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Updated: May 3, 2025
That any three spinsters should be fellow-travellers is not in itself extraordinary, and so our former journeyings in England and Scotland could hardly be described as eccentric in any way; but now that I am a matron and Francesca is shortly to be married, it is odd, to say the least, to see us cosily ensconced in a private sitting-room of a Dublin hotel, the table laid for three, and not a vestige of a man anywhere to be seen.
The abbreviation Miss sounded familiar and unsuitable, but it had just come into use for younger spinsters, though officially they were still termed Mistress. Mistress or Miss Dunord was sallow and gray-eyed, somewhat older than Anne, and looking thoroughly French, though her English was perfect. She was entirely dressed in blue and white, and had a rosary and cross at her girdle.
There were tragic individuals in these crowds. I could only guess at some of their stories as they were written in lines of pain about the eyes and mouths of poor old spinsters such as Balzac met hiding their misery in backstairs flats of Paris tenements they came blinking out into the fierce sunlight of the Paris streets like captive creatures let loose by an earthquake and of young students who had eschewed delight and lived laborious days for knowledge and art which had been overthrown by war's brutality.
It was composed almost exclusively of middle-aged English and American ladies widows and spinsters of blameless morals and anxiously active intelligence. They wrapped their lean forms in woolen shawls and ill-cut jackets. They pervaded salon and corridors guide-book in hand. They discoursed of Umbrian antiquities, Etruscan tombs, frescoes and architecture.
On the other hand, my grandmother's two sisters, elderly spinsters who shared her nobility of character but lacked her intelligence, declared that they could not conceive what pleasure their brother-in-law could find in talking about such trifles.
She came back home again to the Cottage, feeling as immeasurably superior to her unmarried sister as only a woman of that generation could feel, who had found a husband while most of her female relatives remained spinsters. She at once caused the late Mr.
She did not want to upset him as she had before, for not only would it suggest to him that he should not have married her but it would aver to herself her own intransigence and a social ineptness that was of damaged whores and spinsters.
She had been initiated, some ten years before, into that amiable sisterhood commonly known as spinsters, and was, it might be added, a typical representative. Industrious? You may well say so. Her floors, stoves, dishes, linen, well, if they weren't clean, nowhere on earth might you find clean ones.
Meanwhile the two old ladies were concocting a plan of vengeance against the originator of all this trouble, and, believe me, ancient spinsters know how to be revengeful! They left the back door of the garden wide open, laid in wait till the cavalier had entered, and then closed it again.
When I say the town was dull, I mean, of course, that the inhabitants were unenterprising, for in itself Muddleton was a picturesque place, and though it laboured under the usual disadvantage of a dearth of bachelors and a superfluity of spinsters, it might have been pleasant enough had it not been a favourite resort for my kith and kin.
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