"Girlhood" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was a constant source of irritation and discontent to Miss Annabel. Her heart and hopes were as young as Leslie's, and she was forced to find herself pushed aside into the place of age, while this radiant girl walked all unheeding into everything that her girlhood should have been. And this intimation concerning her age and estate was ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... years of age her father removed to Litchfield, Conn., and her happy girlhood was passed in that place. Her bright and versatile mind and ready wit enabled her to pass brilliantly through her school days with but little mental exertion, and those who knew her slightly might have imagined her to be ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... childish conferences with girl friends on the vine-grown porch. They seemed strangely trivial and unmeaning compared to the exhilarating present. She was living now, feeling the force of a rising growth, her horizon widening to suit that which her eyes sought, the dependence of her sheltered girlhood gone from her as the great adventure called upon untouched energies and untried forces. It was like looking back on another girl, or like a woman looking back ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... spread their wings out, without flying, and scraped the grass with them. The elms were quite green already, and the oaks were pushing out thousands of bright emerald leaves. There is a day in every spring when the maiden year reaches full girlhood, and pauses on the verge of woman's estate, to wonder at the mysterious longings that disquiet all her being, and at the unknown music that sings ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... destroy the usefulness of womankind. Tarnish the sacredness of girlhood and you scar the purity of womanhood. Deface the beautiful countenance of chastity, which is found in the bosom of girlhood, and you not only mar the happiness of girlhood, but you deface and obliterate the families of the future, for without that ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... when queens preferred the snug seclusion of those dainty rooms overlooking the dank inner courtyard to the frigid grandeur of their State chambers. Therein it was that Marie Leczinska was wont to instruct her young daughters in the virtues as she had known them in her girlhood's thread-bare home, not as her residence at the profligate French Court had taught her to ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... try too persistently. She turned and re-entered the drawing-room, with Cornish following her. The room itself was prettily furnished in the Dutch fashion, and there were flowers. Dorothy Roden's manner was that of a woman; no longer in her first girlhood, who had seen en and cities. She was better educated than her brother; she was probably cleverer. She had, at all events, the subtle air of self-restraint that marks those women whose lives are passed in the society of a man mentally inferior to themselves. Of course all ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... no longer boast the beauty which was hers when first we met her, but she was still a sweet and graceful woman, her figure remaining almost as slim as it had been in girlhood. The grey eyes also retained their depth and fire, only the face was worn, though more by care and the burden of memories than with years. The lot of the loving wife and mother was hard indeed ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... throng of symptoms which denote the present tendency to a crisis in the life of Woman,—which resembles the change from girlhood, with its beautiful instincts, but unharmonized thoughts, its blind pupilage and restless seeking, to self-possessed, wise and graceful womanhood,—I have attempted ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... remorse, and passionate regret for the lost love and squandered happiness that might have been hers, were all revealed in the thrilling, pathetic, deprecating gaze with which she once more met the eyes of her girlhood's young worshiper, her ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... back seat and let me try my hand without any advice from you. The girl's name is Doris Kenyon and she's an orphan. Her father used to be the general manager of my redwood mill on Humboldt Bay, and her mother was a girlhood friend of my late wife's; so naturally I've established a sort of protectorate over her. She has to work for a living, and any time there's a potentially fine, two-million-dollar husband like Joey lying round loose ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... to all who belong to the genus Boy. Perhaps we should include the genus Girl, also, but of that we are not certain; for, not to dwell upon the fact that we have never been a girl, and are, therefore, unable to enter into the feelings of girlhood, we hold that girls are better than boys, as women are better than men, and that, consequently, they take more kindly to school life. What boys are we know, unless the breed has changed very much since we were young, which is now upwards of—but our age does not concern ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... forlorn and discouraged. I sat on the bulwark, listening to the falling rain and the swish of the dark tide, and thinking of home. How far it seemed, and how impassable the gulf now between the "castle" with its refined ways, between her in her dainty girlhood and me sitting there, numbed with the cold that was slowly stealing away my senses with my courage. There was warmth and cheer where she was. Here—— An overpowering sense of desolation came upon me. I ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... as Roschen grew out of childhood into girlhood, her attitude towards her adoptive father changed. In the great matters of her life he still cared for her, planning always for her good, and withholding from her nothing suited to her station in life that money could buy. In the matter of her music, Aunt Hedwig declared that he was positively ...
— An Idyl Of The East Side - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... individual: it was enough for the body to be, so to speak, an average one, showing him at his fullest development and in the complete enjoyment of his physical powers. The men were always represented in their maturity, the women never lost the rounded breast and slight hips of their girlhood, but a dwarf always preserved his congenital ugliness, for his salvation in the other world demanded that it should be so. Had he been given normal stature, the double, accustomed to the deformity of his members in this world, would have been unable to accommodate ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... waiting heart! Who am I that I wait to-night?... Alas, Where is the old content of maidenhood, The calmness and the laughter and the song, The patient hands unshaken as the needle Plied to the gentle rhythm that my lips Murmured, untroubled girlhood at their brink? ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... memories of a happy girlhood welled up in her soft and suffering breast. The geraniums in the window she had watered daily. The canary—she had fed it with groundsel. The brass skillets on the mantelshelf—they had been burnished by her hand. The cushion ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... another State, lay the lover of her girlhood's happy day,—the bright-eyed, eager, gallant, joyous lad. What good comrades they had been! How they had laughed, and played, and ridden, and rowed, and hunted, and danced, and flirted, through the morning of life,—how pleasant had been that life indeed! ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... a corner room, close to the stream which rippled through the little orchard, and its gentle murmur had been a comfort to her—it carried her back to her home in Oxford County (State of Maine), where her early girlhood had been spent. At times it seemed that she was in the little, old, gray house in the valley, and that her father's sharp voice might come at any moment to break ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... calm. And this was love. She had craved it often—wondered how it would come to her—and it was just Arthur, after all, her childhood's friend, Arthur—but yet how changed! He was not the same. She felt it dimly. The Arthur of her girlhood was gone. They were man and woman now. She had not known this Arthur as he was now. A veil seemed to have been suddenly drawn from his face, and she saw in him—her ideal. There were tears in her eyes as she gazed heavenward. She ...
— Beth Woodburn • Maud Petitt
... Mrs. Ralston was the guest of his brother banker, and of the demolition of her house, Mr. Allyne was doubly surprised. And his statement concerning the lady was not only satisfactory but highly gratifying. She had been left an orphan in her girlhood, and was from one of the oldest and proudest of Virginia's old and proud families. She had now no very near relatives, and having separated from a worthless husband, had lived mostly in Europe. She had resumed her family ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... show you a list I made in my girlhood, some day. But you mustn't read as many as an Englishman read,—Thomas Henry Buckle,—his library comprised ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... said she; "if my name brings up a past laden with bitter memories and shadowed by regret, it also recalls much that is pleasant and never to be forgotten. I do not object to hearing my girlhood's name ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green
... he would take care of the baby sister. How had he kept that promise made when Betty was a little thing bouncing on his knee? It seemed only yesterday. How swift the flight of time! Already Betty was a woman; her sweet, gay girlhood had passed; already a shadow had fallen on her face, the ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... Rossetti exhibited ‘The Girlhood of the Virgin’ in the so-called Free Exhibition or Portland Gallery. The artist who had perhaps the strongest influence upon Rossetti’s early tastes was Ford Madox Brown, who, however, refused from the first to join the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood on the ground that coteries had in modern ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... after days, she looked back to that quiet half-hour by the fire she saw that it was then that she had passed from girlhood into womanhood. The first chapter of her life was, at that moment's laying of her hand on Martin's forehead, closed. The love for him that filled her so utterly was in great part maternal. It was to be her destiny to know the deep tranquil emotions of life rather ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... sufficient to show that a change had come over these two young women, since the giddy days of their girlhood. Jane was pale, but beautiful as ever; she was holding on her knees a sick child, about two months old, which apparently engrossed all her attention. What would be her system as a mother, might be foretold by the manner ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... Simpson—formerly Moissart—was, in sober fact, my great, great, grandmother. In her youth she had been beautiful, and even at eighty-two, retained the majestic height, the sculptural contour of head, the fine eyes and the Grecian nose of her girlhood. By the aid of these, of pearl-powder, of rouge, of false hair, false teeth, and false tournure, as well as of the most skilful modistes of Paris, she contrived to hold a respectable footing among the beauties en peu passees of the French metropolis. In this respect, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... donkey's back sat a woman, and your attention would have been directed to her at once if you could have been there. She was marvelously beautiful. She was very young—just at that interesting period between girlhood and womanhood, when the charm is ...
— Christmas Stories And Legends • Various
... inclined to leave her alone when he saw in his fancy the clean, simple, mindless, honest life that her fanciful girlhood would settle down into as time should go on. But when in the figure of the woodman there was painted visibly on the dusky sky that end for her which he had foreseen, he was not indifferent to it; he resented it; he was stirred ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... to the mantelpiece; then, with an apparent change of impulse, she had turned and faced him. He had noted that her figure was rounder than in girlhood, her complexion paler, but the sunlight still danced in her hair, and her reckless force had given way to a poise that suggested infinite resources ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... who had thrown off a yoke, yet she hardly understood her own light-heartedness. It was quite true that she had never outgrown her girlhood. It was only overlaid by grown-up manners, and unconsciously she was beginning to let the burden of convention slip from her shoulders and to enjoy ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard
... young girl whom he had met who could sit down and talk sensibly to a man. Her ideas were so sweet, so natural, that it charmed him in spite of himself. She was like a heroine out of a story-book—just such a one, he thought, as Martha Washington must have been in her girlhood days. His admiration and respect for her grew ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... this little volume were written at different periods in the life of the author, dating from her early girlhood up to recent years. They were not written with a view of making a book, each poem being the spontaneous outpouring of a deeply poetic nature and called forth by some experience ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy
... a concavity in correspondence to the convexity of the back, with a smoothness much like the inner surface of a bowl. This perhaps was no disadvantage—under the conditions. So much for fate. But fortune had been no kinder. "Blooming" into girlhood, she had been attacked by smallpox. Matazaemon was busy, and knew nothing of sick nursing. O'Naka was equally ignorant, though she was well intentioned. Of course the then serving wench knew no more than her mistress. O'Mino was allowed to claw her countenance and body, as the itching ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... cold temperament, and disposed to regard the affair merely as a proper way of providing for the natural affections, the Paronsina cared nothing for him personally, and only viewed him favorably as abstract matrimony,—as the means of escaping from the bondage of her girlhood and the sad seclusion of her life into the world outside her grandfather's house. So presently the correspondence fell almost wholly upon Tonelli, who worked up to the point of betrothal with an expense of finesse and sentiment that would have made his fortune in diplomacy ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... toward the end of term. The game, begun in pure jest, had taken on something of romantic earnest: there was not one of these young men who did not see in Kathleen his own ideal of slender, bright-cheeked girlhood. And when the train pulled into Wolverhampton, they tumbled out of their smoking carriage ...
