"Middle-aged" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not, if you value your life." Every draught of fresh air and water inspired me with renewed health and spirits, and I disregarded the well-meant advice; the gentlemen who gave it had just recovered from the terrible disease. He was a middle-aged man, a farmer from the Upper Province, Canadian born. He had visited Montreal on business for the first time. "Well, sir," he said, in answer to some questions put to him by my husband respecting the disease, "I can tell you what it is: a man ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... but I should think it must be a very difficult language to acquire," observed a pale middle-aged lady of slight figure who sat opposite Harry, turning her eyes towards him, but those orbs were of a dull leaden hue, the eyelids almost closed. ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... the blood and the brain, and perhaps the bones as well. The old felt younger than they did when they left "the States,"—the territory from the Rockies to the Atlantic Ocean was commonly known as "the States." The middle-aged renewed their youth, and youth was wild with an exuberance of health and hope and happiness that seemed ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... received rather coolly. A temporary boarder from the country, consisting of a somewhat more than middle-aged female, with a parchment forehead and a dry little "frisette" shingling it, a sallow neck with a necklace of gold beads, a black dress too rusty for recent grief and contours in basso-rilievo, left the table prematurely, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... the band, and the long line of school-children, and the burgess, and the fire company, and the distinguished stranger who was to make the address, until Henry Foust appeared, in his blue suit, with his flag on his breast and his bouquet in his hand. On each side of him walked a tall, middle-aged son, who seemed to hand him over reluctantly to the marshal, who was to escort him to his place. Smilingly he spoke to the marshal, but he was the only one who smiled or spoke. For an instant men and women broke off in the middle of their sentences, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... looking in his face by daylight, Sybilla had opportunity to see how changed he was. He had become a grave, middle-aged man. She could not understand it. He had never told her of any cares, and he was little more than thirty. She felt almost vexed at him for growing so old; nay, she even said so, and began to pull out a few grey hairs that defaced the beauty ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... friend entered this small third-story back room. Behind a narrow, unpainted counter, having a desk at one end, stood a middle-aged man, with dark, restless eyes that rarely looked you in the face. He wore a thick but rather closely-cut beard and moustache. The police knew him very well; so did the criminal lawyers, when he happened ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... Irishmen of all religious denominations. On Tone's return to Dublin, early in November, a branch society was formed on the Belfast basis. The Hon. Simon Butler, a leading barrister, was chosen Chairman, and Mr. Napper Tandy, an active middle-aged merchant, with strong republican principles, was Secretary. The solemn declaration or oath, binding every member "to forward a brotherhood of affection, an identity of interests, a communion of rights, ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... middle-aged lady approached his desk, and I thought that I could see a rather awkward effort at a smile hang around the upper corners of his huge, black beard, as his eye caught her features through his spectacles, and he received her papers. But the gruff manner in which ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... permission to enter. We lifted the hanging door of reindeer hide, crept in, stumbling over a confused mixture of dogs and deerskins, until we found room to sit down. Two middle-aged women, dressed in poesks, like the men, were kindling a fire between some large stones in the centre, but the air inside was still as cold as outside. The damp birch sticks gave out a thick smoke, ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... most touchingly, acted. MAUREL excellent as Germont Senior, and MONTARIOL quite the weak-minded masher Alfredo. What a different turn the story might have taken had it occurred to Violetta to have a flirtation with the handsome middle-aged pere noble! At one time it almost seemed as if there had been some change in motive of the Opera since I last saw it, and that the above original idea was about to be carried out. But no; in another second Germont-Maurel ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 2, 1891 • Various
... on this bed—a handsome, middle-aged man, whose thick brown beard showed soft gleams of silver in it, and whose hair, though waving and bright, was growing thin on the top of ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... been greater if the stranger had worn a panther-skin and carried a thyrsus; for the cunning barber had said nothing of the Greek's age or appearance; and among her father's scholarly visitors, she had hardly ever seen any but middle-aged or grey-headed men. There was only one masculine face, at once youthful and beautiful, the image of which remained deeply impressed on her mind: it was that of her brother, who long years ago had taken her on his knee, kissed her, and never come back again: a fair face, with sunny hair, like her ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... and vegetable market, a neat and well-paved bazar, surmounted by a flying roof and pierced for glass windows. The dead arches in the long walls are externally stone and internally brick. The building was full of fat middle-aged negresses, sitting at squat before their 'blyes,' or round baskets, which contained a variety and confusion of heterogeneous articles. The following is a list almost as disorderly as the ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... elegant, dark, intellectual-browed John Moreton, who had doctorates of divinity from half a dozen big theological seminaries at home and abroad; and there was the business man of the two—Stephen, middle-aged before his time, staid and formal ... to the latter, the twin schools: the seminary for girls and the preparatory school for boys—and the revivalistic religion that Went with them, meant a, sort of exalted business functioning ... this I say not at ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... at a pretty steady trot, and at the end of the third,—at the very gates of the Haviland Park, in fact,—fortune came to her rescue. A good-humored middle-aged gentleman on a brown horse came cantering down the avenue and, passing through the gates, approached her. Seeing her, he raised his hat courteously; seeing him, she stopped her pony, for she recognized ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... and curly also. The first time she went to church in her little widow's bonnet with the reddish gold showing itself under the pathetic little white crepe border, she was looked at a good deal. Especially was she looked at by an extremely respectable middle-aged widower who had been a friend of her dead husband's. His wife had been dead six years, he had a comfortable house and a comfortable shop which had thriven greatly through ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Pumblechook, a large hard-breathing middle-aged slow man, with a mouth like a fish, dull staring eyes, and sandy hair standing upright on his head, so that he looked as if he had just been all but choked, and had that moment come to, "I have brought you as the compliments of the season—I have brought you, ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... ease, leisure and income. Being practically indefatigable the loss of ease and leisure troubled her but little and being in extremely comfortable circumstances, she had no need to economise in her hospitalities. She might easily look forward to enjoying an unchanging middle-aged activity, while generations of youth withered round her, and no star, remotely rising, had as yet threatened to dim her unrivalled effulgence. Though essentially autocratic, her subjects were allowed and even encouraged ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... about twenty persons, the majority of whom were visitors, inhabitants of Tudela or of neighbouring country-houses. With four or five exceptions, the party consisted of men, for the most part elderly or middle-aged. One of the ladies and a young officer of the royal guard were the singers, and their performance seemed partially to interrupt the conversation of a group of the seniors who were seated round a card-table at the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... grinding of wheels on the gravel, the cab drew up at the steps, the door opened, and out hopped a dark-haired damsel in a long blue coat. She gave one hurried glance at the window, smiled again and waved her hand, then vanished inside the porch, where she was instantly followed by her companion, a middle-aged gentleman, who carried a bag. The cabman began to take down the box, and the sound of the front door bell could be heard plainly—a loud and vigorous peal, forsooth—enough almost to break the wire! The six Juniors subsided into their sitting-room. ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... Bradshaw arrived—a stout, bald-headed, middle-aged gentleman, with ruddy countenance, dressed in nankin trousers, white jacket, and broad-brimmed straw hat, which he doffed as he approached the strangers, glancing from one to the other; and then, having settled in his mind that Jack Rogers was Alick Murray, ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... nothing, but stood by to take in sail as they ran swiftly toward the little quay. The pace slackened, and the Arabella, as though conscious of the contraband in her forecastle, crept slowly to where a stout, middle-aged woman, who bore a strong likeness to the mate, stood upon ...
