Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 22, 2025
The shabby-genteel house in Boston was rented by the month, all furnished, and the good lady promptly gave her notice and packed her trunks for departure. The first day of the month found her and her daughter whirling away from the city toward their destination. As they stepped from the train to the platform at the little country station, Mrs. Livingstone looked about her with awed interest.
She conducted him through a dark passage, and up a still darker stair, into a dingy little parlour, with a carpet of red and green stripes, a horsehair sofa, a grate covered with cut paper, and a general perfume of brandy and cigars. There were some preparations for breakfast, but no one was in the room but a little girl, about seven years old, dressed in shabby-genteel mourning.
I shall sink into a dowdy, frowsy, shabby-genteel old maid for the rest of my life! It is detestable!" and she uttered a suppressed small shriek on the word, "It has been a hateful, abominable birthday! Everybody will be laughing at me up their sleeves! Think of Lady Larford!" This suggestion was too dreadful for comment, and Mrs. Sorrel closed her eyes, visibly shuddering.
Nor did Mr. Sheldon's announcement of his profession confine itself to the brass-plate and the glass-case. A shabby-genteel young man pervaded the neighbourhood for some days after the surgeon-dentist's advent, knocking a postman's knock, which only lacked the galvanic sharpness of the professional touch, and delivering neatly-printed circulars to the effect that Mr.
Even with his past experience the depressing, deteriorating effects, mental and physical, of years of poverty in its most squalid and depressing form, "shabby-genteel" poverty he realized that even the possession of wealth might leave something to be desired.
Reaching the door of the first on her list, she rang and was shown into a small drawing-room, shabby-genteel in its furniture and ornaments.
The shabby-genteel world and the tradesman's life, unless in exceptional cases of great wealth, were different things a hundred and fifty years ago from what they are now.
William Truedale lived on a shabby-genteel side street of a neighbourhood that had started out to be fashionable but had been defeated in its ambitions. It had never lost character, but it certainly had lost lustre. The houses themselves were well built and sternly correct. William Truedale's was the best in the block and it stood with a vacant lot on either side of it.
Fourthly, a shabby-genteel personage in a threadbare black suit, and apparently in very bad circumstances, with a dry suspicious look; the absent buttons on his waistcoat eked out with red tape; and a bundle of extraordinarily tattered papers sticking out of an inner breast-pocket.
The matter was taken up with profound gravity by the Westminster Gazette, and a considerable number of literary men and women were circularised and asked to state, in the face of "Tom Jones," "The Vicar of Wakefield," "The Shabby-Genteel Story," and "Bleak House," just exactly how long the novel ought to be.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking