of the Sabbath during which the public-house was closed; and other hours. Small wonder, looking at the fine, capable figure of the woman, now bustling about with teapot and cups, he should esteem Mrs Brome personally above the slatternly skeleton ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... This ironmonger's daughter had "pink cheeks and a white skin, but no distinctive character, no opinions, no occupation, no amusements, no vigor of mind, no temper; she was a mere female machine." Being a "blonde, she wore draggled sea-green or slatternly sky-blue dresses," went about slip-shod and in curl-papers all day till dinner-time. She died and left Sir Pitt for the second time a widower, "to-morrow to fresh ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... morning and dressed in the room without fire, shivering now as they drew on their stockings, frozen stiff. They had their morning coffee in a chilly room downstairs, where sometimes their slatternly landlady appeared, lugubriously voluble. This morning they ate alone, in silence, and none too happily. Even Annie's buoyant spirits seemed inadequate. A trace of bitterness was in ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... at any time and to Julie, who had stared at the rows of slatternly kept backyards until she grew familiar with each battered garbage can, the sight was hateful. The rain had driven even the starved alley cats to cover, and with a sigh forlorn in its wretchedness, she turned from the window and contemplated her nicely furnished bedroom. The two days she had been ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... swiftly to the kitchen from the inner yard. He had stood so long in silence on the step, and his coming was so noiseless, that he surprised a long, thin trollop of a woman, with a long, thin, scraggy neck, seated by the slatternly table, and busy with a frowsy paper-covered volume, over which her head was bent in ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... that of a slatternly woman of middle age, thin and complaining. She had come suddenly into the kitchen of the Hoover farmhouse and surprised Bessie King as the girl sat resting for a moment ...
— A Campfire Girl's First Council Fire - The Camp Fire Girls In the Woods • Jane L. Stewart
... creeping through the shutter-chinks found her thinking still; but ere the dull sounds of awakening life were heard above stairs, and before the coming of the sleepy, slatternly maid to "do the parlor," Mrs. York ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... to the bed, and gave Mr. Robson a good shaking. The landlady, a slatternly sailor's wife, now entered with a light. Only a few minutes before, she had managed to get Tom undressed, somehow ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... Nay, not to houses slatternly or idle would I have given thee, distaff, seeing that thou art a countryman of mine. For that is thy native city which Archias out of Ephyre founded, long ago, the very marrow of the isle of the three capes, a ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... asked a little boy, whether the same man could remember and not know the same thing, and the boy said No, because he was frightened, and could not see what was coming, and then Socrates made fun of poor me. The truth is, O slatternly Socrates, that when you ask questions about any assertion of mine, and the person asked is found tripping, if he has answered as I should have answered, then I am refuted, but if he answers something else, then he is refuted and not I. For do you really suppose ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... shut off in little squares by wire fences. Then one will be permitted to ride along a trail between rows of squalid homesteads flanked by piles of old boots and provision-cans. We will have exchanged the stockrider for the slouching farmer with a swarm of unkempt children and a slatternly, scolding wife then." ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... diligently and as deftly as if she had never demonstrated a problem in Euclid or heard of Sophocles. In what way had women become unfitted for their sphere by a liberal education? In no way whatever. If some highly educated women are inefficient housekeepers, and slatternly in their persons, so also are many who neither know how to read nor write; just as there are many impracticable, inefficient, and slovenly men who are highly educated, and ignorant men who are also ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... not in school, using it for playground, lunch-room, and loafing-place, and regarding it as pleasanter than home. Imagine going to school half fed and poorly clothed, sometimes the butt of a playmate's gibes because of a drunken father or a slatternly mother, required to study subjects that make no appeal to the child and in a language that is not native, and then back to the street, perhaps to sell papers until far into the night, or to run at the beck and call of the public as a messenger boy. Many a ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... been one of some pretensions, but had now fallen upon evil days and become the abode of a number of petty tradesmen, such as cobblers, sellers of fruit and cheap drinks, dealers in second-hand goods of every description, and riffraff generally. It swarmed with dirty, slatternly women, still dirtier half-naked children, lean and hungry-looking dogs, and lazy, hulking men with brass ear-rings in their ears, the rags of tawdry finery upon their bodies, and their sashes perfect batteries ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... in its garish yellow brightness full down upon us, as we stand together, illuminating my plain, scorched face, the slatternly looseness of my hair, and the burnt hole in ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... house-keeping. Mrs. Hilary cast her eye about the room at the word, as if she had seen quite enough of it already, and this made Louise laugh again. She was no better in person than the room was, and she felt her mother's tacit censure apply to her slatternly dressing-gown. ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... and Arabs and Egyptians for a night's lodging and the price of a meal. There were four of them, and, so far as I could see, all four were Greeks. Two were evidently man and wife. They were both old, both slatternly and almost in rags; the man a thin, sallow-faced fellow, with grey hair and a black moustache; the woman fat, coarse of face, unwieldy of body. Of the other two, one it seemed must be their daughter, ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... the hacienda has an owner; and with all their indolence, the lounging leperoa outside, and slatternly wenches within, have a master. He is not often at home, but when he is they address him as "Don Faustino." Servants rarely ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... a slatternly young woman, a few seats farther forward, moved, with a "don't care" sort of look, to answer ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... instanter into the apartment where I had discovered all the signs of female inquisitiveness, which I have before detailed. There I discovered a small woman, in a robe equally slatternly and fine, with a sharp pointed nose, small, cold, grey eyes, and a complexion high towards the cheek bones, but waxing of a light green before it reached the wide and querulous mouth, which, well I ween, seldom ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... She had the feeling that her father was so remote from her that she could hardly see him. She opened her lips to speak, but at that moment the maid—the latest acquisition from the employment agency, a slatternly Irish girl—went through the dining-room on her way to answer the door-bell, and her father's amused comment cut her short. "Lydia, you'll have your guests thinking they're at a lunch counter if you let that girl go on wearing that ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... in the estimation of some already biased minds, might be considered as indirectly substantiated by what has been said of the Frenchman's two whales. Elsewhere in this volume the slanderous aspersion has been disproved, that the vocation of whaling is throughout a slatternly, untidy business. But there is another thing to rebut. They hint that all whales always smell bad. Now how did this ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... convolutions of the valley, until it became a thread; on the right it turned sharply by a clump of trees which marked a farm. In the middle of it all, in the grateful shadow cast by a wayside cafe, sat Paragot and myself, watching with thirsty eyes the buxom but slatternly patronne pour out beer from a bottle. A dirty, long-haired mongrel terrier lapped water from an earthenware bowl, at the foot of the wooden table at which we sat. This was Narcisse, a recent member of our vagabond family, whom my master had casually adopted some weeks before and had ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... sitting disconsolately in a corner. It was hard to say to what class of people the house belonged; poor people they were of course; and things looked as if they were simply living there because too poor to live anywhere else. A slatternly woman stared at the intruders; a dirty child crawled over the hearth. Daisy could not endure to touch anything, except with the soles of her shoes. So she stood upright in the middle of the floor; till ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... him to keep it clean, but pays no servant to wash or sweep; and, while enjoining the absence of dirt, it checks and hampers that desire to decorate, which is the positive side of order and taste. The result is, broadly, slatternly schools. ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... they bain't pretty words, Father—not by no manner of means. She's for ever and the day after interfering with every mortal thing one does. And her own house is just right-down slatternly, and her children are coming up any how. If she'd just spend the time a-scouring as she spends a-chattering, her house 'd be the cleanest place in Oxfordshire. But as for the poor children, I'm that sorry! Whatever they do, or don't do, they get a slap for ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... say, it had hardly dawned upon me what was happening. I turned to Amroth, who stood there smiling, but a little pale, his arm in mine; fresh and upright, with his slim and graceful limbs, his bright curled hair, a strange contrast to the slatternly women and ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... on this present occasion there is a goodly crowd outside and in, some well dressed and some slatternly, some bareheaded out of respect to the Judge, and others of necessity, but all with a look ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... a history of a London pavement, with this exception, that the gamin had a mother to whom he presented me without undue formality. The impression made upon me by that lady at first was unfavourable, since she was slatternly, drank, and was apparently given to cuffing and kicking the boy—her only child. I considered her an abandoned and unfeeling female. She dwelt in Drury Lane and sold something that most of ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... taking his turn at agitating the button and shaking the gates; and with no more profit of his undertaking than Hickey. After a minute or two of it he acknowledged defeat with an oath, and turned away to browbeat the straggling vanguard of belated wayfarers,—messenger-boys, slatternly drabs, hackmen, loafers, and one or two plain citizens conspicuously out of their reputable grooves,—who were drifting in at the entrance to line the lobby walls with blank, curious faces. Forerunners of that mysterious rabble which is apparently precipitated ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... A slatternly woman, who had come to the door of the tumble-down house at the sound of the dog's yelps, poured out a volume of vituperation at the girls, most of it, fortunately, being lost in the chugging ...
— The Motor Girls on Waters Blue - Or The Strange Cruise of The Tartar • Margaret Penrose
... close behind her, his mind filled with the singular story which she had so briefly yet powerfully suggested. That she was a lady masquerading in rough clothing was evident even before she spoke, and the picture she made, sitting in the midst of that throng of rough men and slatternly women, had profoundly stirred his imagination. He longed to know more of her history, and it was the hope of still further serving her which led him to ride up ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... marriage, after marriage gradually reveals himself to be hopelessly selfish, or develops a craving for brandy, or becomes merely brutal and ill-tempered; or whether it is the creature of all angelic gifts and graces who, after her marriage, destroys the romance of domestic life by her slatternly ways, or sinks into the condition of a confirmed sigher, or in time discovers to her husband that he has married a woman comprising in herself, to use the American phrase, nine distinct sorts of a born fool. These discoveries are common in life; but they generally follow marriage, ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... bones.' With this, the undertaker's wife opened a side door, and pushed Oliver down a steep flight of stairs into a stone cell, damp and dark: forming the ante-room to the coal-cellar, and denominated 'kitchen'; wherein sat a slatternly girl, in shoes down at heel, and blue worsted stockings very much out ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... as soon as he had finished an uncomfortable supper in his wretched home, filled with quarrelling children, and ruled by a slatternly, shrill-voiced mother, he hurried out to try and induce some of his companions to accompany him down into the mine in a search for Derrick. He had some difficulty in doing this, for the other boys were badly frightened by what had taken place, and ...
— Derrick Sterling - A Story of the Mines • Kirk Munroe
... impression created upon her was that some evil charm was over the place, that in the sweet sunlight it lay drugged, that in those rows of slatternly shacks where the sunlight did not enter men either hid in dark secrecy or lay in some unnatural stupour. The whole settlement seemed preternaturally quiet; the fancy came to her that the town had died long ago and that she ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... fortune brought to his door at a time when the forlornness of his changed position was continually accentuated by the untidy irregularity of his life and surroundings. He was only able to afford to engage the shiftless services of a slatternly negro girl, rendered insubordinate by her newly acquired freedom, and he had begun to feel that he should never again find himself encompassed by the decorous system of a ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the last words of the dying man. As to her being a person of refinement and well dressed, they are, as you perceive, handsomely mounted in solid gold, and it is inconceivable that anyone who wore such glasses could be slatternly in other respects. You will find that the clips are too wide for your nose, showing that the lady's nose was very broad at the base. This sort of nose is usually a short and coarse one, but there are a sufficient number of exceptions ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... wooden table, loaded with coarse food—black bread, boiled cabbage, bacon, eggs, a great chine from a wild boar, sausages, such as we eat nowadays, and flagons and jars of beer and wine, Along the board sat ranged in the order of the household the followers and retainers. Four or five slatternly women and girls served the others as they fed noisily at the table, moving here and there behind the men with wooden or pewter dishes of food, now and then laughing at the jests that passed or joining in the talk. A huge fire blazed and crackled and roared in the great open fireplace, before ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle
... soon swept away, for the detachment was composed of about fifty unhappy, thin-looking men in white flannel jackets, sitting about or leaning over the bulwarks, smoking and watching the dock quay where stood a group of slatternly-looking women, staring wearily at the ship; and now and then one of them would wave a hand or a handkerchief to the men in white flannel, a salute as often as not evoking no response, though sometimes a man would take off his ugly blue woollen forage-cap ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... "Sirs," said I, "your slatternly wenches may be dead ere they match Mistress Hortense! As for wearing light colours, the devil himself is painted black. Let them who are doing shameful acts to the innocent walk shamefacedly! For shame, sirs, ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... very much younger. Only they seemed to be girls with a difference, girls who had somehow lost their girlhood. The rather nauseating atmosphere which enveloped them, the way they were huddled together yet never ceased to drive on their tasks, the slatternly uncorseted figures, stolid faces and furtive glances; by something indefinable in their situation, these girls seemed to have been degraded and dehumanized, to have lost something ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... midst of a stony moor. The inhabitants, of whom a good share were broken-down beggars and nondescript fishermen, varied their discouraged existences by drinking, wood sawing and doing odd jobs for the surrounding farmers, while their slatternly women idled at the doors and the children grew up wild, trooping over the surrounding waste. Politically, the place was noted for its unreliability. It was well known that every suffrage in it was open to corruption. In ordinary times the Rouges troubled ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... windows conspicuous in a lightless waste. From time to time, as they hurried on, they encountered, and made wide detours to escape contact with knots of wayfarers—men debased and begrimed, with dreary and slatternly women, arm in arm, zigzaging widely across the sidewalks, chorusing with sodden voices the burden of some popularized ballad. The cheapened, sentimental refrains echoed sadly between ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... survey of the labors of a family of ten members, including four or five young children, and, looking, seemed at once to throw them into system; matured her plans, arranged her hours of washing, ironing, baking, and cleaning; rose early, moved deftly; and in a single day the slatternly and littered kitchen assumed that neat, orderly appearance that so often strikes one in New England farm-houses. The work seemed to be all gone. Every thing was nicely washed, brightened, put in place, and staid in ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... one place, the Mayers went out very early to the woods, and gathering green boughs, decorated every door with one. A house containing a sweetheart had a branch of birch, the door of a scold was disgraced with alder, and a slatternly person had the mortification to find a branch of a nut-tree at hers, while the young people who overslept found their doors closed by ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various |
