United States or Turkmenistan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"If you are not rich, my dear, I am," she said, when Lucian alleged his poverty as the only bar to their union, "and as money gives me no pleasure without you, I do not care to stay in Berwin Manor in lonely spinsterhood. I shall marry you whenever you choose."
To the others, no wooer had yet presented himself. Alice, if she had ever dreamt of marriage, must by now have resigned prettiness, her health damaged by attendance upon an exacting herself to spinsterhood. Virginia could scarce hope that her faded invalid and in profitless study when she ought to have been sleeping, would attract any man in search of a wife. Poor Isabel was so extremely plain.
She was very tenderly treated by the paternal critic who, merely alluding to her confirmed spinsterhood, fondness for athletic sports, and oracular powers, gave a graceful little exposition of true art and passed on to the last figure.
Once married, she gives up to a large extent, if not entirely, the pomps and vanities of which she has had her full during spinsterhood, and devotes herself to her household, children, and husband. She usually has a large family, and in them pays for all the sins of her youth.
For the first time in her life Miss Brentwood found herself looking, with a little shudder of withdrawal and dismay, down the possible vista possible to every unmarried woman of twenty-four milestoned by unbroken years of spinsterhood and self-helpings.
There was philanthropic lunch-going and lunch-giving spinsterhood in Boston; there was spinsterhood in Europe, semi-social, semi-intellectual, and monotonous in its very variety, for Althea had come to feel change as monotonous; or there was spinsterhood in England established near her friend, Miss Buckston, who raised poultry in the country, and went up to London for Bach choir practices and Woman's Suffrage meetings.
In the "citta dolente" of spinsterhood we often meet, especially in France, with women whose lives are a sacrifice nobly and daily offered to noble sentiments. Some remain proudly faithful to a heart which death tore from them; martyrs of love, they learn the secrets of womanhood only though their souls.
The more anxious her father seemed to dispose of her in the marriage market, the more tenaciously she clung to the privileges of spinsterhood. 'I hope you are not in a hurry to get rid of me, father, she said at breakfast one morning, when Dr. Rylance urged the claims of a cultured youth in the War Office. 'No, my dear; I don't think I have shown any undue haste.
But of all the consolations of spinsterhood, the greatest is this, that out of the dim and uncertain future, perchance in the guise of a divorced man or a widower with four children, The Prince may yet come. "On his plain but trusty sword are these words only Love and Understand."
They went into the larder and Mrs. Tolhurst began: "I hardly lik to say it to you, Miss Joanna, being a single spinster ..." This was a bad beginning, for Joanna flamed at once at the implication that her spinsterhood put her at any disadvantage as a woman of the world. "Don't talk nonsense, Mrs. Tolhurst; I may be unwed as yet, but I'm none of your Misses."
Word Of The Day