Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 2, 2025
To have so great and wonderful a thing in your nature and to suppress it as though it were something shameful and weak? Do you wonder if the term "old maid" has become synonym for everything that is narrow, and hard, and prudish and repressive?
Here is a new quarrel, which for some time affords material for conversation. When there is no quarrel, there is sure to be a bit of scandal afloat. Though Russian provincial society is not at all prudish, and leans rather to the side of extreme leniency, it cannot entirely overlook les convenances.
I can tell you one day she posted herself on the top of the belfry of the village to call some labourers of theirs that were in a ploughed field of her father's, and though they were better than half a league off they heard her as well as if they were at the foot of the tower; and the best of her is that she is not a bit prudish, for she has plenty of affability, and jokes with everybody, and has a grin and a jest for everything.
"You'll come again then?" she insisted pleadingly. "No," said I, bluntly, and cruelly with unwilling cruelty. At that a sudden gust of passion seized her and she turned on me, denouncing me fiercely, in terms she took no care to measure, for a prudish virtue that for good or evil was not mine, and for a narrowness of which my reason was not guilty.
She conjectured all things, and finally settled down to the conclusion that he was a coy young man, and had not been sufficiently encouraged by her. She remembered instances where he had exhibited signs of ardor in one case so far as beginning to slip a hand around her waist and she had repelled him. He was evidently waiting for some marked encouragement. How foolishly prudish she had been!
And what was worse, the emperor's own daughter, whom he had forced to stay at home carding wool, to wear only such garments as were spun in the palace, to affect an almost prudish delicacy, the proud and lovely Julia, had been detected in such profligacy as poured bitter satire on the old monarch's moral discipline, and bore speaking witness to the power of an inherited tendency to vice.
All you can do is to turn your back upon it and walk away in time. 'Well, I'm not going to walk away. There's nothing to walk away from. I've no intention of behaving in a dishonourable way, and I claim the right to be friends with Jane. So that's that. I was angry with Juke. He was taking the prudish, conventional point of view.
Love, who was all for those innocent pastimes which do away with conventional formality and reserve, now proposed a game at "Hunt the Slipper," which was welcomed by the whole party, except the Pole and the Vicomte; though Mademoiselle Adele looked prudish, and observed to the epicier, "that Monsieur Lofe was so droll, but she should not have liked her pauvre grandmaman to see her."
Her propensity, and her conscientious indulgence of the same, were proverbial among her acquaintances, but no one not even prudish and fearsome maidens of altogether uncertain age, and prudent mammas, equally alive to expediency and decorum had ever labelled her "Dangerous," while with young people she was a universal favorite.
He was tall, thin, and fair-haired, dressed with the extreme and elaborate neatness characteristic of a man of fashion in prudish England. Any one might have thought that bashfulness rather than pleasure at the sight of the Countess had called up that flush into his face.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking