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Updated: May 3, 2025
A lady with many domestic interests and increasing family, etc. etc., cannot be supposed to cultivate female intimacies out of doors with that ardour and eagerness which young spinsters exhibit in their intercourse; but Laura, whose kind heart first led her to sympathise with her young friend in the latter's days of distress and misfortune, has professed ever since a growing esteem for Ethel Newcome, and says, that the trials and perhaps grief which the young lady now had to undergo have brought out the noblest qualities of her disposition.
He was further described as ungentlemanly by a brace of spinsters who had been within earshot on the veranda the morning he had abused the Asquith roads, but their evidence was not looked upon as damning. That Mr. Cooke would appear at the cotillon never entered any one's head. Thus it was, for a fortnight, Mr. Cooke maintained a most rigid seclusion.
He went from group to group, as if he were the son of the house, cheering the forlorn, lightening the heavy, smoothing down the prickly, a medical Father O'Flynn. But it was the elderly and the middle-aged that he sought out; the matrons whose children he had tended, the spinsters whose neuralgia he had relieved.
‘How it would solve the superfluous woman question,’ continued the Weary Roué, enthusiastically. ‘Think of the enormous number of miserable spinsters who would be happily provided for.’ An indignant quack came from the Bluestocking. ‘Think of the expense,’ remarked the Good Stockbroker, dryly, and the Weary Roué collapsed like a pricked gas-bag.
Other youths of her acquaintance, or enterprising strangers going through the barrier, had to content themselves with a "Good evening, miss," or at most some more or less dashing remark about the weather; but he was the one to help her on with her coat when the brilliant shades of blue and yellow on the sentry-box had faded into grey: it was his privilege to walk her off with a hand through her arm, feeling sure that the three elderly spinsters and the one middle-aged gentleman who chanced to be about just there wondered who that gay dog was, and thought him no end of a fellow.
Far away at last from the garish horrors of dress, formal dinners, visits, and drives, the inevitable and demoralizing gossip and scandal; far away from hotel piazzas, with their tedious accompaniments of corpulent dowagers, exclusive or inquisitive, slowly dying from too much food and too little exercise; ennuied spinsters; gushing buds; athletic collegians, cigarettes in mouths and hands in pockets; languid, drawling dudes; old bachelors, fluttering around the fair human flower like September butterflies; fancy work, fancy work, like Penelope's web, never finished; pug dogs of the aged and asthmatic variety.
I knew a couple of elderly spinsters once who had a sort of German sausage on legs which they called a dog between them. They used to wash its face with warm water every morning. It had a mutton cutlet regularly for breakfast; and on Sundays, when one of the ladies went to church, the other always stopped at home to keep the dog company.
But, as Fiske points out, cats are the favorite companions of elderly spinsters; therefore, if there are many of the latter, there will be more cats, fewer field-mice, more bees, richer clover fields, and finer cattle! Each link is real and the whole chain is a characteristic example of the countless ways that the natural destinies of living things are interrelated and intertwined.
But the occupants were by no means youthful spinsters or bachelors; they were generally married women, guests of the hotel, receiving other people's husbands whose wives were "in the States," or responsible middle-aged leaders of the town.
"On the eleventh, the day after to-morrow, a special train, leaving No. 2 platform of the railway-station, will be placed by the British Government at the disposal of those married women, spinsters, and children who wish to follow the example of those who left to-day, and go down to Cape Town.
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