"Womanly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... men which she had thought it right to assume had made her anticipate the more keenly the freedom which one man would bring her. She frankly admitted the strength of her nature, she almost had admitted it to him; should she always be able to control the strong womanly vanity which would give him something more than a passing glimpse of the woman, making him forget the girl? If she did anything so reprehensible, it would be the last glimpse he would take of her, ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... purpose of compelling his suit, if necessary. His love had been the product of his animalistic nature. It was a purely sensual appeal. He had never known the true interpretation of love; never experienced the society of a womanly woman. But it is in every nature to respond to the highest touch; to the appeal of honor. When trust is reposed, fidelity answers. It did its best to answer in Waterbury's case. His better ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... writing this novel. It was to honor and magnify the sweetness and dignity of the condition of Motherhood, and of those womanly virtues and graces, which make the Home the cornerstone of the Nation. For it is not with modern Americans, as it was with the old Greek and Roman world. They put the family below the State, and the citizen ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... course and sacrifice all for the love of one man, adjusting her life to his whims. She must, instead, develop her own personality and talents, advancing in learning, in the arts, in science, and in business, cherishing at the same time her noble womanly qualities. Susan hoped that some day the full development of woman's individuality would be compatible with marriage, and she held up as an ideal the words which Elizabeth Barrett Browning put into the mouth ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... was dark, but not so dark as she appeared on the stage, and her face was thinner, a little careworn, it seemed to him; and her eyes—"those leering, wicked eyes"—were large and deep and soft. Her figure was firm, compact, womanly, and modest in every line. No wife could have seemed more of the home than this famous actress who faced him with hands ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... the field. The flag waves over no such faithfulness; its stars sparkle not like this sincerity. The feeling and heroism of women are enough to refresh and to remould the generation. Like subtle lightning, the womanly nature is penetrating the life of the age. From every railroad-station the ponderous train bore off its freight of living valor, amid the cheers of sympathizing thousands who clustered upon every shed and pillar, and yearned forward as if to make their tumultuous feelings the motive power to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... guiltily. The laugh shook you. You saw all that he could never see: inside the room the great ladies and latest American countesses, eager to help, forgetful of self, full of wonderful, womanly sympathy; and outside, the Place de la Concorde, the gardens of the Tuileries, the trees of the Champs-Elysees, the sun setting behind the gilded dome of the Invalides. All these were lost to him, and yet as he sat in the darkness, because ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... man need consider that he forfeits dignity if he speaks with his whole heart: no woman need fear she forfeits her womanly attributes if she responds as her heart bids her respond. "Perfect love casteth out fear" is as true now as when the maxim was first given ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... him, the blessed solace of rest and calm that he so needed. It is thus that Edward Devrient, the great German actor, and one of Mendelssohn's most intimate friends, describes her: "Cecile was one of those sweet womanly natures whose gentle simplicity, whose mere presence, soothed and pleased. She was slight, with features of striking beauty and delicacy; her hair was between brown and gold, but the transcendent lustre of her great blue eyes, and the brilliant roses ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... way home there was a singing at her heart, a certainty of joys undreamt of hitherto, the tenderest, sweetest, most womanly joys—her own house, her own husband, her own children—perhaps; it all ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... She was a very womanly little girl, with a quaint, old-fashioned manner which Elsie thought quite charming. It was touching to see the devoted affection with which she hovered over and waited upon her sick father. She was seldom absent from his side for more than a few minutes at a time, except when he sent her out ...
— The Two Elsies - A Sequel to Elsie at Nantucket, Book 10 • Martha Finley
... uncommonly foolish, which could serve her as food for laughter, and down this path again we must always go when that villain Hayes was of the party, and she wanted to play me off against him, or him against me, or both against her womanly vanities. Accordingly I found them equipped for a walk, loitering on the front piazza, not waiting for me, however, as Dora took pains to explain, and as I could readily believe, for they were flirting over a new song. Not in the best of humor, I took the offered seat near them, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... filial duty and womanly modesty condemn the step I am taking, yet holy charity, surmounting all other ties, justifies this act. Fly; the doors of thy prison are open: my father and his domestics are absent; but they may soon return. Be gone in safety; and may the angels ...
— The Castle of Otranto • Horace Walpole
... there in the center of the living-room floor. And if any human face, in the space of seventeen seconds, could be capable of expressing relief, and regret, and alarm, and dismay, and tenderness, and wonder, and a great womanly sympathy, Emma McChesney's countenance might be said to have expressed all those emotions—and more. The last two were uppermost as she slowly came ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... the strangest dream about that beautiful mansion I was telling you I saw in my ride the other day—that 'Summer Home,' as it is so sweetly styled. I thought I saw a lovely young girl there, younger than myself, but far more womanly in aspect, and she said she was my cousin, and kissed me, and gave me rare flowers and delicious fruit. Did you say father had called for me? Well, I'll dress and go down in the parlor. What ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... arose, scanned once more the beautiful valley before me, and indicated that I was about to wane into the invisible. Then did her womanly nature assert its supremacy and she, for the first time, touched ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... lift those thus favored above the hardened commonplace of human life, creatures not exactly angels, yet moving in the same atmosphere with angels. The monasteries, even those into whose gates women are forbidden to look, all have stories of womanly excellence which the monks tell each other in pauses from labor in the lentil patch, and in their cells after vesper prayers. In brief, so did Sergius' estimate of the Princess increase that he was unaware ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... lasted only a few years in England. In 1815 he married Miss Milbanke, an English heiress, who abruptly left him a year later. With womanly reserve she kept silence; but the public was not slow to imagine plenty of reasons for the separation. This, together with the fact that men had begun to penetrate the veil of romantic secrecy with which Byron surrounded himself and found a rather brassy idol beneath, turned the tide of public opinion ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... simple, and yet so indescribably delicious, that very glad indeed I am that thou art not a man, but a woman, and that it is I that am the man. And it would be a crime in the Creator to gratify thy wish by making thee a man, who art the very essence of all womanly perfection and attraction. And for satisfaction of thy wish, look at thyself through my eyes, and thy wish is attained, since I am myself the very mirror provided thee by the Creator for that very purpose. And so learn, by my mouth, that ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... October 1802, when he brought home his young wife, Mary Hutchinson, his sister's long-time friend, to their cottage at Townend. This is she whom he has sung in the lines—'She was a phantom of delight;' of whom he said in plain prose, 'She has a sweetness all but angelic, simplicity the most entire, womanly self-respect and purity of heart speaking through all her looks, acts, and movements.' The advent of Mrs. Wordsworth brought no change to Dorothy. She still continued to fill to her brother and his wife the ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... was bidden, and considered the Doctor's behaviour. She observed that he embraced the boy three times in the course of the evening, and managed generally to confound and abash the little fellow out of speech and appetite. But she had the true womanly heroism in little affairs. Not only did she refrain from the cheap revenge of exposing the Doctor's errors to himself, but she did her best to remove their ill-effect on Jean-Marie. When Desprez went out for his last breath of air before retiring for the night, she came over to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not all the better for this pleasantry? so womanly, so genial, so rich, and so without a sting,—such a true diversion, with none of the sin of effort or of mere cleverness; and how it takes us into the midst of the strong-brained and strong-hearted men and women of that time! what an atmosphere of sense and good-breeding ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... wistful eyes of the little lad, and in the caressing touch of Lily's hand. In the interest with which she watched the little girl as she went about intent on household cares, she well-nigh forgot her own weariness and her many causes of anxiety. There was something so womanly, yet so childish, in her quiet ways, something so winning in the grave smile that now and then played about her mouth, that her aunt was quite beguiled from her sad thoughts. In a little while Lily went to the door, and listened for her ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson
... both, Mrs. Lee Hentz has achieved a triumph of no ordinary kind. It is not that old associations bias our judgment, for though from the appearance, years since, of the famous 'Mob Cap' in this paper, we formed an exalted opinion of the womanly and literary excellence of the writer, our feelings have, in the interim, had quite sufficient leisure to cool; yet, after the lapse of years, we have continued to maintain the same literary devotion ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... melody of purely feminine lines; and the only reason why his transcripts from the female form are not gross like those of Flemish painters, repulsive like Rembrandt's, fleshly like Rubens's, disagreeable like the drawings made by criminals in prisons, is that they have little womanly about them. ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... though few have journeyed over more of the wide lands of America than myself, old and feeble as I seem. But little use is there for a horse among the hills and woods of York—that is, as York was, but as I greatly fear York is no longer—as for woollen covering and cow's milk, I covet no such womanly fashions! The beasts of the field give me food and raiment. No, I crave no cloth better than the skin of a deer, nor any meat richer ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... miracles by his magical arts, and of foretelling events by his knowledge of astrology. In the Thebaid he was so far honoured that at the bidding of the priests one of the sacred trees spoke to him, as had been their custom from of old with favourites, and in a clear and rather womanly voice addressed him as a teacher ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... might attack me and give the police the chance of coming down upon them unawares. She saw me go out of her house to what she thought would be certain death, and she never lifted a finger to keep me back. That was womanly, wasn't it?" ...
— Only an Irish Girl • Mrs. Hungerford
... appeared and were introduced to Feodora. They were shortly upon very good terms, for each of them was exceedingly well bred and possessed of purest womanly instincts. ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... Shaw's estate for more than a week after her first encounter with the feudal baron. If she found a peculiarly feminine satisfaction in speculating on his disappointment, it is not to be wondered at. Womanly insight told her that Randolph Shaw rode forth each day and watched with hawk-like vigilance for the promised trespasser. In his imagination, she could almost hear him curse the luck that was helping her to evade ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... awakened by his mother upon her return. She reproved him for his long absence, and told him of the sensation his beautiful cousin was making in society. In the morning he met Anne with some consciousness and distress. A womanly reserve and delicacy made the girl unwilling to affect an intimacy that might not be graciously acknowledged. She treated him coldly, and began to read some ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... cheeks. Equally decadent is Liszt. Liszt is a Hungarian and the Hungarians are confessedly a completely disorganized, self-outlived, dying people. No less decadent is Chopin, whose figure comes before one as flesh without bones, this morbid, womanly, womanish, slip-slop, powerless, sickly, bleached, sweet-caramel Pole!" This has a ring of Nietzsche—Nietzsche who ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... romance. She was strung heroically, and educated according to the notions of her caste and church, purely and religiously. True it is, that one can scarcely call that education which teaches woman everything except herself,—except the things that relate to her own peculiar womanly destiny, and, on plea of the holiness of ignorance, sends her without one word of just counsel into the temptations of life. Incredible as it may seem, Virginie de Frontignac had never read a romance or work of fiction of which love was the staple; the rgime of the convent ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... very moment in my little shop, home in Falmouth, I've a corner cupboard of his under repair that he wouldn't trust to another living soul! And along comes you an' say, 'That man's innocent! Look at his face!' you says, which it's downright womanly instink, if ever there was such ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... no means recovered herself when Tunis had his brief interview with her. Had she not shut herself away from him—refused to even discuss the situation with the troubled skipper of the Seamew—she must have broken down, given way to that womanly weakness born of love for the man of ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... there were lights still burning at one o'clock. One of them shone from Mr. Hatton's room at the north end of the second floor. He was officer of the day, and that accounted for it. The other beamed from the corner window at the south, and a tall, graceful, womanly form, wrapped in a heavy shawl, was leaning against the wooden pillar on the veranda. A beautiful face was upturned to the few stars that peeped through the rifts of clouds that angrily swept the heavens. Then, as one jewelled hand ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... and graciousness of manner, the same sweet womanly face, and the same depths of love and ready sympathy in her clear, calm eyes. She was dressed in mourning, and at her throat was the brooch containing the locks of the children's hair. Jack noticed it at once, and ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... arrival; among others my cousin Betty, the greatest romp in nature; she whisks me such a height over her head that I cried out for fear of falling. She pinched me, and called me squealing chit, and threw me into a girl's arms that was taken in to tend me. The girl was very proud of the womanly employment of a nurse, and took upon her to strip and dress me a-new, because I made a noise, to see what ailed me; she did so, and stuck a pin in every joint about me. I still cried; upon which she lays ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... of eight or ten was commonly represented—even by Raffaelle himself—as a dwarf Hercules, with all the gladiatorial muscles already visible in stunted rotundity. Giotto probably felt he had not power enough to give dignity to a child of three years old, and intended the womanly form to be rather typical of the Virgin's advanced mind, than an actual representation of ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... eyes she was not an attractive creature, for she possessed no clear conception of how to render apparent those few feminine charms she possessed. Negligence and total unconsciousness of self, coupled with lack of womanly companionship and guidance, had left her altogether in the rough. He marked now the coarse ragged shoes, the cheap patched skirt, the tousled auburn hair, the sunburnt cheeks with a suggestion of freckles plainly visible beneath the eyes, and some of the fastidiousness ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... wicked would be cast "into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels." He did not represent religion as a mysterious affair, the mere business of the priesthood, limited to the temple and the Sabbath, and the ceremonies thereof; it was the business of every day,—a great manly and womanly life. ...
— Two Christmas Celebrations • Theodore Parker
... infirmity. Justice and science, law and reason, are virile things, and they come before imagination, feeling, reverie, and fancy. When one reflects that Catholic superstition is maintained by women, one feels how needful it is not to hand over the reins to the "Eternal Womanly." ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... places of life, and inured to poverty and hardship; the other privileged with the best opportunities for culture, and high intellectual and social development; and yet with vision grown suddenly clear, I could detect a refinement of the soul, and true womanly honor in Mrs. Larkum that the other lacked. I was glad to notice that Mrs. Larkum's tears had ceased to flow so profusely. There was an occasional moistening of the eye from sheer joy; for she too had got her experience brightened of late. She ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... scream from the casement behind which she had hid herself, gazing with an intense womanly curiosity into the thoroughfare. The robber's face was upon a level with, and not half a dozen feet from, her pale cheeks. She marked his handsome features, and his look of wrath made her quiver as if it had been a flash of lightning. Then she broke away from the fascination of his youth and beauty, ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... which had been taken by the Duke. In all this there was much petulance, but very little dignity, while there was neither a spark of real sympathy for the oppressed millions, nor a throb of genuine womanly emotion for the impending fate of the two nobles. Her principal grief was that she had pacified the provinces, and that another had now arrived to reap the glory; but it was difficult, while the unburied ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... was Dick's conclusion. Lottie did not know. But suspicion was rife, and nothing, he was certain, under the circumstances, would gladden her woman's heart more than to discover the unimpeachable Paula as womanly ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... spite of this womanly spirit, in spite of the contempt which she felt for such miserable pride of purse and position, she was deeply wounded and made to realize, as she never yet had done, that Mrs. Richmond Montague's seamstress would henceforth be regarded as ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... like Regan and Gonerill. She is only wicked to gain a great end; and is perhaps more distinguished by her commanding presence of mind and inexorable self-will, which do not suffer her to be diverted from a bad purpose, when once formed, by weak and womanly regrets, than by the hardness of her heart or want of natural affections. The impression which her lofty determination of character makes on the mind of Macbeth is ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... installed in the soft crimson chair by the fire. It was such a comfort to hear a friendly voice after all those lonely weeks! When the servant entered with a tray, I watched her movements over the tea-cups with a delicious sense of the womanly presence and the ...
— On the Church Steps • Sarah C. Hallowell
... person. Seldom have I seen so graceful a figure, so womanly a presence, and so beautiful a face. She was a blonde, golden-haired, blue-eyed, and would no doubt have had the perfect complexion which goes with such colouring, had not her recent experience left ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... frequently, and for several months after Mr. Germaine's death, it was the scene of no ordinary grief. Mrs. Germaine bore her bereavement patiently—for it was an event she had long anticipated with womanly meekness and resignation; but she mourned most deeply—for it is a great mistake to think commonplace persons deficient in vividness of feeling. I believe their emotions are as keen, and generally more enduring, than those of more decided minds, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... smile, And told him to follow—he straightway obeyed her. As they hurried along, she kept ever before him, And he kept his eye on the tempting prunella, Secretly hoping there'd come such a shower As would make a new Flood in half-an-hour— That she, with a womanly care for her bonnet, Which would "spot," with the least drop of ...
— Nothing to Say - A Slight Slap at Mobocratic Snobbery, Which Has 'Nothing - to Do' with 'Nothing to Wear' • QK Philander Doesticks
... exchanging children grew up: German parents wrote to Magyar towns, Magyar parents to German towns, to the respective school directors, to ask if there were any pupils who could be interchanged. In this manner one child was given for another, a kind, gentle, womanly thought! ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... made extensive investigation of the subject of human magnetism and is probably the best authority on the subject, but many celebrated scientists have studied it thoroughly. In the Pittsburg Medical Review there is a description of a girl of three and a half, a blonde, and extremely womanly for her age, who possessed a wonderful magnetic power. Metal spoons would adhere to her finger-tips, nose, or chin. The child, however, could not pick up a steel needle, an article generally very ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... big man did not look at Hugh; his smile broadened on their common captor. Her answering eyes laughed, but even in them, deep down, he saw a pleading ardor at once so childlike, so womanly, and so celestial that suddenly the deck ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... pearly whiteness, while her large black eyes sparkled with an uncommon brightness that was softened by the most attractive sweetness. She possessed a strong and melodious voice, and, in short, had all the charms of womanly beauty. ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... see that she must have had a good range of books from which to choose her own reading. It is evident, that the womanly consciences of these two correspondents were anxiously alive to many questions discussed among the stricter religionists. The morality of Shakspeare needed the confirmation of Charlotte's opinion to the sensitive "E.;" and a little later, she inquired whether ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... in all that chapter of Court history. She stands out among the rough, coarse, self-seeking men and women somewhat as Sophy Western does among the personages of "Tom Jones." Her tender inclination towards Lord Hervey makes her seem all the more sweet and womanly; her influence over him is always apparent. He never speaks of her without seeming to become at once more manly and gentle, strong and sweet. Of the other princesses, Emily had perhaps the most marked character, but there would appear ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... out of the world. They were a brother and sister, the former educated for the Church, and the latter highly gifted and educated far above her condition. I never knew a woman, in any rank of life, of nobler character or a more heroic nature. She had the richest store of womanly tenderness and kindly affections. She took the veil at the Dungarvan Convent in very early youth, where she died two years afterwards. I asked for some food, and while it was being prepared I wrote the following ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... in favor of casting the bantling on the rocks. For, in spite of Mrs. Nitschkan's joyous lack of responsibility, her daughters had grown up the antitheses of herself, thoroughly feminine little creatures, already famous for those womanly accomplishments for which their mother had ever shown a marked distaste, while the sons were steady, hard-working, reputable young fellows, always to be depended upon by ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... tempests of human grief, and often the fiercer the storm the more beautiful the after effects. Viola was no longer the pale child, "the little spit-fire," by whom her Uncle Gabriel's arm had been seized in such a violent grip. A womanly gentleness had come over her whole being, and already voices were heard in the Ghetto praising her grace and beauty, which surpassed even the loveliness of her dead mother in her happiest days. Many an admiring eye dwelt upon the beautiful girl, many a longing glance was cast in the direction ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German (V.2) • Various
... that as they strode over the links that afternoon he was impressed by her fine physical bearing. There were a freedom and an ease in her movements, essentially womanly and graceful, yet independent and self-reliant, which stirred his pulses. He had been a close and absorbed student, and his observation of the other sex had been largely indifferent and formal. He knew, of course, that the modern woman had sloughed off helplessness and docile dependence on ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... she waited, and her eyes filled with tears; it was a soft, warm, round face, with coaxing, kissable lips, a smooth, low brow and the gentlest of hazel eyes: not a pretty face, excepting in its lovely childishness and its hints of womanly graces; some of the girls said she was homely. Marjorie thought herself that she was very homely; but she had comforted herself with, "God made my face, and he likes it this way." Some one says that God made the other features, but permits us to make the mouth. Marjorie's sweetness certainly ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... commanded the respect and excited the imagination of her people. As a woman, they regarded her just as she wished them to regard her, as the throned Vestal, the watery Moon, whose chaste beams could quench the fiery darts of Cupid. She was to them, in fact, the Belphoebe of Spenser, "with womanly graces, but not womanly affections—passionless, pure, self-sustained, and self-dependent"; shining "with a cold lunar light and not the warm glow of day." This feeling was increased by the spirit of chivalry which still lingered in English society, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... "moved." Was my presence the cause of the spiritual paralysis? I think not, for I was becoming conscious of reverent feeling and deeper motives. If the fair face was my Gospel message, it was already leading me beyond the thoughts of success and ambition, of mental power and artistic grace. Her womanly beauty began to awaken my moral nature, and her pure face, that looked as free from guile as any daisy with its eye turned to the sun, led me to ask, "What right have you to approach such a creature? Think of her needs, of her being first, and not your own. Would you drag her into ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... her skill and address in dealing with them that Miss Alcott deserves the celebrity that is now attached to her name. Her simple pictures of domestic country life are drawn with a firm and confident hand. They stand out in strong relief, and take their color from her own warm-hearted womanly nature. Her characters act unconsciously before us as if we looked at them through a window. In American fiction "Little Women" holds the next place to the "Scarlet ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... best fashion. These two essays [Footnote: A third essay, "The Mystery of Life," was added to Sesame and Lilies. It is a sad, despairing monologue, and the book might be better off without it.] contain Ruskin's best thought on books and womanly character, and also an outline of his teaching on nature, art and society. If we read Sesame and Lilies in connection with two other little books, Crown of Wild Olive, which treats of work, trade and war, and Ethics of the ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... line of ridge faded out with her abstraction, and she turned from the window and lit the lamp on her desk. The yellow light illuminated her face and figure. In their womanly graces there was no trace of what some people believed to be a masculine character, except a singularly frank look of critical inquiry and patient attention in her dark eyes. Her long brown hair was ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... drew back in lofty womanly reserve, and her dark eye kindled, while the rich blood shot, like the passing brightness of the sun, into her very temples, ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... a well-born but friendless waif, thrown at the age of thirteen upon the charity of Dr. Peters, an eccentric bachelor. She cares for his house and for him in quaint, womanly fashion, very bewitching, until she is grown. The suit of another and a younger man, makes the doctor know, to his cost, how well he loves her. He holds his peace, and marries Midge ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... neither the girlish charm of Shakuntala[20] nor the mature womanly dignity of Sita.[21] She is more admirable than lovable. Witty and wise she is, and in her love as true as steel; this too, in a social position which makes such constancy difficult. Yet she cannot ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... I had done with both. My life seemed to belong to him and to none other, at last, and I had no power to speak a word. Have faith in me, my dearest friend, till you know him. The intellect is so little in comparison to all the rest—to the womanly tenderness, the inexhaustible goodness, the high and noble aspiration of every hour. Temper, spirits, manners—there is not a flaw anywhere. I shut my eyes sometimes and fancy it all a dream of my guardian angel. Only, if it had been a dream, the pain of some parts of it would ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... you were doing wrong. You felt it even more than he did. For God made you with a more delicate sense of purity, with a shrinking from the temptation, with a womanly foreboding of disgrace, to help you to hold the cup of your honour steady, which yet you dropped on the ground. Do not seek refuge in the cant about a woman's weakness. The strength of the woman is as needful to her womanhood as the strength of the man is to his manhood; and a woman is ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... was ten Years old: A Coach or Chair I am obliged to for all my Motions from one Place to another ever since I can remember. All who had to do to instruct me, have ever been bringing Stories of the notable things I have said and the Womanly manner of my behaving my self upon such and such an Occasion. This has been my State, till I came towards Years of Womanhood; and ever since I grew towards the Age of Fifteen, I have been abused after another Manner. Now, forsooth, I am ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... could do some things extremely well—play bridge, gamble in stocks and shares and anything else, and arrange lights and colours with the skill of an artist when a suitable setting for her pretty self was concerned. She had all the charms of womanly weakness without any old-fashioned and grandmotherly narrowness; she was quite free and emancipated in mind and manners, no man had to modify his language for her; she preferred a double meaning to a single one, and ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... her with his blithest expression. But Lillian appeared to be the thoughtful one now and with an air of dignity, very pretty and becoming, thanked her young squire in a stately manner and swept into the house, looking tall and womanly in her flowing skirts. ...
— The Mysterious Key And What It Opened • Louisa May Alcott
... each other as brothers and sisters." Mrs. Mary Seymour Howell (N. Y.) gave an eloquent address on The Outlook, answering the four stock questions: Why do not more women ask for the ballot? Will not voting destroy the womanly instincts? Will not women be contaminated by going to the polls? Will they not take away ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... countenance fell, her sensitive nature touched. Already a womanly intuition, wonderful in one so childlike and ignorant of the world's ...
— That Old-Time Child, Roberta • Sophie Fox Sea
... the lawn, and were gladdened by his kindly smile and passing word. In good report and in evil report, in days of power and in days of weakness, the Countess Russell cheered, helped, and solaced him, and brought not only rare womanly devotion, but unusual intellectual gifts to his aid at the critical moments of his life, when bearing the strain of public responsibility, and in the simple round of common duty. The nation may recognise the services ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... God bestows His grace on those who put no obstacle to it, the Church therefore calls the female sex "devout." Hence we are not to find fault with the learned for their knowledge, nor are we to praise women for womanly weakness; but that abuse of knowledge which consists in self-exaltation is blameworthy, just as the right use of women's weakness in not being uplifted is praiseworthy ...
— On Prayer and The Contemplative Life • St. Thomas Aquinas
... the ingenuous editorials and schoolgirl essays. Then she grew sober and thoughtful, envying in her heart the sweetness and simplicity so apparent in every line. Here were girls who possessed something infinitely higher than journalistic acumen; they were true women, with genuine womanly qualities and natures that betrayed their worth at a glance, as do ingots of refined gold. What would not this waif from the grim underworld of New York have given for such clear eyes, pure mind and unsullied heart? "I don't know as I can ever swim in their pond," Hetty reflected, ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... too strongly marked, and the half-shy pleasure in the eyes which she raised to him; and then the coy little gesture with which she swept aside her draperies and made room for him. Half the power of Kitty's witcheries lay in her frank, childish manner, just dashed with womanly reserve. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... your attention!—I have a poor word in my head I must utter, though womanly custom would set it ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... Chicago in those days was also connected with ex-President Hayes. This time it involved a visit to the latter's home at Fremont, O. In all his frequent references to Mr. Hayes, Field had always spoken of Mrs. Hayes with sincere admiration for her womanly qualities and convictions. So long as these were confined to the ordering of her personal household he deemed them as sacred as they were admirable. Nor did he blame her for attempting to extend them to rule the actions of her husband in his public relations. But it was ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... to a husband for whom she had no regard, and who had no regard for his own honor. An attachment sprang up, which was soon strengthened by events such as could hardly have occurred on land. Hastings fell ill. The baroness nursed him with womanly tenderness, gave him his medicines with her own hand, and even sat up in his cabin while he slept. Long before the Duke of Grafton reached Madras, Hastings was in love. But his love was of a most characteristic description. Like his hatred, like his ambition, like all his passions, it was ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... then, that she mistook herself for an inspired person? It was easy to understand her popularity with her fellow-men. Her eyes were as soft and clear as those of a child, her hair waved prettily off her low, serene brow, her figure was plump and womanly, and when her voice trembled with emotion (which in her was a shallow well very near the surface) the charmingest pink colour came and went in her cheeks. On such occasions more than one member of the various brotherhoods thought ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... you madden me! If this be so—if you speak the truth—I cannot help it, and I do not care. I am ambitious. If I immolate all my womanly feelings to become a peeress, it is as I would certainly and ruthlessly destroy everything that stood in my way to become a queen, ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... him again. I had many letters from him, hopeful at first, full of strong resolves. He told me he had written to Elspeth, not telling her everything, for that she would not understand, but so much as would explain; and from her he had had sweet womanly letters in reply. I feared she might have been cold and unsympathetic, for often good women, untouched by temptation themselves, have small tenderness for those who struggle. But her goodness was something more ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... everichon With great reverence and that full humbly, And at the lust there began anon A lady for to sing right womanly A bargaret in praising the day's-eye, For as, methought, among her notes swete, She said, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... California, ten days old, and growled through the adjacent blinds "They're coming now," whereat there was sound of rustling skirt within, and between the slats there came a glimpse of shining, big blue eyes, alive with womanly interest, and parted lips disclosing two opposing rows of almost perfect teeth, all the whiter by contrast with the sunburned, "sonsy" face that framed them. Together, yet separated, this Darby and Joan of the far frontier sat and watched the ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... partly learned from Yunsan, partly worked out for herself. Vulgar religion, the public religion, she held, was a device to keep the toiling millions to their toil. She had a will of her own, and she had a heart all womanly. She was a beauty—yes, a beauty by any set rule of the world. Her large black eyes were neither slitted nor slanted in the Asiatic way. They were long, true, but set squarely, and with just the slightest hint of obliqueness that ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... light carried him into the service; the conscience was set free from the temporary disturbance; yet the decision brought him to the scaffold; it placed upon his brow the martyr's crown. The worthy wife sadly went into widowhood, and the children into orphanage, through that strong, womanly spirit which could brook ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... was Miss Guggenslocker because a man was unnecessary," she said, so gravely that he smiled. "I was without a title because it was more womanly than to be a 'freak,' as I should have been had every man, woman and child looked upon me as a princess. I did not travel through your land for the purpose of exhibiting myself, but to ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... on the beach, behind the friendly sand-dune that had been their trysting place all Summer. Thoroughly humble in her surrender, yet wholly womanly, Eloise put her soft arms around his neck. "I will," she said. "Kiss me ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... Austen, 'the woman of whom England is justly proud'—whose method generous Macaulay has placed near Shakespeare. She is writing in secret, putting away her work when visitors come in, unconscious, modest, hidden at home in heart, as she was in her sweet and womanly life, with the wisdom of the serpent indeed and ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... watched the workings of her lips, the helpless misery in her young eyes, the endeavour for self-command and the struggles of womanly pride, Mallard remembered how distinctly he had foreseen this in his past hours of anguish. It was hard to grasp the present as a reality; at moments he seemed only to be witnessing the phantoms of his imagination. The ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... Margaret, As mydsomer flowre; Jentill as fawcoun Or hawke of the towre: With solace and gladnes, Moche mirthe and no madness, All good and no badness, So joyously, So maydenly, So womanly, Her demenyng In every thynge, Far, far passynge That I can endyght, Or suffyce to wryghte, Of mirry Margaret, As mydsomer flowre, Jentyll as fawcoun Or hawke of the towre: As pacient and as styll, And as full of good wyll As faire Isaphill; Colyaunder, Swete pomaunder, Goode Cassaunder; ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... lady," Archie said hotly. "No such thought ever entered my mind. I should as soon doubt the holy Virgin herself as to deem you capable of aught but what was sweet and womanly. The matter seemed to me simple enough. You had saved my life at great peril to yourself, and it seemed but natural to me that in your trouble, having none others to befriend you, your thoughts should turn to one who had sworn to be to the end of his life your faithful knight and servant. ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... Napoleon had at first meant to appoint the Count of Narbonne to this place, but Marie Louise had dissuaded him. M. Villemain says in his Life of M. de Narbonne: "The Empress Marie Louise, generally so yielding to her husband, on this occasion manifested great opposition. Whether through womanly kindness or through her pride as a sovereign, possibly through some superstitious scruple as a second wife, she insisted on the retention in this post of the Count of Beauharnais; she was unwilling on any terms to seem to exclude, in ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... pronounced effort useless, from the time the body had been under water. This at once damped the ardour of the crowd, although it did not discourage a female, who had taken a prominent part in the operations, and who, with that true womanly tenderness and solicitude which do honour to her sex, and which are nowhere more conspicuous than in America, insisted upon the corpse being taken to a neighbouring house, where, like a ministering angel, she persevered in her efforts ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... School in keeping me at Girton, where I shall attend the University lectures at Cambridge, and learn as much as a man learns. It is wonderful to think of it. Mother is rather vexed; she says that I shall be put out of my sphere and cease to be womanly, but I don't think I could ever be that. You see that it is very important for me to win the Scholarship, and I mean to try very, ...
— A Bunch of Cherries - A Story of Cherry Court School • L. T. Meade
... grace; and her drapery partakes of the same rigid forms. Her countenance is full of stern melancholy—the natural character of one whose feelings and habits are at variance; whose strong passions may have flung her out of the pale of society, but whose womanly sympathies still remain unchanged. She is artfully pleading for the life of the youth, by contemptuously noting his insignificance; but she commands while she soothes. She is evidently the mistress or the wife of the chief, in whoso absence an act of vulgar ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... Marryatt, a very superficial observer; Miss Martineau, who was in search of something ultra and elementary, and even Mrs. Jameson, who had the most accurate and artistic eye of all, but who, with the exception of some bits of womanly heart, appeared to regard our vast woods, and wilds, and lakes, as a magnificent panorama, a painting in oil. It does not appear to occur to them, that here are the very descendants of that old Saxa-Gothic race ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... he will turn up in due course; let me hear before you go to bed if he has come back;" and he poured himself out another cup of tea, for he was one of those thin-blooded and old-womanly men who elevate the drinking of tea instead of other liquids into a special merit. "He could not understand," he said, "why everybody did not drink tea. It was so much more refreshing—one could work so much better after ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... not in the least like Cecilia, who had always been his ideal of womanly beauty. Cecilia had been small and dark and vivacious—Rosemary West was tall and fair and placid, yet John Meredith thought he had never seen ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... hour together as though he were a woman friend, and his melancholy eyes would lighten with pleasure at her talk. Indeed Francisco had something of the feminine in his nature; his very gentleness was womanly, and his slight stature, delicate hands and features heightened this impression. In face he was not unlike Juanna herself, and as time went on the resemblance seemed to grow. Had he been arrayed in a woman's loose attire, it would have been easy to mistake one for the ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... she could not think good and evil at the same time. She had longed for some word from him since she last saw him; and now she had got a word. She had known that he was close to his fair cousin,—the cousin whom she despised, and whom, with womanly instinct, she had almost regarded as a rival. But to her the man had spoken out; and though he was far away from her, living close to the fair cousin, she would not allow a thought of trouble on that score to annoy her. He was her own, and let Lizzie Eustace do her ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... clearness this voice created in my mind (not as light would create it) the vision of a self-contained, womanly little girl, whose voice and accent formed a curious silvery replica of the psychic's, and yet I could not say that the psychic's vocal organs gave out these words. At last she said "Good-bye," and the cone was ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... protect the poor at the expense of the rich and see that everything should be neatly adjusted. Every man had to shift for himself and, consequently, men were, as Mr. Clement Scott would say, manly, and women, as Mr. Clement Scott would say, womanly. In those days, a young man of wealth and family found open to him a vista of such licence as had been unknown to any since the barbatuli of the Roman Empire. To spend the early morning with his valet, gradually assuming the rich apparel that ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... tender, their hearts open to kindness as are their hands to charity, nobody who knows the type will dispute. They lack many advantages which their more independent sisters (no less gifted with noble and womanly qualities) enjoy, but they possess a peculiar gentleness, which is all their own, whether it be ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... in 1690. Later on, such women as Elizabeth Fitzgerald became more rare, but there is one noted example of womanly daring which must not be passed over. The celebrated "Lady Freemason" confronted the terrors of a Masonic lodge, and, unlike our mother Eve, the forbidden knowledge has brought no evil consequences ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... with which his wife, Claudia, used to cover the triumphal garlands he brought home. Mrs. Sheridan may well take her place beside these Roman wives;—and she had another resemblance to one of them, which was no less womanly and attractive. Not only did Calpurnia sympathize with the glory of her husband abroad, but she could also, like Mrs. Sheridan, add a charm to his talents at home, by setting his verses to music and singing them to her harp,—"with ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... she had changed: in a few short hours Her bouquet had become a garland of flowers, That she held in her outstretched hands, and flung This way and that, as she, dancing, swung In the fulness of grace and of womanly pride, That told me she soon was to be a bride; Yet then, when expecting her happiest day, In the same sweet voice I heard her ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... and carried carefully into the house and upstairs into my own room, where my sister (advertised by Bob, who had made the best of his way home on foot) had a cheerful fire blazing in the grate, hot water in abundance, and everything else ready that her womanly sympathy could suggest. ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... and debauched age of Louis XV. of France. A delirium of fashion exists. Women are ranked by what they wear, not by what they are. Extravagance of dress, and almost indecency of dress, has taken the place of simple womanly beauty. Wordsworth once described the "perfect woman nobly planned." Where will you find the perfect woman now? Not in the parti-coloured, over-dressed creature—the thing of shreds and patches—with false hair, false colour, false ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... does not wish for husband and children, feeling that they would impede her in her work? All women are not born to be wives and mothers: some have other work to do. But I need not argue with my journal: it is of my way of thinking; my ideas meet no opposition here. "But this is not at all womanly," my critic would say, had I one, which I have not: "you have not said a word of the really important event of the week." Dare I say that I had half forgotten it? A man has asked me to marry him! The great event of a woman's life has been within my reach, and I refused it. Mr. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... said; she had only been troubled because he did not come, and then for once in her life she did a womanly act. She laid her head in the doctor's lap and cried, just as she had done the previous night. He understood the cause of her tears at last, and touched with a greater degree of tenderness for her than he had ever before experienced, he smoothed her ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... Desvarennes was really in the zenith of womanly splendor. She seemed taller, her figure had straightened, vigorous and powerful. Her gray hair gave her face a majestic appearance. Always surrounded by a court of clients and friends, she seemed like a sovereign. The fortune ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... ornamentation to the bedroom. Against the cheap faded lilac and gold wall-paper were tacked photo-engravings that had taken the younger sister's fancy: a young man and woman, clad in scanty bathing suits, seated side by side in a careening sail boat,—the work of a popular illustrator whose manly and womanly "types" ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... dear; it's right and womanly to feel grief at losing Gladys; but since it has to be, I want you to conquer that grief, and not let it ...
— Marjorie's New Friend • Carolyn Wells
... portions of it. One of these pictures reveals simply the form of the Virgin. She rises from the earth, caught up in the clouds, the drapery streaming in soft folds, and on the upturned face is a look of love and tenderness and trust, combined with womanly strength, that hushes ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... another and a larger dog came up to see what Narcisse was doing and in half a minute was whirling about with Narcisse in a death grapple, and Blanquette sprang forward, separated the two dogs at some risk and took our bleeding mongrel to her bosom, consoling him with womanly words of pity, I saw there was something tender in Blanquette ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... penances. And at that time when the earth was bereft of Kshatriyas, the Kshatriya ladies, desirous of offspring, used to come, O monarch, to the Brahmanas and Brahmanas of rigid vows had connection with them during the womanly season alone, but never, O king, lustfully and out of season. And Kshatriya ladies by thousands conceived from such connection with Brahmanas. Then, O monarch, were born many Kshatriyas of greater energy, boys and girls, so that the Kshatriya race, might thrive. And thus sprang the Kshatriya ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... apropos to the modern movement for opening new professions to the female sex, why there should not be well-educated female architects. The planning and arrangement of houses, and the laying-out of grounds, are a fair subject of womanly knowledge and taste. It is the teaching of Nature. What would anybody think of a bluebird's nest that had been built entirely by Mr. Blue without the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... tears with the little wisp of lace, annoyed with herself at betraying her indignation in that womanly way. She knew him, alas! too well. She mistrusted him, for she was well aware of how cleverly he had once conspired with Lady Heyburn, and with what ingenuity she herself had been drawn into ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... loss of time; and I doubt if one of that group except Talbot would marry her. I don't think many of us are pleased with that sort of thing. We don't want too fierce a light to beat about the woman we are dreaming of. She has no love or respect for sweetness and womanly virtue for their own sake—no faith in their value to her, further than that the semblance of them ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... him to send out another order for the fellows who were to kill the Jews, and they killed 75,000 or 80,000 of them. And they came back and said, "Kill Haman and his ten sons," and they hung the family up. That is all there is to the story. And yet this Esther is held up as a model of womanly grace and tenderness, and there is not a more infamous story in ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... into the house, leaving Trenby rather taken aback by her sudden submission. But it pleased him, nevertheless. He liked a woman to be malleable. It seemed, to him a truly womanly quality—certainly a wifely one! Moreover, almost any man experiences a pleasant feeling of complacency when he thinks he has dominated a woman, even over so small a matter as to whether she shall wear an extra coat or not—although he generally fails to guess the origin of ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... Hinduism, of early Buddhist legends; and the Buddhist quality of gentleness has not disappeared in the history.[25] Rama, however, is far from a perfect character. His wife Sita is possessed of much womanly grace and every wifely virtue; and the sorrowful story of the warrior-god and his faithful spouse has appealed to deep sympathies in the human breast. The worship of Rama has seldom, if ever, degenerated into lasciviousness. ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... vulgarian, who, whatever she was, and however detestable the part she was playing, was at least possessed of womanly sympathy, came frequently to see me during those weary days. Her engagement to Mr. Bainrothe was never by her acknowledged, or by me alluded to, and she seemed to have taken up the impression in some way that I was the victim of an unfortunate attachment to that subtle person, ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... and, to the recollection of her beauty, he clung with an aching eagerness of delight that attested the extent of its influence over his imagination. Had there been nothing to tarnish that glorious picture of womanly perfection, the feelings it called up would have been too exquisite for endurance; but alas! with the faultless image, came also recollections, against which it required all the force of that beauty to maintain itself. ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... thinking thus with himself, the princess was earnestly watching the king, with looks of childish love and womanly tenderness that went to Curdie's heart. Now and then with a great fan of peacock feathers she would fan him very softly; now and then, seeing a cloud begin to gather upon the sky of his sleeping face, she would ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... on her ear, a spark of womanly dignity filled her breast, and her eyes kindled with indignation. She looked at him for a moment sternly and silently, until her gaze caused him to turn his countenance from her, abashed at the mute rebuke she had administered. The pride of by-gone days had returned, with the unfeeling remarks ...
— The Trials of the Soldier's Wife - A Tale of the Second American Revolution • Alex St. Clair Abrams
... little utterance. Am I wrong in conjecturing, however, that there was considerable feeling of a certain quiet kind? Miss Blunt maintained a rich, golden silence. I, on the other hand, was very voluble. What a sweet, womanly listener ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... to me even more fair and appealing by daylight than when I first saw her in the dusk. There was a pure brightness in her brown eyes, a gentle dignity in her look and bearing, a soft cadence of expectant joy in her voice. She was womanly in every tone and motion, yet by no means weak or uncertain. Mistress of herself and of the house, she ruled her kingdom without an effort. Busied with many little cares, she bore them lightly. Her spirit overflowed ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... gnarled apple tree hugging the left side next to the stone chimney, became a still queerer place when Widow Smith, a tall, straight, firm, black-eyed, dark-skinned Indian woman, the descendant of a long line of natives of these hills, but withal a refined, womanly old lady, came to board with Squire Perkins and his wife. Widow Smith was a Presbyterian of the straitest sort. The Squire's was surely a home of ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... Beth hovered over her constantly, ministering to every possible want and filled with tenderest sympathy for their injured cousin. The accident seemed to draw them out of their selfishness and petty intrigues and discovered in them the true womanly qualities that had ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces • Edith Van Dyne
... characters possess that sweet naturalness, depth and constancy of affection, purity and refinement which an age that had not yet lost the ideals of chivalry accepted as the normal qualities of a good woman. The mothers, wives, and daughters of that day would appear to have been before all things womanly, in an unaffected, instinctive way. Isaac (in the Chester Miracle Play), thinking, in the hour of death, of his mother's grief at home, says, 'Father, tell my mother for no thinge.' When Mary is married (Coventry Play) and must ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... particular degree of his manhood must exactly correspond to the particular degree of her womanhood in order to exactly balance the one-sidedness of each. Hence the most manly man will desire the most womanly woman, and vice versa, and so each will want the individual that exactly corresponds to him in degree of sex. Inasmuch as two persons fulfil this necessary relation towards each other, it is instinctively felt by them and is the origin, together ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... to-night—very gentle and womanly—more English than French or Russian, more American than either. Neither of them spoke for a long while. Such words as they could speak would have taken something from the perfection of their background. But Markham thought of her as he had frequently done, thankful again for the benefits of her ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... for a something in thy form and face, Thy looks and ways, of primal harmony; A certain soothing charm, a vital grace That breathes of the eternal womanly, And makes me feel the warmth of Nature's breast, When in her arms, and thine, ...
— Music and Other Poems • Henry van Dyke
... among the group that watched the receding cloud the eyes that would linger longest and would find it hardest to turn away would be those of the Blessed Mother. Her mission about our Lord during all these past years had been a very characteristically womanly mission, a mission of silence and help and sympathy. She was with the women who ministered to Him, never obtrusive, never self-assertive; but always ready when need was. It was the silent service of a great love. ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... Stevens. He did not trouble much about it. He was confident enough of his strength and the advantages of his boyish training in the gymnasium to regard the trial with equanimity. Still, the girls he had known in the East would never have set two men to fight, never—it was not womanly. Good girls were by nature peacemakers. There must be something in Loo, he argued, almost— vulgar, and he shrank from the word. To lessen the sting of his disappointment, he pictured her to himself and strove to ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... affairs would seem to have contributed much to the order of her establishment, as well as to the every-day happiness of a cheerful home. She is described as having been a person above common in many respects, of a fine womanly presence, ladylike in appearance, affecting in domestic arrangements—according to our traditions—what, it would seem was considered for the time, rather a superior style of living. What such a style consisted in, the reader shall have the means ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... his big white iron fountain set in his terraced lawn behind his endless cobble-stone walls. I couldn't tell, of course, what he was thinking about. But I myself was thinking of the past, the irrecoverable past, the irredeemable past, the singing years of my womanly youth that seemed to be sealed in a lowered coffin on which the sheltering earth would soon be heaped, on which the first clods were already dropping with hollow sounds. We each seemed afraid to look the other full in the eyes. So we armored ourselves, ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... pleasure to the vehement creature, whose playfellow from babyhood had been a man—and such a man! Use did no good, but rather, as the childish activity and power of play and the sense of novelty passed, the growth of the womanly soul made the heart-hunger and solitude worse, and spirit and health came yearly to ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and the light in a pair of gray eyes when they were lifted; the beating of a girl's heart near him; the springtime grace of a girl's sweet youth in its contrast with the voluptuous summer of Rhaetian types of beauty; the warm rose that spread upwards from a girl's childlike dimples to the womanly arch of her brows; all these charms and more which rendered one girl a hundred times adorable, took hold of him, and made him not an ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... that our marriage laws will not stand criticism, and that they have held out so far only because they are so worked as to fit roughly our state of society, in which women are neither politically nor personally free, in which indeed women are called womanly only when they regard themselves as existing solely for the use of men. When Liberalism enfranchises them politically, and Socialism emancipates them economically, they will no longer allow the law to take immorality so easily. Both men and women will be forced to behave morally ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... darkened by exposure to a warmer sun than ours. His features were somewhat striking; his moustache and hair raven black; and his eyes, denied the attributes of military keenness by reason of the largeness and darkness of their aspect, acquired thereby a softness of expression that was in part womanly. His mouth as far as it could be seen reproduced this characteristic, which might have been called weakness, or goodness, according to the mental attitude of the observer. It was large but well formed, ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... William or Henry called for the "good laws of Eadward the Confessor." But it was as a mere shadow of the past that the exile really returned to the throne of AElfred; there was something shadow-like in his thin form, his delicate complexion, his transparent womanly hands; and it is almost as a shadow that he glides over the political stage. The work of government was done by ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... creed and country of his fathers. And so every townsman, seizing the nearest weapon, with a spirit of patriotic frenzy, rushed into the streets, crying out, "The Cross, the Cross!" "Liberty!" "Greece!" "Iskander and Epirus!" Ay! even the women lost all womanly fears, and stimulated instead of soothing the impulse of their masters. They fetched them arms, they held the torches, they sent them forth with vows and prayers and imprecations, their children clinging to their robes, and repeating ...
— The Rise of Iskander • Benjamin Disraeli
... Field found her own camps not much better. True, the refuse was not raised in pyramidal shape before the front door, and the beef was a little more orderly, but the low log huts, the dim cold light, the dingy walls and floors, the lack of any womanly or home touch, the tin dishes, the wholesale cooking, all struck upon her ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... long since laid aside her native garb, and wore the more graceful and womanly costume of the Indian women, and Maximus wore the capote and leggings of the voyageur. But there were not wanting gentlemen from the camp at the point whose hairy garments and hoods, long hair and beards, did honour to the race of the Esquimaux; and there were ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... us all the womanly graces, Your Honor," she answered, "and not least among them is tidiness. I should have had you looking beautifully neat in another ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... ambassador at Rome, young, beautiful, delicately nurtured, retired in 1608 from the court, and a few years later opened her salon of the Hotel de Rambouillet to such noble and cultivated persons as were willing to be the courtiers of womanly grace and wit and taste. The rooms were arranged and decorated for the purposes of pleasure; the chambre bleue became the sanctuary of polite society, where Arthenice (an anagram for "Catherine") was the high priestess. To dance, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... camp to keep them to herself. Whatever they may have been, I felt as sure then, as I do now, that she was a good woman. Her kindly interest in my little romance was just a bit of honest, human nature. It pleased me and when I think of her look of innocent, unguarded, womanly frankness, I can not believe that she had had the least part in the dark intrigue of ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... if only it were not so desolate. I wonder what Lady Esmondet or Vaura would think of it, how lovely she would look standing in the Tower windows with the fresh air blowing her beautiful hair and her gown close about her; but I forget it is late, and I am dreaming, her hair will be confined in some womanly fashion and she is not for me, no, Mars, you and I are lonely wanderers," and the dog is patted, the lights are out while the weary man throws himself on his couch to pass a restless night ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... spite of the blood-stained handkerchief about her face, and was caressing the frightened girl upon her lap in such a gentle, womanly way, that I concluded she must be her mother. On the box, with the coachman, was a police officer. ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... soul, and to avoid the inevitable damnation threatened against "advoutrers," to reconcile herself with Angus as her true husband, or out of mere natural affection for her daughter, whose excellent beauty and pleasant behaviour, nothing less godly than goodly, furnished with virtuous and womanly demeanour, should soften her heart. That she should be reputed baseborn cannot be avoided, except the queen will relinquish the "advoutrous" company with him that is not, nor may not ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... worry keeps the wrinkles away and as long as she does not become obese she remains attractive. Her "clinging-vine" ways make men call her the most "womanly" type, and even when she tips the scales at two hundred and fifty they are still for her. Then they say "she looks ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... Truscott was not yet through with it, and what is more, I have heard you remark on several occasions that she was an awfully weak sort of a heroine and would make Jack wretched yet. Bless your womanly hearts! I never pretended that she was a Zenobia, or a Jeanne la Pucelle, or a Susan B. Anthony. She was absurd, if you will, but she was utterly in love with her husband, as Mrs. Turner said, and thought far more of him than the rest of mankind put together, which is ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King |
