United States or Norway ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"You've started well," she said. "I am simply stunned. I expected to find you old and dowdy. Majesty, you're the handsomest thing I ever laid eyes on. You're so splendid and strong, and your skin is like white gold. What's happened to you? What's changed you? This beautiful room, those glorious roses out there, the cool, dark sweetness of this wonderful house!
But this time a troubled frown followed the laugh. "I know, Bertram, I suppose they do look dowdy, sometimes," she confessed; "but, you see, I hate to wear a really good dress Baby rumples them up so; and I'm usually in a hurry to get to him mornings, and these are so easy to slip into, and so much more comfortable for me to handle him in!"
They were forbidden, or, at all events, lacked the means, to follow out their natural instinct of adorning themselves; all were dressed in one homely uniform of blue-checked gowns, with such caps upon their heads as English servants wear. Generally, too, they had one dowdy English aspect, and a vulgar type of features so nearly alike that they seemed literally to constitute a sisterhood.
He was apparently unmarried; or was there perhaps a wife, picked up in a previous state of existence, and hidden away with her offspring at Clapham or Hornsey or Peckham? Bury could remember, years before, a dowdy old sister, to whom Lady Henry had been on occasion formally polite. Otherwise, nothing. What were the great man's origins and antecedents his family, school, university?
"What's the matter with the hair, little girl?" asked Cyril in a voice that was caressingly irritable. "You've been fussing with that long-suffering curl for the last five minutes!" Marie's delicate face flushed painfully. "It's got loose my hair," she stammered, "and it looks so dowdy that way!" Billy dropped her thread suddenly.
Why should I? I don't want to I won't," she continued, half laughing, half sobbing, "go and have to bother about running a house and have a lot of babies and lose my pretty figure and get fat and dowdy and slow-poky and old. Look at Molly Vane: twins already. She's a horrible example. Why do people always have to have children "
'Beldam, crone, hag, or dowdy! Of course. What I mean is if it dawned on you that you were mistaken about my identity ... I want you to be serious, because the thing is possible ... what would you do?" "There are so many supposes. Suppose you hated me and I thought you a beldam!
Not that Nina found them dowdy far from it: they had a distinction of their own, which, like that of their ancient palaces, seemed to remain superior to modern decrees of fashion. Nearly all of them had lovely figures, which they did not strive to force into newly prescribed outlines. A remark that a foreigner in New York had made to Nina came back to her, and she now realized its truth.
"Bad luck, wasn't it?" she asked, later, of the half-dozen men to whom she was giving tea in the billiard-room. "If I'd stayed to watch you shoot for another five minutes, I should have escaped them! Not a bad, dowdy little woman the man a worse stick in the drawing-room than the pulpit, if possible.
Then, drawing back with a little smile of warning "I shall look hideous in dowdy clothes; but I can trim my own hats," she declared. They stood silent for a while after this, smiling at each other like adventurous children who have climbed to a forbidden height from which they discover a new world.
Word Of The Day