— Kathleen • Christopher Morley
... only studied the proud face for a long while, and knew there was no lovelier person between two seas. For time here had pillaged very sparingly; and if Dame Melicent had not any longer the first beauty of her girlhood, Callistion had nowhere seen a woman more handsome than this ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... Here all her girlhood was passed, and it was in the garden of Hope End that she stood, holding up an apron filled with flowers, when that lovely picture was painted representing her as a little girl of nine or ten years of age. Much of rather apochryphal myth ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... tremendous forces of the upper and the nether world which play for the mastery of the soul of a woman during the few years in which she passes from plastic girlhood to the ripe maturity of womanhood, he may well stand in awe before the ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... the other, they came forward and were formally introduced to him by the President. Nine of the fourteen were men, and five were women of ages varying from middle age almost to girlhood. The men were apparently all between twenty-five and thirty-five, and included some half-dozen ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... Ah, reluctant maid, Love's drapeau rouge the truth has told! O' er girlhood's yielding barricade Floats the great Leveller's ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... sir, I'd rather be the little girl. I"—with a pathetic tremble in her voice, "I'm barely twenty yet, and I've never had much of a girlhood." ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... sanguine spirit of girlhood, she felt sure that something delightful would happen, and built fine castles in the air for her sister, with a small corner for herself, where she could watch Laura bloom into a healthy woman and a great artist. The ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... the Grecian fashion; the small and shapely foot, which peered out with its jewelled sandal under her gold-fringed draperies; combined to present to the eye a very incarnation of that ideal loveliness, which haunts enamored poets in their dreams, the girl just bursting out of girlhood, the glowing Hebe of the soft and sunny south. But if her form was lovely, how shall the pen of mortal describe the wild romantic beauty of her soul-speaking features. The rich redundancy of her dark auburn hair, black where the shadows rested on it as the sable locks of night, ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... wondered why she did not love him, wondered if she should, had she never met the other man. Doubtless, for he possessed all the attributes of the conquering hero, and she would have excavated the ideals of her romantic girlhood, brushed and re-cut their garments, and then deliberately set fire to her imagination. If the responsive spark had held sullenly aloof, awaiting its time, she, knowing nothing of its existence, would soon have ceased to remember the half-conscious ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... and purplish paper? How I hate my environments! Poverty and sybaritism go as ill together as roses and purple paper, but I have always been too much given up to the gratification of the eyes and of the senses. How well I remember in my first girlhood, how I used to fill bowls with roses, lilacs and heliotrope, in the country June, and putting beneath my cheek a little pillow, whose crimson silk gave me delight, shut my eyes in my rough, unfinished little room, and ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... money of his own, and I have also, and out here it is ample. But at first I was very bitter with him, and let myself be influenced by my people who were still more bitter, and I would not join him. I went back home and lived the old life of my girlhood. He never uttered one word of reproach, although he was just breaking his heart for me, and—for which I bless him every day of my life—he wrote every mail telling me about the country and his work. At first I scarcely read the letters, and often did not reply; but ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... back. I advised him to go to the Free States, where his tongue would not be tied, and where his intelligence would be of more avail to him. He left me, still hoping the day would come when I could be bought. With me the lamp of hope had gone out. The dream of my girlhood was over. I felt lonely ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... cravats for dinner, or ladies'-maids pinning caps on their mistresses' heads, or even young housemaids condemned to the exhausting labor of making beds and dusting furniture. The deplorable practice of swilling adulterated malt liquor two or three times a day, begun in early boy and girlhood among English servants, had not in America, as I am convinced it has with us, laid the foundation for later habits of drinking in a whole class of the community, among whom a pernicious inherited necessity for the indulgence is one of its consequences; while another, and more lamentable ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... person gifted with a natural liking for children, and the freemasonry requisite to bring him acquainted with them; and it lighted up his face with a pleasant surprise to see two such beautiful specimens of boyhood and girlhood in this dismal, spider-haunted house, and under the guardianship of such a savage lout as the grim Doctor. He seemed particularly struck by the intelligence and sensibility of Ned's face, and met his eyes with a glance that Ned long afterwards ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... for wearing in the morning anywhere, or for the forest at any time. Ruth had worn only the daintiest and finest of garments all her life, without any regard for suitableness. From her babyhood to this day of her girlhood, it had been Philip Alston's pride and happiness to dress her as the proudest and richest father might dress his daughter, in the midst of the highest civilization. Ruth knew nothing else, and those who knew her would scarcely have known her, seeing her otherwise. It was only ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... thin bit of red rock, rippled as delicately as a woman's hair, bearing marks of raindrops that came from the south. It was once soft clay. It was laid down close to the igneous Archaean rocks when Mother Earth was in her girlhood and water first began to flow. More clay flowed over, and all was hardened into rock. Many strata, variously colored and composed, were deposited, till our bit of beauty was buried thousands of feet deep. The strata were tilted variously and abraded wondrously, for our ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... returning home, not knowing why, she would look into the glass. It seemed to her that the girlhood she had somehow missed was awakening in her, taking possession of her, changing her. The lips she had always seen pressed close and firm were growing curved, leaving a little parting, as though they were not quite so satisfied ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... point which Zoraida herself had vouched for: since girlhood she had been accustomed to coming here. It would appear inevitable that the atmosphere of the place would have deeply influenced young fancies; that what she was now was largely due to these conflicting ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... in the back of his mind; in his subconscious mind, perhaps, but he seemed to have put her away, like his skill with revolver and lasso. Now she burst upon him again with all that beauty and charm which had so magnetised him in those glad, golden days, and the frank cleanness of her girlhood made him disgusted and ashamed. It was to fit himself for her that he had come to town, and what sort of mess was he making of it? He was going down instead of up. He had squandered his little money, and now he was squandering his life. He had ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... expression, nor yet if her tender lips had seemed to be saddened by a passing thought. She had not put on the veil again, and he had not meant that a suggestion of suffering ecstatically borne should dim her glad girlhood in his picture; but he had seen the vision once, and it had come out again under his brush, in spite of him, as if it were the necessary truth over which the outward expression was moulded like a lovely mask, but ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... sleeping babe in her arms, while a curly-pated boy nestled his head in her lap and slept through the magic lanes and fairy woods of dreamland. The woman's face was one of those that blend the confidence of girlhood with the uncertainty of womanhood. 'Twas a pretty face, which had been plainly tagged by its Maker for a light-hearted trip through this world, but it had been seared by ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson
... are an uncounted number of mothers who, after they have navigated a large family of children through all the diseases of infancy, and got them fairly started up the flowering slope of boyhood and girlhood, have only strength enough left to die. They fade away. Some call it consumption; some call it nervous prostration; some call it intermittent or malarial disposition; but I call it martyrdom of the domestic circle. Life for life. Blood for ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... propriety, my dear Kate, surely there is the presence of mother to prevent any scandal—although really her own conduct with the wounded one is not above suspicion," she added, with that novel mischievousness that seemed a return of her lost girlhood. "We must try to do the best we can with them and for them," she said decidedly, "and meantime I'll see if I can't ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... her three years of intermittent intimacy with a disillusioning world of mimicry, her dreams were pure romance, proved that Lorraine had still the unclouded innocence of her girlhood unspoiled. ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... her eyes and drew the baby closer. It looked like a rose dipped in milk, she thought, this pink and white blossom of girlhood, or like a pink cherub, with its halo of pale yellow hair, finer ...
— The Bird's Christmas Carol • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the nursery, songs for childhood, for girlhood, boyhood, and sacred songs—the whole melody of childhood and youth bound in one cover. Full of lovely pictures; sweet mother and baby faces; charming bits of scenery, and the dear old Bible ...
— Harper's Young People, June 15, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... carried her back to the first years of her girlhood. She was only eighteen when she first met him. He was the first man who had kissed her, and she had lain awake thinking of something which his sister Edith had told her. Edith knew that she did not love a man to whom she was engaged, because when he kissed her his kiss did not ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... chords with fire. Hitty rested her weary head against the window-frame and sent her wearier thoughts upward to the stars; there were the points of light that the Chaldeans watched upon their plains by night, and named with mystic syllables of their weird Oriental tongue,—names that in her girlhood she had delighted to learn, charmed by that nameless spell that language holds, wherewith it plants itself ineradicably in the human mind, and binds it with fetters of vague association that time and chance are all-powerless to break,—Zubeneschamali and Zubenelgunebi, Bellatrix ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... she was called after her marriage, was the daughter of a very eminent Covenanter, Sir Patrick Hume of Polwarth. Grisell was born in 1665, and during all the years of her girlhood her father was seldom able to come home to his house of Polwarth, for fear of the officers of the Government seizing him. On one occasion he was taken and cast into prison in Dumbarton Castle for full ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... b. Honolulu, Dec. 3. Came to California in young girlhood. Writer of verses to accompany her own artistic photographs. Address: 647 32nd St., ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... permission to address his daughter herself on the subject. To this Sir Robert offered no opposition; he was ignorant of the strength of Constantia's feelings with regard to Burrell. She had been affianced to him in her early girlhood, when much too young to have an opinion on the matter; and as the union had never been pressed upon her, she had not been called upon to state any objections to it. Her poor mother had seen, with the clearness of a mother's love, that the marriage would never tend to her child's happiness: ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... presents a very interesting development. The subject has at one time or other—probably the critical period of girlhood—sustained a severe ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... needless fears of many, let me say at once, the creature is a nuisance, but not a danger. The stealthy, crafty, determined pursuer of the young and honest actress is a product of the imagination. These "Johnnies" who hang about stage doors and send foolish and impertinent notes to the girlhood of the stage are not in love—they are actuated by vanity, pure and simple. These young "taddies," with hair carefully plastered down, are as like one another as are the peas of one pod,—each wishes to be considered a very devil of a fellow; but how can that be unless he is recognized ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... poetry. The wearisome battling with life's needs had left the mother, as it leaves thousands of women, haggard, careworn, and not too smooth in disposition. There was no romance about her. She had fairly forgotten her girlhood, it seemed to lie so far behind; and even the unconquerable mother-love, that gave rise to her anxieties, had a touch of hardness about it. And Pamela had caught something of the sharp, harassed spirit too. But Theo had an odd secret sympathy for Pamela, though ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Christian mind. Did Eve think about that? Perhaps her association with him, careless as he was in all such matters, had helped to blunt her religious feeling. Yet what hope was there, in such a world as this, that she would retain the pieties of her girlhood? ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... watched the men disappear. She buried her face in her hands and moaned as she had not done since her mother left her just a few years before. The girlhood in her was dead. She was a woman. The one great note had come to ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... laying bare the interior of that household. Doctor Rouget was a man of whom we say in common parlance, "He is not pleasant to deal with." Consequently, during his lifetime, his townsmen kept silence about him and treated him civilly. His wife, a demoiselle Descoings, feeble in health during her girlhood (which was said to be a reason why the doctor married her), gave birth to a son, and also to a daughter who arrived, unexpectedly, ten years after her brother, and whose birth took the husband, doctor though he were, by surprise. ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... Kate—most of the time the personification of proper little-girlhood—had a disconcerting faculty of occasionally dropping a word here, or a question there, with startling effect. As, for instance, when she asked Billy "Who's going to boss your wedding?" and again when she calmly informed her mother that when she was married she was not going to have any wedding ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... met and formed their club seems commonplace, but this writer makes it fascinating, and how they made their club serve a great purpose continues the interest to the end, and introduces a new type of girlhood. ...
— Ruth Fielding in the Great Northwest - Or, The Indian Girl Star of the Movies • Alice B. Emerson
... was scarcely below her shoe tops. She still had the slimness of immature girlhood, the adorable shy daring ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... content. Continually there came into her pretty, wide-open eyes—the eyes of a young doe—a look of uneasiness, of distrust, and aversion. Los Muertos frightened her. She remembered the days of her young girlhood passed on a farm in eastern Ohio—five hundred acres, neatly partitioned into the water lot, the cow pasture, the corn lot, the barley field, and wheat farm; cosey, comfortable, home-like; where the farmers loved their land, caressing it, coaxing it, nourishing it as ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... she had money saved up, and she sent money to her parents: yet her wages, until late years, had been small. In doing her duty to others she did good to herself. A duchess would have been glad to have her in her household. She had been in farmhouse service from girlhood, and had doubtless learned much from good housewives; farmers' wives are the best of all teachers: and the girls, for their own sakes, had much better be under them than wasting so much time learning ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... appetite for money till he cared for nothing else. My sister, who died believing that I also had turned against her, was forced to marry a man she did not love because he had money. I never knew the man she did love. It was a romance of her girlhood. I was away from home the most of my boyhood years, and she never mentioned his name after the affair was broken off. All I know is that she was deceived and made to believe some cruel story against him. She and her husband came West, where they died. My father never forgave ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... the king grew frightened as months and years slipped by, and Psyche was past the age when Greek maidens left the hearth where they had grown into girlhood. He summoned some wise men to give him counsel, but they shook their heads, and bade him consult the oracle of his fathers. It was a three days' journey to his shrine, and then no man knew when the oracle would speak, so the king took with him ...
— The Red Romance Book • Various
... the undertaking, she had felt the need of the shelter home would give. She was a little girl then, now she was at the door of womanhood. Instinctively she felt that this was not always to be her home, and she had a longing for the freedom, that normal girlhood feels, from responsibility and care. She longed to go out, as other girls went, to face the battles and make the conquests of life. It seemed to her that unless she made a bold dash for freedom her whole life would be given up to ...
— The Hero of Hill House • Mable Hale
... a room sparsely occupied by a very brilliant company, and stood—not, as she had expected to stand, among strangers—but in the midst of her own familiar friends, whom she had known in her girlhood at the court of St. Petersburg, or met, in her womanhood, in the ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... had removed into the district, and also to the distances, and the bleak country to be traversed, the wives of these clerical friends did not accompany their husbands; and the daughters grew up out of childhood into girlhood bereft, in a singular manner, of all such society as would have been natural to their age, sex, ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Attorney's hand. "What she will say is this, for I think I have very thoroughly sounded her: First, that she is Mrs. Taylor's most intimate friend. This is conceded by all who know her. Secondly, that while her intimacy does not extend back to their girlhood days—Mrs. Taylor being an Englishwoman by birth and remarkably reticent as to her former life and experiences—she has one story to tell of that time which answers the question I have given you. ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... highest ideals of girlhood as advocated by the foremost organizations of America form the background for these stories and while unobtrusive there is ...
— The Girl Scouts at Sea Crest - The Wig Wag Rescue • Lillian Garis
... her speech and act I hastened to explain the cause of my amusement. I told her of my desolate childhood, of the quiet village in which my uneventful girlhood was passed, where the most exciting thing that ever happened was a funeral about once in ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... least," said Miss Vavasor, "that you do not love my nephew as he deserves to be loved—or as any woman ought to love the man to whom she has given her consent to be his wife! You have very different ideas from such as were taught in my girlhood concerning the duties of wives! A woman, I used to be told, was to fashion herself upon her husband, fit her life to his life, her thoughts to his thoughts, ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... as she drew down a tendril of jasmine to inhale its honeyed fragrance. There was not much girlhood left in the faded, sorrowful woman who had left them just now; but in the father's fond eyes Priscilla would always be a girl. Then, in her serious, sweet way, she began to talk to her old friend—drawing him out, and listening to those ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... at it so savagely that at last her silky, black tresses clung to her white temples in big, smooth waves. Then she twisted the plaits in a huge coil at the nape of her neck; that was the way she had worn her hair in her girlhood, and that suited ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig
... a sense of outrage and revolt, were making me first hot and then cold, and distrust and suspicion and baffling helplessness were enveloping me beyond resistance. The happy ignorance and unconcern and indifference of my girlhood, my young womanhood, were vanishing before cruel and compelling verities, and that which, because of its ugliness, its offensiveness, its repulsiveness, I had wanted to know nothing about, I knew I would now be forced ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... never been handsome, even in her days of early girlhood, and now she was middle aged, distorted with work and child-bearing, and looking faded and worn as one of the boulders that lay beside the pasture fence near where she sat milking a ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... only way I like it. It carried me back to my girlhood and the summers in the Sandy River valley. I don't know why it is, of late, that my mind turns so often back to those days, and with such affection. Perhaps it is only because I find myself once more living in the country. It may be true that life is a circle, and ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... are yellow with age, Grace; they were written in my girlhood: and they are rather torn and disarranged, if I remember. Besides, my child, my flowing hand is difficult ...
— Fairy Book • Sophie May
... allowance, Aunt Janet had wept a few rather bitter tears in private, and Joan had come to London to train as a secretary, according to herself. They had taken rooms for her in the house of a lady Aunt Janet had known in girlhood, and there Joan had dutifully remained. It was not very lively, but she had a sense of gratitude in her heart towards Aunt Janet which prevented her from moving. Joan was not thinking of all this as she sat there, nor was she exactly seeing the ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... Peltrie, with an excellent grace, bore her part in the world she had wished to renounce. After a union of five years, her husband died, and she was left a widow and childless at the age of twenty-two. She returned to the religious ardors of her girlhood, again gave all her thoughts to devotion and charity, and again resolved to be a nun. She had heard of Canada; and when Le Jeune's first Relations appeared, she read them with avidity. "Alas!" wrote the Father, "is there no charitable and virtuous lady ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... less easily from page to page and chapter to chapter. But an ingenuous student of ethics who should take Helvetius seriously, could hardly be reconciled by lively anecdotes to what, in his particular formula, seems a most depressing doctrine. Madame Roland read the celebrated book in her romantic girlhood, and her impression may be taken for that of most generous natures. "Helvetius made me wretched: he annihilated the most ravishing illusions; he showed me everywhere repulsive self-interest. Yet what sagacity!" she continues. "I persuaded myself that ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... and went on with her work. She was certainly a remarkable specimen of healthy, buoyant girlhood, with face aglow and eyes sparkling with animation. What a subject she would make for an artist, Douglas mused as he watched her as she worked ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... restful peace of happy, innocent girlhood, God called her to her divine work of helpin' to ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... a little basket full of flower-seeds, was going with the gardener from bed to bed, watching him plant them. No one who had seen her in the childlike loveliness of her early girlhood could have imagined the splendour of her matured beauty. She had grown "divinely tall," and the exercise of undisputed authority had added a gracious stateliness of manner. Her complexion was wonderful, her large blue eyes shining with tender lights, her face full of sympathetic revelations. Above ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... he waived religious prejudice. He wooed, he promised, he won. The timid Madeleine, beneath her rich suitor in position, dazzled by wealth, and decoyed by the fair promises that so often deceive the confiding character of girlhood, gave her hand and her heart to a destiny ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... newspaper published in Philadelphia, entitled the Gazette of the United States. Between this young lady and Verplanck there grew up an attachment, and in 1811 they were married. I have seen an exquisite miniature of her by Malbone, taken in her early girlhood when about fifteen years old—beautiful as an angel, with light chestnut hair and a soft blue eye, in the look of which is a touch of sadness, as if caused by some dim presentiment of her early death. I remember hearing Miss Sedgwick ...
— A Discourse on the Life, Character and Writings of Gulian Crommelin - Verplanck • William Cullen Bryant
... Sometimes she spoiled and humoured Martin, and sometimes quarrelled with him childishly, scolding and fretting for her own way, and angry with conditions over which neither he nor she had any control. Alix was surprised to see the old pout, and hear the old phrase of Cherry's indulged girlhood: "I don't think this is ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... strength from the young. They loved each other, and, more than any love, they trusted one another. And Hope Georgia watched it all and rejoiced, for she believed with all the accrued erudition of eighteen years of innocent girlhood that Mr. Bud Haines was quite the finest specimen of young manhood this world had ever produced. How could he have happened? She was sure that she had never met his equal, not even in that memorable week ...
— A Gentleman from Mississippi • Thomas A. Wise
... your pain and worry, and those nights Of weary, anxious watching. Vivian writes Your plans are changed now, and you will not sail Before the Springtime. So you'll come and be My bridesmaid, darling! Do not say me nay. But three weeks more of girlhood left to me. Come, if you can, just two weeks from to-day, And make your preparations here. My sweet! Indeed I am not glad Aunt Ruth was ill— I'm sorry she has suffered so; and still I'm thankful something ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... broken. These stirring and terrible scenes had imprinted themselves for ever upon her mind. When she began to go back over these recollections, indissolubly bound up with the days of her girlhood, when she remembered how enthusiasm and wild delight alternated with scenes of terror, her whole life seemed to rise up before her I learnt from her to be so proud of the Revolution that I have liked it since, in spite of my reason and of all that I have said against it. I do not withdraw ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... the winter months in the west of England, with that lady's mother, who was now far advanced in years, and very desirous of having the company of this her last surviving child, and to feel the cheering influence of lively girlhood in the society of her truly ...
— Aunt Mary • Mrs. Perring
... you will have of its liberty!" returned the cousin sarcastically. "After having passed a girlhood of wholesome restraint in the rational society of Europe, you are about to return home to the slavery of American female life, just as you are about to ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... 1789, the second daughter of Edmund Power, of Knockbrit, near Clonmel, in the county of Tipperary. Her father came of a good family, as did also her mother, who spoke unduly often of her ancestors, the Desmonds. Marguerite was not comely in her early girlhood, though her sister Ellen and her brother Robert were handsome children. As a child, she was sensitive and sentimental, and her delight was to browse in a library,—and it was this taste that equipped her for her later friendships. Her power ...
— Some Old Time Beauties - After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment • Thomson Willing
... pledged herself to nothing. She was a tall young woman of about two-and-twenty, with very little of the tender grace of girlhood about her; a young woman who, by right of a stately carriage and a pair of handsome shoulders, might have been called fine-looking. Her features were not unlike her father's; and those eyes and eyebrows of Daniel Granger's, which would ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... it all. She had been born beside that sea. Etna had looked down upon her as she sucked and cried, toddled and played, grew to a lusty girlhood, and on into young womanhood with its gayety and unreason, its work and hopes and dreams. That Oriental song—she had sung it often on the mountain-sides, as she set her bare, brown feet on the warm stones, and lifted her head with a native pride beneath ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... easy to accuse a young person for suffering herself to be deceived, in the desire to escape, at any price, from the condition of girlhood; but such an accusation is only just in the present condition of our manners. At the present day, a young person knows nothing about seduction and its snares, she relies altogether upon her weakness, and mingling with this ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... he said gently, "forgive a selfish middle-aged bachelor if he cannot come up to the precious ideals of the sweetest girlhood in the world! I am no more worthy of you, Lady dear, than I have ever been, but I have never felt more tender toward you, more sensible of all you are giving me. I cannot pretend to the wild love of the poets you read so much; that time, if it ever was, is ...
— The Courting Of Lady Jane • Josephine Daskam
... like to bring before young people who have read her books some qualities of her mind and character which made her the rare woman, teacher, and writer that she was. I knew her from early girlhood. We went to the same schools, in more and more intimate companionship, from the time we were twelve until we were twenty years of age; and our lives and hearts were "grappled" to each other "with links of steel" ever after. She was ...
— The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball - That Floats in the Air • Jane Andrews
... She was an unskilled workwoman, not especially gifted in any way or fitted by her upbringing to earn her daily bread. Long years of her girlhood had been spent at a select school, and in the result she knew a part of the Book of Kings by heart, with the Mercy speech from the Merchant of Venice and the date of the Norman Conquest. Every day she bought the Fieramosca, and she tried to see the other ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... and starlight and the spirit of flowers, breathed out in odours. The quaint and pretty tune rose and fell, quavered, lilted along as it listed without regard for law and order. It struck Miss Mattie to the heart. Her girlhood, with its misty dreams of happiness, came back to her ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... a long while, lookin' out the window an' up to the of gray mountains; and as I watched her with her lips tremblin, an' her eyes misty, with courage winnin' a battle over pain, I saw the woman lines of her face steal forth an' bury the last traces o' girlhood. After a time she sez softly, "Poor ol' Dick, I wonder how it happened"; but never one tear got by ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... solitary-minded young person. The only child of elderly parents, she had never learnt in the nursery to indulge in the indiscretions of confiding girlhood. She had the good fortune to be without a bosom-friend who related her most sacred secrets to other bosom friends and so on, as is the way of maidens. From her father she had inherited a discriminating mind and a most admirable habit ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... time to observe the young ladies more closely. They were fine-looking, and one or two of them really beautiful. Two of them were in early girlhood yet, and there was not a vestige of the vanity and affectation often seen in those of their position. They evidently had wide diversities of character, and faults, but there were the simplicity and sincerity about them which make the difference between a chaste piece of marble and a painted ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... a boulder here and there in the course of his travels and getting it home by balancing it on the horn of his saddle. During the last weeks of her illness, when her wandering mind went back to the hills of her girlhood, her imagination played continually around this mimic mountain of Steve's, and as it seemed to be the one joy of her prairie-spent life, he would carry her out on the porch in good weather and prop her up so that she could sit and look at it. Jonas Hicks, becoming interested, took a hand ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... for them, and the earl paying them impromptu and flying visits. Generous and benevolent she was, timid and sensitive to a degree, gentle, and considerate to all. Do not cavil at her being thus praised—admire and love her whilst you may, she is worthy of it now, in her innocent girlhood; the time will come when such praise would be misplaced. Could the fate that was to overtake his child have been foreseen by the earl, he would have struck her down to death, in his love, as she stood before him, rather than suffer her to enter ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... chest, straight back and forward falling shoulders of the patient and enduring working woman, though her body was now still in its milder girlhood and work had not yet ...
— Three Lives - Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena • Gertrude Stein
... Karl could have defined the strange, conflicting emotions with which they separately received Herman's proposition. Unwillingly Olga's mind traveled swiftly back to the old days and her girlhood, and she recalled the day of Karl's departure, the day he took her in his arms and kissed ...
— The Devil - A Tragedy of the Heart and Conscience • Joseph O'Brien
... off; and my girlhood was surrounded by all the comforts of life. Every wish of my heart was gratified, and I was ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... along their hideous waves, and leave behind them smoking and depopulated deserts. The pillager is in every house, plucking even the morsel of bread from the lips of the starving child. Gray hairs are dabbled in blood, and innocent girlhood shrieks in vain to Lust for mercy. Laws, Courts, Constitutions, Christianity, Mercy, Pity, disappear. God seems to have abdicated, and Moloch to reign in His stead; while Press and Pulpit alike exult at universal murder, and urge the extermination of the Conquered, by ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... a dull time they must have with the Married Men, the Celibate, the Paralytic, and Carnaby! I'm glad my girlhood wasn't spent ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... was Venetia! the fair, the serene Venetia! the young, the inexperienced Venetia! pausing, as it were, on the parting threshold of girlhood, whom, but a few hours since, he had fancied could scarcely have proved a passion; who appeared to him barely to comprehend the meaning of his advances; for whose calmness or whose coldness he had consoled himself by the flattering conviction of her ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... of fact, Mlle. Meunier was considerably Ferrer's senior. Having spent her childhood and girlhood with a miserly father and a submissive mother, she could easily appreciate the necessity of love and joy in child life. She must have seen that Francisco Ferrer was a teacher, not college, machine, or diploma-made, but one endowed with genius for ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... anything wrong in admitting three young girls like the Vivians to the school? But yet there was her invariable rule. Could she possibly see them? One short interview would decide her. She looked round the beautiful home in which had grown up the fairest specimens of English girlhood, and wondered if, for once, ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... hollow—pathetic remains of dolls. But a doll is seldom given to Kojin during the lifetime of its possessor. When you see one thus exposed, you may be almost certain that it was found among the effects of some poor dead woman—the innocent memento of her girlhood, perhaps even also of the girlhood of her mother and of ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... second gift presents types of the principal phases of human development; from the easy mobility of infancy and childhood,—the ball,—we pass through the half-steady stages of boyhood and girlhood, represented in the cylinder, to the firm character of manhood and womanhood for which the cube furnishes ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the drawing room, looking the very incarnation of youth and charming girlhood, and the judge's eyes brightened ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... Dunstanwolde was surely a happy woman. Having known neither gayety nor luxury in her girlhood, it seemed now that she could give her lord no greater pleasure than to allow him ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... grew into womanhood she was a constant source of anxiety to her father. To him it seemed that she had passed from an awkward and rather jolly girlhood into a peculiarly determined new kind of womanhood over night. Her adventurous spirit worried him. One day he had sat in his office reading a letter announcing her homecoming. The letter seemed no more than a characteristic outburst from an impulsive girl who had ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... but his way of life soon proved him careless of deserving her, and it was then that she became staid and careworn, and her youth had lost its bloom, while forced in conscience to condemn the companion of her girlhood, yet unable to take back the heart once bestowed, though so ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... good!" he repeated, regretfully; "A woman trained as she must have been trained since girlhood, with all her finer perceptions blunted by perpetual contact with the assertive and ostentatious evidences of an excess of wealth,—probably surrounded too by the pitiful vulgarisms of a half-bred American society, too ignorant to ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... Queen Victoria's Letters, which have been published, notice that in her girlhood she was a simple, gentle, innocent girl, not specially clever, but eager to learn, resolved that everything in the government of her country should be explained to her so that she might understand it. It was her duty to know the details of that great government, and she was determined, ...
— The Canadian Girl at Work - A Book of Vocational Guidance • Marjory MacMurchy
... neglected arbor. In the midst of this formal and faded pageantry she looked charmingly fresh, youthful, and pretty; and yet the unfortunate woman thought that her attitude and expression at that moment suggested more than her fifteen years of girlhood. Her golden hair still hung unfettered over her straight, boy-like back and shoulders; her short skirt still showed her childish feet and ankles; yet there seemed to be some undefined maturity or a vague womanliness about her that stung Mrs. Peyton's heart. ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... remember which of the women Gertie knew as a result of her girlhood visit to New York, which from their membership in St. Orgul's Church, which from their relation to Minnesota. They all sat in rows on couches and chairs and called him "You wicked man!" for reasons none too clear to him. He finally fled from ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... Alabama, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas and South Dakota. Other States, also, not yet organized, are assisting in definite lines, as Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Our Bureau of Woman's Work has for many years proved its wisdom. The state of black womanhood and girlhood taken together is pitiful. The permanent and uplifting Christianization and civilization to be engrafted on the Negro race in this land, can come only as the womanhood of that people is imbued with right principles and led to right practices. ...
— American Missionary, Volume XLII. No. 11. November 1888 • Various
... through time to the ancestors of his subjects. Thus, the case of Josephine which he describes. She was eighteen years old and she lived at Voiron, in the department of the Isere. Under hypnotism Colonel de Rochas sent her adventuring back through her adolescence, her girlhood, her childhood, breast-infancy, and the silent dark of her mother's womb, and, still back, through the silence and the dark of the time when she, Josephine, was not yet born, to the light and life of a previous living, when she had been a churlish, suspicious, and ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... crisis in her life—her going away to school—this world into which she was born had been to Kitty an all-sufficient world. The days of her childhood had been as carefree and joyous, almost, as the days of the young things of her father's roaming herds. As her girlhood years advanced, under her mother's wise companionship and careful teaching, she had grown into her share of the household duties and into a knowledge of woman's part in the life to which she belonged, as naturally as her girlish form ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... to be served by the Eternal Spirit of all grace and yet not know him. In Jean Webster's "Daddy Long Legs," Jerusha Abbott in the orphanage is helped by an unknown friend. Year after year the favours flow in from this friend whom she does not know. She blossoms out into girlhood and young womanhood and still she does not know him. One day she sees him and she does not recognize him. She has always thought of him as looking other than he does, and so even when she sees him she does not know him. ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... together, and then Florence went to pack her grips and things. Old Hurlbird took the opportunity to read me a full-blooded lecture, in the style of an American oration, as to the perils for young American girlhood lurking in the European jungle. He said that Paris was full of snakes in the grass, of which he had had bitter experience. He concluded, as they always do, poor, dear old things, with the aspiration that all American ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... vendors were chiefly women, of whom the most celebrated was a hag named Tophania, who was in this way accessory to the death of upwards of six hundred persons. This woman appears to have been a dealer in poisons from her girlhood, and resided first at Palermo and then at Naples. That entertaining traveller, Father Lebat, has given, in his letters from Italy, many curious particulars relating to her. When he was at Civita Vecchia, in 1719, the Viceroy of Naples discovered that poison was extensively sold ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... There is something wonderfully attractive about her, she is so pretty, proud, and high-spirited, and, at the same time, so intensely real and human. It is a pleasure to say that the author of this "love story of the university" has given us a picture of modern girlhood that goes straight to the heart and stays ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... her girlhood. She went first to live with a sort of cousin in town, in a house where they took in cards on a tray, and then she came to live with Mrs Black, who took a fancy to her at first. I'd had no boyhood to speak of, so I gave her ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... those who lie Cast out from bliss, the days of joy come back, And all the soul with wormwood sweetness rack, So in that trance of dreadful ecstasy The vision of her girlhood glinted by:— And how the father through their garden stray'd, And, child with children, play'd, And teased the rabbit-hutch, and fed the dove Before him from above Alighting,—in his visitation sweet, Led on by ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... "Do you know, Lieutenant, that actually I have never before had the privilege of meeting an officer of the army. Why, we in the East scarcely realize that we possess such a body of brave men. But I have read much regarding the border, and all the dreams of my girlhood seem on the point of realization since I came here and began mingling in its free, wild life. Your appearance supplies the one touch of color that was lacking to make the picture complete. Mr. Moffat has done so much to make me realize the breadth of Western experience, and now, I do so hope, you ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... and in her dressing-room and had almost finished her toilette before he awakened. For the first time in years—perhaps the first time since the end of her happy girlhood and the beginning of her first season in Washington society—she felt like singing. Was there ever such a dawn? Did ever song of birds sound so like the voice of eternal youth? Whence had come this air like the fumes ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... shaky when she got out of bed and stood on her feet. She had not had a maid in her girlhood so she could dress herself, much as she detested to do it. After she had begun however she could not help becoming rather interested because the dress she had worn the day before had become crushed and she put ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Very faintly, as in a dream, I have seen an angel visitant. My mother, why did you leave your hapless babe? Oh! why? my mother! I was left much to myself, and followed unrestrained my own inclinations. You know my fondness for books; that fondness was imbibed in girlhood, as I wandered in my own sunny home—my lost home. My father taught me to conceal my emotions—to keep down the rising sob, to force back the glittering tear; and when I smiled over some childish grief, applauded my stoicism. ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... the advantages which the royal couple sought. It was in the Isle of Wight, which her Majesty had loved in her girlhood, with the girdle of sea that gave such assurance of the much-courted, much-needed seclusion, as could hardly be procured elsewhere— certainly not within a reasonable distance of London. It was a lovely place by nature, with no end of capabilities for the practice of the Prince's pleasant faculty ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... begun with my life, and that only an absence was ended When we met and knew in our souls that we loved one another. For from the first was no doubt. The earliest hints of the passion, Whispered to girlhood's tremulous dream, may be mixed with misgiving, But, when the very love comes, it bears no vagueness of meaning; Touched by its truth (too fine to be felt by the ignorant senses, Knowing but looks and utterance) soul unto soul makes confession, Silence to silence speaks. And I think ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... Law. The Sisters of the Congregation are bound to co-operate with the pastors of the Church in the discharge of such duties of charity as come within the spirit of their rule, making, however, a specialty of instructing youth, to which Sister Bourgeois devoted all her energies from girlhood. Her zeal was indeed a consuming fire, for she had no sooner learned that there were pagan tribes to instruct and convert in the New World, than she sought means to go there ...
— The Life of Venerable Sister Margaret Bourgeois • Anon.
... days of my boarding-school," she continued, "I have known only one Mabel. In her girlhood she had all that she could get out of life and turned everything she could to her own ends. A marriage was arranged for her—you see, I was half a Jewess and my husband was half a Jew, and things are done like that with ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... dignity about her face and figure which became her well, and which she carried as though she knew herself to be in very truth a countess. It was a face which bore well such signs of age as those which had come upon it. She seemed to be a woman fitter for womanhood than for girlhood. Her eyes were brighter than of yore, and, as Harry thought, larger; and her high forehead and noble stamp of countenance seemed fitted for the dress and ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... Wade among her books. She felt light of heart. Within this hour Glazzard would be gone from Polterham. Four days hence, Denzil would be a Member of Parliament. Had she no claim to happiness—she whose girlhood had suffered such monstrous wrong? Another reason there was for the impulse of joy that possessed her—a hope once already disappointed—a voice of nature bidding her regard this marriage as true and eternal, let the ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... sat at night in my cell I could bear once more to think of the little ivy-covered cottage, of the green grave in the churchyard, and of the two helpless children who might still live to call me father. What had become of them? They were perhaps growing up into boyhood and girlhood, beginning to discover for themselves the snares and sorrows of the world which had overcome me. Need I tell you I prayed for those two night and day? A convict's prayer it was—a forger's prayer, a thief's prayer; but a father's prayer to a pitiful Father ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... Boston on the 6th of March 1888, two days after the death of her father in the same city. Miss Alcott's early education had partly been given by the naturalist Thoreau, but had chiefly been in the hands of her father; and in her girlhood and early womanhood she had fully shared the trials and poverty incident to the life of a peripatetic idealist. In a newspaper sketch entitled "Transcendental Wild Oats,'' afterwards reprinted in the volume Silver Pitchers ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... spring, when Father and Mother returned, and we all went back to Andersonville, there followed another long period of just happy girlhood, and I suspect I was too satisfied and happy to think of writing. After all, I've noticed it's when we're sad or troubled over something that we have that tingling to cover perfectly good white paper with "confessions" and "stories of my life." ...
— Mary Marie • Eleanor H. Porter
... him. Bidding a long farewell to the loving parents who had up to that time stood between her and every trouble, Fanny Osbourne, at an age when most young women are enjoying the care-free life of irresponsible girlhood, took her small daughter Isobel and set forth into a ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... moment, a dim, untraceable association of ideas drew her back until she was face-to-face with a long-forgotten incident in her very-little girlhood. Once upon a time, there had been a moment when she had experienced much the same sort of feeling she had now—the feeling of wanting to cry out and run away. As a matter of fact, she had cried out and run away. Why, and from what? As it came back to her, not from ...
— Martha By-the-Day • Julie M. Lippmann |