— Lady of the Barge and Others, Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... matter, and Flora, not without some difficulty, got rid of the promising candidate for matrimony and emigration. Her place was instantly supplied by a tall, hard-featured, middle-aged woman, who had been impatiently waiting for Miss Pack's dismissal, in the kitchen, and who now rushed upon the scene, followed by three rude children, from six to ten years of age, a girl, and two impudent-looking boys, who ranged themselves in front of Mrs. Lyndsay, with ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... George Hotspur, late Mrs. Morton. Very many spoke of her familiarly, who knew her only on the stage,—as is the custom of men in speaking of actresses,—and perhaps some few of these who spoke of her did know her personally. "Poor Lucy!" said one middle-aged gentleman over fifty, who spent four nights of every week at one theatre or another. "When she was little more than a child they married her to that reprobate Morton. Since that she has managed to keep her head above water by hard work; and now she has gone and married another ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... said the man as Athalie lifted her eyes from the crystal and smiled reassuringly at him. He was a stocky, red-faced, trim, middle-aged man; but his sanguine visage bore the haggard imprint of sleepless nights, and the edges of his teeth had ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... so instinctively. Vanity apart, I stood for something tangible in her life. She could not remember the time when I had not been her firm friend. Between my first offering of chocolates and my last over a quarter of a century had lapsed. As far as a young woman can know a middle-aged man, she knew me outside in. If she came to me for my sympathy, she knew that she had the right. If she twitted me on my foibles, she knew that I granted her ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... The strong middle-aged woman who stood alone in the empty hall knew nothing of sinking vessels or the ways of rats, but she had known incidentally of more than one catastrophe like this, in the course of her husband's ascendant career, and somehow ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... Invisible Man could easily have distanced his middle-aged pursuer under ordinary circumstances, but the position in which Wicksteed's body was found suggests that he had the ill luck to drive his quarry into a corner between a drift of stinging nettles and the gravel pit. To those who appreciate the extraordinary irascibility of the Invisible Man, ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... brought all his high spirits to enliven the family party. Richard, too, returned later on the same day, and though not received with the same uproarious joy as Harry, the elder section of the family were as happy in their way as what Blanche called the middle-aged. The Daisy was brought down, and the eleven were again all in the same room, though there were suppressed sighs from some, who reflected how long it might be ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... him weep. It was partly the terror of the unknown and the unfamiliar; it was partly the interruption to the even tenor of his life and the customary engagements of his day; and in this respect the boy had what may be called a middle-aged temperament, an intense dislike of any interference with his own ways; he had no enterprise, none of the high-hearted enjoyment of novelty, unless he was surrounded by a bulwark of familiar personalities; but partly, too, his love was all given to ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... his room, the waiter said, and Mr Cruden was to step up. He did step up, and was ushered into a little sitting-room, where a middle-aged gentleman stood before the fire-place reading the paper and softly humming to himself as he ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... a clergyman dining gloomily at a table by himself. There was a gray group of middle-aged ladies next to him. There was Colonel Hankin and his wife. They had arrived with the Lucys in the hotel 'bus, and their names were entered above Robert's in the visitors' book. They marked him with manifest approval as one of themselves, and they looked all pink perfection and silver white propriety. ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... but I could take the baby along with me, if some one could be found—The conductor calls. The car stops. As the child robbers step out (the little girl, clutched in the old grandfather's arms) 'mid the frantic cries of the mother and the execrations of the passengers, two middle-aged gentlemen of fine matter-of-fact presence, entered. I at once met their questioning faces with a hurried statement of facts, and the need of some intelligent, humane gentleman to aid the young mother in the recovery of her little girl. Having spoken together aside, the younger man introduced ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... and to them appears, not the angel, but the little child Christ, half-swaddled, swimming in orange clouds on a deep blue sky. The eldest king is standing, and points to the vision with surprise and awe; the middle-aged one shields his eyes coolly to see; while the youngest, a delicate lad, has already fallen on his knees, and is praying with both hands crossed on his breast. For dramatic, poetic invention, these frescoes can be surpassed, poor as is their execution, only by Giotto's St. John ascending ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... Bay neighbourhood, four modes of disposing of the dead obtain, according to Mr. Meyer:—old persons are buried; middle-aged persons are placed in a tree, the hands and knees being brought nearly to the chin, all the openings of the body, as mouth, nose, ears, etc. being previously sewn up, and the corpse covered with mats, pieces of old ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... the Governor. There was a large bookcase, with a glass front, containing handsomely bound books, many of which, I observed, were of a religious character. In a few minutes the Governor came in, a middle-aged man, tall, and thin for an Englishman, kindly and agreeable enough in aspect, but not with the marked look of a man of force and ability. I should not judge from his conversation that he was an educated man, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a middle-aged man, acted like a spoiled child. He threatened and blustered and raved until the Chief hung up the receiver. At dawn the rangers went after the two old babes in the wood and found them creeping ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... Henrik Ibsen who said that the value of a truth lasted about fifteen years; then it rotted into error. Now, isn't all this talk of artistic improvement as fallacious as the vicious reasoning of the Norwegian dramatist? Otherwise Bach would be dead; Beethoven, middle-aged; Mozart, senile. What, instead, is the health of these three composers? Have you a gayer, blither, more youthful scapegrace writing today than Mozart? Is there a man among the moderns more virile, more passionately earnest ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... signs of life. It was not until we sought out the house of a captain of dragoons, a friend of my companion the Comte, that we found a human being in these solitudes. The house was, indeed, a melancholy ruin, but by the gate was a lodge, and in the lodge a concierge. He was a small man and middle-aged, and as he spoke he trembled with a continual agitation of body as though he were afflicted with ague. He led us into his little house, the walls of which were blackened as with fire and pierced in many places with the impact of bullets. And ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... down the terrace in front of him he sees a little to his left a solitary guest, a middle-aged gentleman sitting on a chair of iron laths at a little iron table with a bowl of lump sugar and three wasps on it, reading the Standard, with his umbrella up to defend him from the sun, which, in August and at less than an hour after noon, ...
— You Never Can Tell • [George] Bernard Shaw
... to different Inmates. The first was a middle-aged, scholarly man, who was seated at a table with a Webster's Dictionary and a ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... the forenoon of the day following Bob McGraw's spectacular advent into San Pasqual, the nurse for whom Doc Taylor had telephoned to Bakersfield arrived at the Hat Ranch. She proved to be a kind middle-aged woman, devoted to her profession and thoroughly competent to do everything for Bob McGraw that could be done. Her arrival released Donna from the care of watching the wounded man, and she ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... middle-aged tidy woman, with that alert precision of movement which seems to come from an active orderly mind; and as she now turned her head briskly at the sound of the Parson's footsteps, she showed a countenance prepossessing, though not handsome,—a ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... beyond the ridge where I had been shooting I came upon the pan of water that was to be our outspan, and beside the pan was a farmhouse, outside of which stood a little group of people. An old woman, a young man, a girl, two middle-aged matrons, a man horribly deformed—people of different ages and manners, yet having in common one startling thing: they were all shaking with terror. It was startling because they were the only living ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... was prevented by the entrance of a customer. Before he had been fully served, a middle-aged woman came in with a large bundle, and went back to Berlaps's desk, where he stood engaged ...
— Lizzy Glenn - or, The Trials of a Seamstress • T. S. Arthur
... flat membranes, like rudimentary eyes, but no sorb. These membranes were expressionless, but in some strange way seemed to add vigour to the stem eyes underneath. When his glance rested on Maskull, the latter felt as though his brain were being thoroughly travelled through. The man was middle-aged. ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... after year she was always to be seen there, sweetly abstracted like an old saint in a dream. She had one thought, one purpose left in life. This was to live to see all of her "boys saved." These were three middle-aged men, all of whom had been wild in their youth. Her one connection now with the church was expressed, not by any personal interest in the preacher or his sermons, but in this thought for her children. Some time during every experience meeting ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... we were not without some excuse for this unpardonable sentiment. For there was another English family in Passy—the Prendergasts, an older family than ours—that is, the parents (and uncles and aunts) were middle-aged, the grandmother dead, and the children grown up. We had not the honor of their acquaintance. But whether that was their misfortune and our fault (or vice versa) I cannot tell. Let ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... for the sake of argument, that gratitude, respect, friendliness, a sense of being unprotected and alone in the world, have led to her engagement with the wealthy, middle-aged banker, and that through it all her woman's heart was never awakened: such a thing at least is possible. If this were true, she would be no more to blame than I, and we might become the happy victims ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... unctuous voice which they recognised; it was that of M. Vigneron, who was loudly repeating the morning prayers. A moment afterwards came a meeting which interested them. They were walking down the passage when they were passed by a middle-aged, thick-set, sturdy-looking gentleman, wearing carefully trimmed whiskers. He bent his back and passed so rapidly that they were unable to distinguish his features, but they noticed that he was carrying a carefully made parcel. And immediately afterwards he slipped a key into the lock of the room ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... herself willing to take Lucy into her house on special conditions. She must be able to teach music up to a certain point. "Then it's all over," said Lucy to the dean with her pretty smile,—that smile which caused all the old and middle-aged men to fall in love with her. "It's not over at all," said the dean. "You've got four months. Our organist is about as good a teacher as there is in England. You are clever and quick, and he shall teach you." So Lucy went to Bobsborough, and was ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... waning. The gradual closing up of its huge throat, and the increasing substitution of steam for water, prove that the monster has now entered on the final stage of its career; for here, as on the terraces, we are surrounded by specimens of life, decay, and death. The young, the middle-aged, the old, the dead,—they ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... the middle-aged are more attended to here than with us, where the young are all in all. As Hayward said to me the other evening, "it takes time to make PEOPLE, like cathedrals," and Mr. Rogers and Miss Berry could not have been what they are now, forty ...
— Letters from England 1846-1849 • Elizabeth Davis Bancroft (Mrs. George Bancroft)
... on the floor. Each man had an Indian woman. One was middle-aged; the other, a comely young girl with heavy silver earrings, was laughing noisily as her companion dragged her to a standstill ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... eagle, a bull, or at worst assumes for his private purposes the forms of those animals. The cow and the cuckoo are sacred to Hera; the owl and the snake to Athena; the dolphin, the crow, the lizard, the bull, to Apollo. Dionysus, always like a wilder and less middle-aged Zeus, appears freely as a snake, bull, he-goat, and lion. Allowing for some isolated exceptions, the safest rule in all these cases is that the attribute is original and the god is added.[20:1] ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... want to see it!" Dolly sprang lightly up the steps and hurried into her mother's room on the right of the hall, where a tall, angular, middle-aged spinster sat with her stained and needle-pricked fingers ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... be 'shamed on, Bob Bostock," said another middle-aged man. "I know what you feels, mate, for I've got boys o' my own, and he's somebody's bairn. Got a father and mother waiting for him out in Brisbun. Ah! there'll be some wet eyes yonder when they come ...
— King o' the Beach - A Tropic Tale • George Manville Fenn
... accent he has! and the national swagger too.' And Mr. Wynn, feeling intensely British, left his box, and walked into the midst of the room with his newspaper, wishing to suggest the presence of a third person. He glanced at the American, a middle-aged, stout-built man, with an intelligent and energetic countenance, who returned the glance keenly. There was something indescribably foreign about his dress, though in detail it was as usual; and his manner and air were those of one not accustomed to the ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... to his mind. Twenty years ago he had spent a night with a middle-aged ugly vixen in Soleure, when he had imagined himself to be possessing a beautiful young woman whom he adored. He recalled how next day, in a shameless letter, she had derided him for the mistake that she had so greatly desired him to make and that she had compassed with such infamous ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... sense of doing that?" argued one middle-aged widow of a practical turn of mind. "You can save funeral expenses by letting the Germans ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... counted and on them but twenty birds recognized, five hundred and forty-two were decorated with feathers of some kind. Of the one hundred and fifty-eight remaining, seventy-two were worn by young or middle-aged ladies, and eighty-six by ladies ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... nowadays as old maids and maiden aunts as contrasted to British matrons. There are merely married or unmarried women. And Lady Kellynch belonged to a long-forgotten type; she was no suffragette; politics did not touch her, and at fifty-four she did not regard herself as the modern middle-aged woman does. It never occurred to her for a moment, for example, to have lessons in the Tango or to learn ski-ing or any other winter sports, in a white jersey and cap. She was not seen clinging to the arm of a professor of roller-skating, nor did she go to fancy-dress balls as Folly or Romeo, ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... to be unassailable,—what had the club to do with that? "If you turn out all the blackguards and all the dishonourable men, where will the club be?" was a question asked with a great deal of vigour by one middle-aged gentleman who was supposed to know the club-world very thoroughly. He had committed no offence which the law could recognise and punish, nor had he sinned against the club rules. "He is not required to be a man of honour by any regulation of which I am aware," ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... the summons in an instant, and followed Rohfritsch up stairs. There, on the first floor, a middle-aged monk received me, and accompanied me to the chamber of the President. On rapping at the door with his knuckles, a hollow but deep-toned voice commanded the visitor to enter. I was introduced with some little ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... conventionality and false standards, and she made confessions like these to Laura, sitting in the girl's bedroom in the twilight. They were very soothing, these confessions. Laura would take Mrs. Simpson's thin, veined, middle-aged hand in hers and seem to charge herself for the moment with the responsibility of the elder lady's case. She did not attempt to conceal her pity or even her contempt for Mrs. Simpson's state of grace: ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... inexperienced,—and who have fluttered hither to the snare of Lady Winsleigh's "at home," half expecting to be allowed to make love to their hostess, and so have something to boast of afterwards,—others are of the middle-aged complacent type, who, though infinitely bored, have condescended to "look in" for ten minutes or so, to see if there are any pretty women worth the honor of their criticism—others again (and these are the most unfortunate) ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... to hold the world together," returned Eli; and then he was silent, his eyes fixed on Doll's eloquent ears, his mouth working a little. For this progress through a less desirable stratum of life caused him to cast a backward glance over his own smooth, middle-aged road. ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... extravagant, even if presented to him on specious grounds; and moreover, as I had told Mrs. Pallant, I really had no wish to change my scene. It was no part of my promise to my sister that, with my middle-aged habits, I should duck and dodge about Europe. So I temporised. "Should you really object to the boy so much as a son-in-law? After all he's a good fellow ...
— Louisa Pallant • Henry James
... fore-topsail aback. The Montauk followed, taking a position under her lee. A quarter-boat was lowered, and in five minutes its oars were tossed at the packet's lee-gangway, when the commander of the corvette ascended the ship's side, followed by a middle-aged man in the dress of a civilian, and a ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... in life. When interrogated concerning her employers, Toni was always vague. That there were two of them Fanny knew; but from Toni's extremely colourless description, Miss Gibbs gathered that neither was at all what the girls called interesting; and Mr. Rose, at least, almost middle-aged. (Heaven knows what flight of fancy on the part of Toni—Toni, whose magic romance was the shyest, most delicate fantasy in the world—was responsible for ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... shade with the steep roofs of desultory Dutch houses, and where pigs and chickens disported themselves in the gutter. These elements of rural picturesqueness have now wholly departed from New York street scenery; but they were to be found within the memory of middle-aged persons, in quarters which now would blush to be reminded of them. Catherine had a great many cousins, and with her Aunt Almond's children, who ended by being nine in number, she lived on terms of considerable intimacy. When she was younger they had been rather afraid of her; ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... one of the marvels of English society; the most sought after of all its members, though no one could tell you exactly why. He was a little oily Portuguese, middle-aged, corpulent, and somewhat bald, with dark eyes of sympathy, not unmixed with humor. No one knew who he was, and in a country the most scrutinizing as to personal details, no one inquired or cared to know. A quarter of a century ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... delivered and Jack reported to Bartlett, an agreeable, middle-aged farmer-soldier, who had been on scout duty since July. They left camp together next morning an hour before reveille. They had an uneventful day, mostly in wooded flats and ridges, and from the latter looking across with a spy-glass into Bruteland, as they called the country ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... larder does not cause fish to be there; after a series of random movements it is found that this result is to be caused by going to the City in the morning and coming back in the evening. No one would have guessed a priori that this movement of a middle-aged man's body would cause fish to come out of the sea into his larder, but experience shows that it does, and the middle-aged man therefore continues to go to the City, just as the cat in the cage continues to lift the latch when it has once found it. Of course, ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... SIR,—As a middle-aged mother I do not appeal for your sympathy, I merely wish to describe my position, the difficulties of which might no doubt be paralleled in hundreds of other households. I have three children whose characteristics may be ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 1st, 1920 • Various
... still the more than middle-aged German professor (he must be fifty-seven or so) but with a heart full of newly wakened yearnings for human life with all its joys and passions, Faust wanders, trying to feel sympathy with all these multitudinous human beings, attracted perhaps here ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... ordinary and commonplace life until he was a middle-aged man, and then something remarkable happened to him. It happened on the twenty-fifth of January, in a very cold winter. Jules was forty-five years old, that year, and he remembered the day of the month, because in the ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... enter the church and look at the tomb of the Plantagenet lady and her unknown knight, who slept there so quietly from year to year, through spring, summer, autumn and winter, for ever and for ever. The front door was locked, so he rang the bell. It was answered by a new servant, rather a forbidding, middle-aged woman with a limp, who informed him that Mr. Knight was out, and notwithstanding his explanations, declined to admit him into the house. Doubtless she thought that a young man, wearing a foreign-looking hat and carrying ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... madam; I am he," said a middle-aged, pleasant-faced man, who met her in the doorway. "I was just going out, but if your business is not likely to keep ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... they came upon a middle-aged woman accompanied by four girls, all of whom showed signs ...
— The High School Boys' Fishing Trip • H. Irving Hancock
... days later a middle-aged, ragged fellow, with a grinding organ, arrived at the inn, and called for a glass. In the guest-room were the "packmen," and some equally wild-looking girls. The grinding organ was put in requisition, and to its strains they danced till past midnight, when Babinsky himself ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... planning!—Maurice was out, wandering about in the gray afternoon. It had begun to snow, in a fitful, irritating way—little gritty pellets that blew into his face. He had nowhere to go—four o'clock is a dead time to drop in on people! He had nothing to do, and nothing to think of—except the foolish, middle-aged woman, stating, in their dreary third-floor front, an undeniable fact—he was tired of her! Walking aimlessly about in the cold, he said to himself, dully, "Why was I such an idiot as to marry her?" He was old enough ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... of those brisk, efficient, middle-aged career-women who had no fuss or frills about her. She had seen us knocking on the door, so she didn't bother to do any knocking herself. She just opened the ...
— A Spaceship Named McGuire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... brains, skulls, charts, and other matters that would make the most show for the money. That would do to begin with. I would then advertise myself as the celebrated Professor Brainey, or whatever name I might choose, and wait for my first customer. My first customer is a middle-aged man. I look at him,—ask him a question or two, so as to hear him talk. When I have got the hang of him, I ask him to sit down, and proceed to fumble ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... gave his instructions to the uniformed policeman who came. Presently the door opened again and the officer ushered in a respectable-looking, middle-aged man, who had "domestic service" written ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... sportsmen equipped with rifles and other accoutrements; two young men, one of them a lawyer, the other a merchant (as I discovered from their conversation); an elderly gentleman, evidently of wealth and position, whom the young lawyer addressed as "Judge;" a middle-aged widow from Chicago; a brisk little milliner on her way back to some Pennsylvania village with the latest fashions from New York; and myself, a lively girl just out of school. There was also a negro huddled up in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... front heard the words, and redoubled their efforts, but they were heavy, middle-aged scoundrels, and plodded clumsily over the stone-strewed ground; while, forgetting their wounds in the excitement, Mark and Ralph bounded along, leaping blocks that stood in their way, and gaining so fast upon their flying enemies, that in a few minutes they were close up: ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... strove with all the decision of which she was capable to keep her high-pitched, middle-aged voice in order—"'fore you get to bed I'm most forgettin' what I was to ask you. I s'pose you'll laugh, but Guy—he wrote me partic'lar he wanted you and his father to"—Marietta's rather stern, thin face took on a curious expression—"to hang ...
— On Christmas Day in the Morning • Grace S. Richmond
... almost too good to be true. In addition, the gods loved him, and so he had to die young. Some people think that a man of fifty-two is middle-aged. But if R. H. D. had lived to be a hundred, he would never have grown old. It is not generally known that the name of his ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... audience will have, before he goes in. Front seats: a few old folks,—shiny-headed,—slant up best ear towards the speaker,—drop off asleep after a while, when the air begins to get a little narcotic with carbonic acid. Bright women's faces, young and middle-aged, a little behind these, but toward the front—(pick out the best, and lecture mainly to that). Here and there a countenance sharp and scholarlike, and a dozen pretty female ones sprinkled about. An indefinite number of pairs of young people,—happy, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... Mrs. Throckmorton went to her middle-aged repose, I sat up and went through imaginary scenes, and reviewed the situation a hundred times, and tried to convince myself of what I wanted to believe, and ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris
... an opportunity to notice my entertainers. The man was a strongly built, good-looking, middle-aged Mexican; the wife (as I took her to be) placid-looking, kindly-featured, and of the national middle-aged stoutness. The two children were slender, attractive girls, verging on the early womanhood of their race. I think they were twins. This, ...
— The Penance of Magdalena & Other Tales of the California Missions • J. Smeaton Chase
... marry one of the sisters? Ridiculous! But what was there to do? To-day he was nearly thirty; in ten years he would be a middle-aged man; and, alas! for he felt in him manifold resources, sufficient were he to live for five hundred years. Must he marry Agnes? He might if she was a peeress in her own right! Or should he win a peerage for himself by some great poem, or by some great political ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... his middle-aged heart, these casual and opinionated young things, with their follies and fanaticisms, their Jacob's ladders hitched perilously to the stars; with their triumphs and failures and disillusions all ahead of them; airily impervious to proffered ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... who had discovered the real secret of her books. George reflected sadly that he was the only person who understood her. Why, it was maddening to think that any one reading those paragraphs in the "Times" might imagine her middle-aged and ugly and spectacled. And how were they to know that her knowledge of cricket averages was probably greater than that of the Selection Committee? Probably, too, they pictured her with short hair, June, with her crinkling crown ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... about sixty or seventy yards away to a shady spot, where he sat down on the green slope of the foss to cool himself. He had been riding many hours in a burning sun, and wanted cooling. He attracted everybody's attention on his arrival by his appearance: middle-aged, with good features and curly brown hair and beard, but huge—one of the biggest men I had ever seen; his weight could not have been under about seventeen stone. Sitting or reclining on the grass, he fell asleep, and rolling down the ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... middle-aged person, fate; for is it not practically certain that what I have done for twenty years I shall repeat to-day? What are the chances for a man who has been lazy and indolent all his life starting in to-morrow morning to be industrious; or a spendthrift, frugal; a libertine, virtuous; ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... middle-aged lady, very plain but motherly-looking. She wore her hair combed in a way that would have been considered "terribly old-fashioned" in Mary Alice's home town, and she had on several large cameos very like some Mary Alice's mother had and scorned ...
— Everybody's Lonesome - A True Fairy Story • Clara E. Laughlin
... she looked, as she stood there, like a lovely lily in a green calyx, and her expression made his hands tingle to knock flat the scowling, middle-aged man with the unkempt hair and the missing tooth who was uneasily edging him farther and ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... JOHN.) And which of you boys was it that had the idea of keeping a middle-aged woman perishing on a doorstep before daylight ...
— The Great Adventure • Arnold Bennett
... shouted out in mouthfuls, of the best possible ways of ending it. "Water!" but there was none near, and many cried for it who might have got it from the well at Blackfriars Wynd. "Bite the tail!" and a large, vague, benevolent, middle-aged man, more desirous than wise, with some struggle got the bushy end of Yarrow's tail into his ample mouth, and bit it with all his might. This was more than enough for the much-enduring, much perspiring shepherd, who, with a ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... the "school of the middle-aged woman." It is so in a very broad sense. It begins by gratifying her desire for fellowship, her thirst for knowledge; by training her in business and parliamentary methods; and gradually develops in her the power ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various |
