Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 1, 2025
The occupants of the houses did not often show themselves at the back windows, but the servants were always in sight. Noisy slatterns, Mrs. Manstey pronounced the greater number; she knew their ways and hated them. But to the quiet cook in the newly painted house, whose mistress bullied her, and who secretly fed the stray cats at nightfall, Mrs. Manstey's warmest sympathies were given.
In Wednesbury, Bilston, and all that district, when work is over you find the men drinking in their dirty clothes and with grimy faces at the beer-shop of the "Buttey," that is to say, the contractor or middleman under whom they work, according to the system of the country, and the women hanging about the doors of their dingy dwellings, gossiping or quarreling, the old furies and the young slatterns.
The shoulders of the ladies at play were no barer than those of the slatterns who gaped at them playing; but for Ippolita, who had always been a decent girl, let us hope her blushes were a cloak. She felt naked. And the bath, remember, had unnerved her. What these neighbours of hers may have thought is no concern of ours, since the actors in the play took no concern in it.
The slatterns gossiped from house to house, the heels of their shoes clacking as they went, and cried that this was what came of being too thrifty. And sure enough, in due time, the giant widower came to the farmer as he was in the field looking over his crops, and proposed for Molly there and then.
He turned up his ugly nose especially at 'blue stockings'; said all literary women were 'hopeless pedants and slatterns, and quoted that abominable Horace Walpole's account of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's 'dirt and vivacity. I really thought Gordon would throw him overboard. I wonder what he would say if he could see you darning Uncle Allan's socks. Oh, Edna, dearie!
These were slatterns, not wholly lacking in a certain comeliness, and eyed the visitors with shy curiosity. The latter spoke to them in Spanish, to which they smiled and replied in soft, awed monosyllables, and respectfully watched the movements of the young women.
"Danged if our country down here is worth singing about like that!" continued the glazier, as the Scotchman again melodized with a dying fall, "My ain countree!" "When you take away from among us the fools and the rogues, and the lammigers, and the wanton hussies, and the slatterns, and such like, there's cust few left to ornament a song with in Casterbridge, or the country round."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking