"Girlish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... went to bed, she lay awake a long time listening for the sound of girlish laughter and a boy's voice under her ...
— The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural • Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
... sound being the low lapping of the blue, tranquil water, clear as crystal in the morning light. She was engrossed in her book, for it was a new one by her favourite author, while he, standing motionless, watched her and saw that, though she had grown slightly older, she was full of girlish charm. She was quietly but beautifully dressed—different indeed to the black gown and print apron ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... because from what he knows of Mr. Ellsworth and yourself, he is convinced you would eventually be happy; he fears you hesitate from some feeling of girlish romance. Still, we have neither of us any wish to urge you too far. Appeal to your own good, common sense, that is all that can be desired; do not be romantic, dear, for the first time in your life," continued her ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... girls, they caused a sensation all of their own. Carolina, a different type from the younger, had an austere loveliness denoting pride and birth, a brunette of the quality that has contributed so much to the fame of Southern women. Hope Georgia, more girlish, and a vivacious blonde, was the especial pet of her father, and usually succeeded in doing with ...
— A Gentleman from Mississippi • Thomas A. Wise
... sister, Louise, stood there among them, and of all those girlish, blooming faces I thought hers the very handsomest. But she did not open her lips wide enough to satisfy me. I could not see that she was ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... before, with his hands and face swollen with mosquito bites, and asked for a job, big-hearted Joe took a liking to him. It was owing to Joe's influence with the foremen that he was at last, grudgingly, given work, as his slim, girlish figure told strongly against him among such a crowd ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... dear Jane, I offer the love of a cultured man and association with one of culture and refinement, which you must have sorely missed in your relations with the poor ape that through your girlish infatuation you married so thoughtlessly. I love you, Jane. You have but to say the word and no further sorrows shall afflict you—even your baby shall be returned to ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... mine eyes . . . And lo! A flickering snatch of memory that floats Upon the face of a pool of darkness five And thirty dead years deep, Antic in girlish broideries And skirts and silly shoes with straps And a broad-ribanded leghorn, he walks Plain in the shadow of a church (St. Michael's: in whose brazen call To curfew his first wails of wrath ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... other said cordially. "Nothing could be better. In the meantime, as you say, should Richard turn out well, and the young people take a liking for each other, no match could be more satisfactory. What I want is that she should take no girlish fancy for ...
— With Wolfe in Canada - The Winning of a Continent • G. A. Henty
... were the very atmosphere of her existence. From such a training much might be hoped; but even those who knew most and hoped most were not quite prepared for the strong individual character and power of self-determination that revealed themselves in the girlish being so suddenly transferred "from the nursery to the throne." It was quickly noticed that the part of Queen and mistress seemed native to her, and that she filled it with not more grace than propriety. "She always strikes me as possessed of ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... as straight and slim as a dart. I fancied that she could be no more than eighteen, her figure and face were so girlish. The quiet composure of her manner, however, and the subdued yet graceful ease of her movements, were so suggestive of the "great lady," that it was hard to believe that she was indeed ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... dead-line of middle age, and had given up the fight, and was fast becoming a very prim and very proper old lady, but Miss Sarah, being out of range, could still smile, and nod her head, and shake her curls, and laugh little, hollow, girlish laughs, and otherwise disport herself in a light and kittenish way, after the manner of her day and age. All of which betrayed not only her earnest desire to please, but her increasing anxiety to get in under matrimonial cover before one of Father Time's sharpshooters ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... been a snare to you?—Have you not, more than once, been on the point of resigning those great designs which should place righteousness as a counsellor beside the throne, because you desired to gratify your daughter's girlish passion for this descendant of your old ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... from her side the girlish crowd, With lovely smiles and limber graces, Went singly, took their prizes, bowed, Returning sweetly to ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 23, 1914 • Various
... and so occupied was I in my meditations, that even had any one entered at the time, in all probability I should not have perceived it. At length, however, I was aroused from my study by a burst of laughter, whose girlish joyousness was not quite new to me. I knew it well; it was the senhora herself; and the next ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... joyous undignified whoop the parsonage girls scrambled to their feet and rushed indoors in a fine Kilkenny jumble. Aunt Grace looked after them, thoughtfully, smiling for a second, and then with a girlish shrug of her slender shoulders she slipped out and followed ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... she was blameless throughout; but because she did not, could not, understand what any touch of hers must mean to me. In her dear life, there had never been another man; that much I knew by unerring instinct and by her own admission. I have sometimes thought that she may have had an ideal in her girlish days, against whom, in after years, she measured others, and, finding them come short, held them at arm's length. But, if I am right in this surmise, he must have been a blind fool, unconscious of the priceless love which might have been his, had he tried to win ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... her too something of the confidence which had sprung up in the heart of her friend. She had the look of one for whom the Valley of the Shadow is past, and her beauty had never struck Janet as it struck her at that moment. Its grosser elements seemed all refined away. The girlish look was quite gone; she seemed older and graver; but there breathed about her ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... paces of the fence, she stopped, threw back the flaps of her sun-bonnet, and said, "Good day to you!" Jacob was so amazed to see a bright, fresh, girlish face, that he stared at her with all his eyes, forgetting to drop his head. Indeed, he could not have done so, for his chin was propped upon the top ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... the youngest and most girlish among the Otaheitan women, and could not resist an appeal to her feelings even when uttered only by the eyes. Besides, little Toc was a great favourite with her. She therefore burst into a merry laugh, gently pulled ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... serviette beside her plate and her bread on her lap mechanically, and took up her knife and fork to eat her soup. She seemed puzzled for a moment when she found that the implements did not answer, and then she laughed! Such a fresh, girlish laugh! It did one's heart good to hear her! Yes, verily! Ideala was herself again, ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... the room; there was a work-basket on a small table by the window; and an embroidery frame with a half-finished piece of work in it stood near, just as if its owner might have been working at it yesterday. It was altogether a dainty apartment, and bore evidence in every corner of the girlish fancies of its former mistress. The pictures on the walls were all of a romantic description; the books on the shelves could almost have told the tale of Marjory Hunter's childhood and girlhood. Fairy tales there were in plenty, and the rest ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... year," about which we have been told so much, but at a later period, which he sets roughly at from the third to the fifth year after marriage. By this time there are usually one or two babies, the wife's girlish charm has gone, and the romance of the first attraction has vanished, while the steady force of conjugal affection which should smooth their path through the years ahead has not come to take its place. It is in this middle ...
— Broken Homes - A Study of Family Desertion and its Social Treatment • Joanna C. Colcord
... in slumber. She had curled up like a child in her meager covering. Van watched her from his distance. A little shiver passed through her form, from time to time. Her hat was still in place, but how girlish, how sweet, how helpless was her face—the little he could see! How he wished he might permit her to sleep it out as nature demanded. For her own sake, not for his, he must hasten her onward to Goldite, by way of the ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... sort of a soul, which became enthusiastic at a bound. She lacked equilibrium, like all women who are spinsters at the age of fifty. She seemed to be pickled in vinegary innocence, though her heart still retained something of youth and of girlish effervescence. She loved both nature and animals with a fervent ardor, a love like old wine, mellow through age, with a sensual love that she had ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... avoid laughing at—or, so it seemed to him in his heart-seared frenzy—he thought it not improbable that he should go mad. He was harried so by memories of lovely little soft ways of Edith's (his wife's name was Edith), of the pretty sound of her laugh, and of her innocent, girlish habit of kneeling down by her bedside every night and morning to say her prayers. This had so touched him that he had sometimes knelt down to say his, too, saying to her, with slight awkward boyishness, that a fellow who had a sort of angel for his wife ought to do his best to believe in the things ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... glamour. It was like . . . She suddenly remembered a scene in the dressing-room when the company had been in Baltimore. Lois Denham, duly the recipient of the sunburst which her friend Izzy had promised her, had unfortunately, in a spirit of girlish curiosity, taken it to a jeweller to be priced, and the jeweller had blasted her young life by declaring it a paste imitation. Jill recalled how the stricken girl—previous to calling Izzy on the ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... friends, and afterward freely exchanged confidences, telling to each other a mutual tale of girlish hope and trustful affection. ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... an old, old story—indeed the painting itself is dimmed by the passing of nearly two centuries; but just as the sweet face looks out from its frame ever girlish, so does perennial youth seem to dwell in the romance of the "Fair Maid of the James." The portrait is by Sir Godfrey Kneller. It shows a beautiful young woman. Her gray-blue gown is cut in a stiff, long-waisted ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... cathedral, near the shrine of a saint, as an angel or a Madonna; one could imagine it bending over a sick child, lighting with its pure loveliness the home of sorrow; but one could never picture it in a ball-room. It was a face of girlish, saintly purity, of fairest loveliness—a face where innocence, poetry, and passion all seemed to blend in one grand harmony. There was nothing commonplace about it. One could not mistake it for a plebeian face; "patrician" was written ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... aged, gnarled and riven tree, foolishly decked in blossoms, like some faded, wrinkled dame, fatuously reluctant to leave off girlish finery. Under its frivolous branches on the grassy sward would be the place for his first night's halt—for the magic wood just this side of the sun was now seen to be farther off than he had once supposed. So he spread his carpet, arranged the contents of ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... 'Purpose? I'll tell you what purpose you had! Ain't I seen you making up to everything in pants that'd waste time and pay attention to your impert'nence? Ain't I seen you showing off your legs with them short skirts of yours, trying to make out like you was so girlish and la-de-da, running ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... To them she was but an ordinary child, a poor thing of the roads, a girl of reluctant growth, timidly humble in her ways. Assuredly it was in her glance that Abbe Ader had with agitation detected the stifling ailment which filled her puny, girlish form with suffering—that ailment born of the greeny solitude in which she had grown up, the gentleness of her bleating lambs, the Angelic Salutation which she had carried with her, hither and thither, under ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... it would have pleased me so!" exclaimed Pauline, who, despite her eighteen years and plump girlish figure, liked nothing better than to romp with ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... while she would send me a notice of her success at some concert or minor theatre. At last, in 1813, seven years after her girlish debut at Verona, she received an engagement at Venice. At that time I obtained conge for a few months, and, on my home-journey, stopped a few weeks at Venice, to see some relatives living there, and my old ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... saccharine: and much as this pardoned sinner loved books, it seemed to him that the interest of the story flagged, and that the enjoyment of reading was much enhanced by the proximity of a gray bonnet and a girlish profile. But Dickens soon proved more powerful than Debby, and she was forgotten, till, pausing to turn a leaf, the young man met her shy glance, as she asked, with the pleased expression of a child who has shared an ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... each girlish head drooped in silence, hot blushes dyeing their cheeks; then Lulu, lifting hers, said, "I'm very sorry, grandpa Dinsmore. I oughtn't to have brought this book out here; but it wouldn't have come to any harm ...
— Elsie's Kith and Kin • Martha Finley
... purity; the other, absolute innocence, startled by the stupendous revelation and exalted by the vaguely comprehended glory of the future. It is before this picture that the visitor always lingers longest. The face is the purest expression of girlish loveliness possible to art. The Virgin floats upborne by rosy clouds, flocks of pink cherubs flutter at her feet waving palm-branches. The golden air is thick with suggestions of dim celestial faces, but ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... had their pleasure; young mothers whose children became restless withdrew here to quiet them; another table in an alcove at the side was opened for the young girls who feasted here in the presence of their holy director, and through the noise and tumult of the men, their joyous girlish voices rang out in Vivas to the noble lord and lady who sat at the head of the main table. In the shadow of a vaulted recess, the monks and lay brothers were assembled, who had crowded from all foreign parts at the report that a bishop in Hungary was celebrating his marriage. ...
— Peter the Priest • Mr Jkai
... office of tenderness to my sister's memory. Ten legions would not have repelled me from seeking her, if there had been a chance that she could be found. Mockery! it was lost upon me. Laughter! I valued it not. And when I was taunted insultingly with "my girlish tears," that word "girlish" had no sting for me, except as a verbal echo to the one eternal thought of my heart—that a girl was the sweetest thing which I, in my short life, had known; that a girl it was who had crowned the earth with beauty, and had opened to my ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... thus as she wearily pushed her loaded truck, glancing at the others with envy as they briskly went on with their work. Suddenly she saw Rosalie, who was fastening some threads, fall down beside the girl who was next to her. At the same time a girlish cry of anguish ...
— Nobody's Girl - (En Famille) • Hector Malot
... giggled Flora, tossing her head with a caricature of her girlish manner, such as a mummer might have presented at her own funeral, if she had lived and died in classical antiquity, 'I am ashamed to see Mr Clennam, I am a mere fright, I know he'll find me fearfully changed, I am actually ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... Moor Park we hear very little. Her fame was assured her when, as Dorothy Osborne, she had waited seven years to marry William Temple, and had sent to him, without an idea that they would reach an English public, some of the most graceful girlish letters ever written. After her marriage she leaves the scene, or we see her seldom. She corresponded with Queen Mary, but Swift has little to tell us about her. She, at least, could ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... Eeny at the sight which met her eyes. Standing on the portico steps, playing with a large dog Kate had reason to know, and flirting—it looked like flirting—with the dog's master, stood a radiant vision, a rounded girlish figure, arrayed in bright maize-colored merino, elaborately trimmed with black lace and velvet, the perfect shoulders and arms bare, the cheeks like blush roses, the eyes sparkling as stars, and the golden-brown hair, freshly curled, falling to ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... by the huge fireplace was the same quaintly carved chair where she always sat. Ah, those delicious evenings when one was five-and-twenty. For the moment I should not have been surprised if she had suddenly taken shape before my eyes, in the old seat, the slim, girlish woman in her white dress, her hands folded in her lap, her quiet eyes gazing dreamily into the red fire, a subtile air of distinction in her whole posture.... She would be old now, I suppose. Would she? Ah no, she was not one of the women who grow old.... I caught up the ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... tilted his chair back, and cocked his feet on the guard-rail of the stove. For one half-minute a girlish vision wavered in the shimmering air above the stove, then merged into a woman of fair ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... stranger's boat through, whose name proved to be Breck, Kit and Shorty met his wife, a slender, girlish woman whose blue eyes were moist with gratitude. Breck himself tried to hand Kit fifty dollars, and ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... ivory miniature in her brother Charley's stateroom in the steamer "Quaker City," in the Bay of Smyrna, in the summer of 1867, when she was in her twenty-second year. I saw her in the flesh for the first time in New York in the following December. She was slender and beautiful and girlish—and she was both girl and woman. She remained both girl and woman to the last day of her life. Under a grave and gentle exterior burned inextinguishable fires of sympathy, energy, devotion, enthusiasm, and absolutely limitless ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... first sight to be a comfortable-looking and eminently respectable elderly lady is often discovered to be, in reality, a giddy, girlish, and inexperienced young thing, the pride of the village or the darling ...
— Stage-Land • Jerome K. Jerome
... take her seat on the throne from which her father had just been hurled, should have been sad, or at least serious. Mary was not merely in high, but in extravagant, spirits. She entered Whitehall, it was asserted, with a girlish delight at being mistress of so fine a house, ran about the rooms, peeped into the closets, and examined the quilt of the state bed, without seeming to remember by whom those magnificent apartments had ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... that of Architecture—Painting, in Europe, by that of Architecture and Sculpture. If Sculpture and Painting stand by the side of Architecture in Egypt, if Painting by that of Architecture and Sculpture in Greece, it is as younger sisters, girlish and unformed. In Europe alone are the three found linked together, in equal stature and perfection."—Vol. i, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Virgin has the fine features and earnest, tender expression which recalls earlier Flemish painters. Her dress falls in rich, heavy folds upon the marble pavement. But, as with Van Eyck and Memling, Holbein and Schongauer, fine clothes do not conceal her girlish simplicity or her loving heart. A low table, spread with food, stands at the left,—a curious domestic element to introduce, and ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... 'er," said the widow, charitably. "Many a good, married woman wouldn't want all her girlish pranks to reach the ear of the man she finally settled down with, an' I reckon Jim Cahews wants 'er. They say he's tired chasin' after Julia Hardcastle, an' Carrie may suit. Johnny tuck it awful hard. After she went ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... for her any superhuman exemption from girlish feelings. She was innocently dazzled with the vision of courtly halls and princely splendors, and thought Mrs. Adams's descriptions almost a perfect realization of things she had read in "Sir Charles Grandison." If her mother ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... slight girlish figure—was standing near her mother-in-law and had a pretty smile of welcome for all the guests. It was rather an ordeal for her, as she was a stranger in the country (she came from the south of France) and every one ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... humble self in the dainty lines, but I shall always be proud to think I inspired them. Will it be in the new volume? I have never been in print before; it will be a novel sensation. I cannot pay you song for song, only feeling for feeling. Oh, John Lefolle, why did we not meet when I had still my girlish dreams? Now, I have grown to distrust all men—to fear ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... it, Kitty," Deleah was saying with a little girlish longing. "Not only the concert, but everything. Let me picture it. You will run home when you leave me—me in horrid Bridge Street!—and in your bedroom there will be a fire lit, and on the bed your pretty evening frock will be spread, and your lace ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... the finish, a senseless, screaming demon. I saw Alicia straining forward, her face like chalk, her very lips blanched, her whole high-strung body aquiver. Her eyes were distended, and in them I saw a look which told me that this was no mere girlish whim, that this was more than the animal call of youth and sex. Running Elk had become a ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... hardly knew which to admire the more. Lillian looked so fair and graceful; the pure, spiritual face and tender eyes had new beauty; the slender, girlish figure contrasted well with the stately dignity ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... High-place the chaunting people throng, For him the oven smoke as for a speechless beast, And the sire of my Taheia come greedy to the feast." "Rua, be silent, spare me. Taheia closes her ears. Pity my yearning heart, pity my girlish years! Flee from the cruel hands, flee from the knife and coal, Lie hid in the deeps of the woods, Rua, sire of ...
— Ballads • Robert Louis Stevenson
... versed in the story of Beatrice—following her with devout admiration, as her lover showed her in her girlish beauty, and then in her matured and gracious womanhood—we may ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... in the corridor made him look up. Standing in the doorway was a vision of girlish beauty that had the acrobatic effect of sending his blood into his head and his heart into his eyes. She wore the diaphanous gown of white that he liked best, her hair was coiled at the exact angle he had prescribed, and at her ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... who were to accompany Joan were ready. She was armed in white armor, but unhelmeted, a little axe in her hand, riding a great black charger. She turned to the church, and said, in her girlish voice, "You priests and churchmen, make prayers and processions to God." Then she cried, "Forward, Forward!" and on she rode at their head, a page carrying her banner. And so ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... horse-like face and large teeth—sometimes stays for hours at a time and leaves us limp. Even gentle Mrs. Wilmot approaches, as nearly as it is possible for her to approach, unkindness in her comments on her. She has such playful, girlish manners, and an irritating way of giving vent to the most utter platitudes with the air of having just discovered a new truth. She has been with us this morning and mentioned that her father was four times removed from ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... channels I may not fathom. Three hours ago when I came ashore and lifted the dead man out, and sent the sleeping girl to shelter, Ruth Bellenden's hand was the first to touch my own, her word the first my ear would catch. So clear it was, such music to a man to hear that girlish voice asking of his welfare as a thing most dear to her, that all the night vanished at the words, and Ken's Island was lost to my sight, and only the memory of the olden time and of my life's great hope ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... abilities. She was several years older than myself, and an object of my unbounded school-girl heroine worship. A daughter of Kiallmark, the musical composer, was also eminent among us for her great beauty, and always seemed to my girlish fancy what Mary Queen of Scots must have looked like ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... old man crossed the room and offered his arm to the girl with the exquisite, gracious manner with which once upon a time he had offered it to a girlish queen at Windsor. ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... A sound of girlish voices here broke on their ears, and springing up, Octavia hurried to meet her friends, exclaiming joyfully, "They have ...
— The Abbot's Ghost, Or Maurice Treherne's Temptation • A. M. Barnard
... a perfect avalanche of little bags, packages, and umbrellas on the seat beside him. Several of them fell to the floor, and Rod was good-naturedly picking them up when he was startled by the sound of a clear, girlish voice that he knew as well as he knew his own, directly behind him. He turned, with a quickly beating heart, and saw Eltje Vanderveer. She was walking between her father and Snyder Appleby. They had already passed without seeing ...
— Cab and Caboose - The Story of a Railroad Boy • Kirk Munroe
... hats. The father smoked. The mother looked furtive in a bonnet, and the two daughters, with wide open eyes, examined the flirtations around them as a child examines a butterfly caught in a net. One of them blushed. But she did not turn away her eyes. Nor were her girlish ears inactive. Family life seemed suddenly to become dull to her. She wondered whether it were life at all. And the father still smoked domestically. He knew it all. That was the difference. And perhaps it was his knowledge that made ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... sound was audible, and when his ear touched her lips, their coldness sent a shiver of horror through his stalwart frame. Pure as the satin folds of an annunciation lily pearled with dew, was the smooth girlish brow, where exhaustion hung heavy drops; and about her temples the damp hair clung in glossy rings, framing the pallid, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... time he was growing used to her sudden changes of manner and to the occasional scornful speeches she made. He could not understand them in the least, as may be imagined, and having considerable experience he set them down to the score of a certain girlish shyness, which showed itself in no other way. He had known women whose shyness manifested itself in saying disagreeable things for which they were sometimes ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... her apron, and elbows consequently more or less akimbo with her wide Leghorn hat flapping down and hiding her face one moment and blowing straight up against her fore head the next and making its revealment of fresh young beauty; with all her pretty girlish airs and graces in full play, and that sweet ignorance of care and that atmosphere of innocence and purity all about her that belong to her gracious time of life, indeed she was a vision to warm the coldest heart and bless and cheer ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and what joy his request would cause his sisters, and how happy they would be as they talked at the bottom of the orchard of that dear brother of theirs in Paris. Visions rose before his eyes; a sudden strong light revealed his sisters secretly counting over their little store, devising some girlish stratagem by which the money could be sent to him incognito, essaying, for the first time in their lives, a piece of deceit that reached the sublime in ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... two, he was the more gratified by the curious glances directed at those little feet, shod with plum-colored prunella; at the dainty figure outlined by a low-cut bodice, filled in with an embroidered chemisette, which only partially concealed the girlish throat. Her dress was lifted by her movements as she walked, giving glimpses higher than the shoes of delicately moulded outlines beneath open-work silk stockings. More than one of the idlers turned and passed the pair again, to admire or ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... Pen, against his mother she had no such feeling; but devoted herself to Helen with the utmost force of her girlish affection—such affection as women, whose hearts are disengaged, are apt to bestow upon the near female friend. It was devotion—it was passion—it was all sorts of fondness and folly; it was a profusion of caresses, tender epithets and endearments, such as it does not ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... room—a cell, with a narrow slit at the end through which one gained a glimpse of the church. Before this slit she had often knelt while the angels drifted from the belfry like doves to peer in on her. The place was sacred. How many nights had she spent here with girlish folded hands, her face ecstatic, the cold eating into her tender body? I see her blue for lack of charity, forgotten, unloved, neglected—the symbol of misunderstanding and loneliness. They told her she was mad. She was a laughing stock in the village. The world could find ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... with contempt fellow-Christians of the Baptist persuasion. To have a child of theirs identify herself with this despised sect was one of those crosses which they could not and would not bear. But Fanny had in a fit of girlish frolic entered one of the meetings of these low-caste Christians. What she heard changed the current of her life. She knew thenceforth that God was no respecter of persons, and that the crucified Nazarene ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... thee, my Algernon. My brave and beautiful, my soul's lord! when shall the time come when the tedious night shall not separate us, nor the blessed day? Twelve! one! two! I have heard the bells chime, and the quarters, and never cease to think of my husband. My adored Percy, pardon the girlish confession,—I have kissed the letter at this place. Will thy lips press it too, and remain for a moment on the spot which has ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... kept out the fierce California sun by day, and were now touched with silver in the gracious moonlight. Culpepper leaned against the low fence, and gazed long and earnestly at the building. Then the moonlight vanished ghostlike from one of the windows, a material glow took its place, and a girlish figure, holding a candle, drew the white curtains together. To Culpepper it was a vestal virgin standing before a hallowed shrine; to the prosaic observer I fear it was only a fair-haired young woman, whose wicked black eyes still shone with unfilial warmth. Howbeit, ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... France, and now graced the coronation of her Dictator. The Empress, radiant with joy at her now indissoluble union, bore her splendours with an easy grace that charmed all beholders and gave her an almost girlish air. She wore a robe of white satin, trimmed with silver and gold and besprinkled with golden bees: her waist and shoulders glittered with diamonds, while on her brows rested a diadem of the finest diamonds and pearls valued at more than a million francs.[318] The ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... dull, good-natured, and a little fat; she was a beautiful woman with extraordinary charm and a lithe, girlish figure of which she took infinite care; he was supposed to kick up his heels in a quiet way while she did the thing brilliantly and kept the wheels of American Colony gossip (busy enough, anyway) turning and spinning until they groaned in ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... L. C. she knew not. The mention of Captain Pomeroy, however, seemed to implicate her father in some "unpleasant business." A darker anticipation of evil, and a profounder dread, settled over her heart. She did not say a word to Hilda. This, whatever it was, could not be made the subject of girlish confidence. It was something which she felt was to be examined by herself in solitude and in fear. Once only did she look at Hilda. It was when the latter asked, in a ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... when my first children were young that it was the part of wisdom to be sometimes blind to venial faults. Not," she added more gravely, "that I would ever put disrespect to my father in that category, but we must not make too much of a little girlish petulance, especially when excited by a generous sympathy with the ...
— Elsie's New Relations • Martha Finley
... do!" and Jack promptly threw the kitten overboard, scorning to be seen by any manly eye amusing himself with such girlish toys. ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... change of scene, Dunroe's tenderness, and the influence of enlivening society, will completely restore your health and spirits. Dunroe's a rattling, pleasant fellow; and notwithstanding his escapades, has an excellent heart. Tut, my dear child, after a few months you will yourself smile at these girlish scruples, and thank papa for forcing you ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... dread. To the cavern of the Living Dead! The monster carrying the limp girlish form was now running up through the city toward it, guarded by two other huge insects that had appeared from nowhere. Through the entrance of the cavern ...
— Loot of the Void • Edwin K. Sloat
... and had a certain air of breeding, but even to my girlish eyes he betrayed at that first sight the character of a man who had lived an irregular, perhaps a ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... wardrobe of her guest. Adele, in the flush of her joyful expectations from the scene that had burst upon her out of doors, now prattled more freely with the spinster,—tossing out the folds of her dresses, as they successively came to light, with her dainty fingers, and giving some quick, girlish judgment upon each. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... striking feature of the first comer, M. de Marsay, famous for the passions which he had inspired, was his girlish beauty; but its softness and effeminacy were counteracted by the expression of his eyes, unflinching, steady, untamed, and hard as a tiger's. He was loved and he was feared. Lucien was no less handsome; but Lucien's expression was so gentle, his blue eyes so limpid, that he scarcely seemed ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... ideas are rather girlish as yet," said Miss Panney, "but housekeeping at Cobhurst will change all that;" and then she went on with her remarks concerning the Haverley and Butterwood families, a subject upon which Ralph was not nearly so well informed ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... this girlish head with its long flowing tresses will be surprised, for no contrast could be greater than that between this portrait and the common conception of Lucretia Borgia. The likeness shows a maidenly, almost childish face, of a peculiar ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... Princess arrived, and we had the usual address and reply and march through. Afterwards a mighty dejeuner in the St. Andrew's Hall—a fine old place looking its best. I was just opposite the Princess, and I could not help looking at her with wonderment. She looked so fresh and girlish. She came and talked to me afterwards in a ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... time during the winter. He watched her in talk with others, noting the contradiction in her that she would at one moment appear knowing and masterful, with depths of reserve that the other people neither fathomed nor knew of; and at another moment frankly girlish, with an appealing feminine helplessness which is woman's greatest strength, coercing ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... quiet men with ties like oriflammes, breasts like a kingfisher's, and cataclysmal trouser patterns. Even so, if the shopkeeper had his will, should we all be. Those poor withered maiden ladies, too, who fill us with a kind of horror, with their juvenile curls, their girlish crudity of colouring, their bonnets, giddy, tottering, hectic. It overcomes me with remorse to think that I myself have accused them of vanity and folly. It overcomes me with pain to hear the thoughtless laugh aloud after them, in the public ways. ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... a dream, looked above him and met the sour glances of Hansen and Bates, whom the noise had brought to the ship's rail; then he looked below into the girlish face upraised to his. For better or worse, his resolution was taken. They might keep his chest; they might keep his wages; their stinking ship might sink or swim for all he cared. They were welcome to what Jack Wilson left ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... his watch, he told me he must now leave me to myself; and bidding me consult reason, and not girlish fancies, he withdrew. I had not the courage to move; the night fell, and found me still where he had laid me during my faint, my face buried in my hands, my soul drowned in the darkest apprehensions. Late in the evening he returned, carrying ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not a coward. After his adventure in Balak, he feared neither man nor devil, and he insolently returned the black fellow's gaze. They stood about a buffet and drank coffee. The young woman—her outlines were girlish—did not touch anything; she turned her face in Pobloff's direction, so he fancied, and spoke at intervals ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... a grey, rather austere tailor-made gown; it gave a girlish turn to her slender figure, and on her fair hair was poised the little boat-shaped hat and long silvery gauze veil which have become in a sense the uniform of a ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... again as she returned, quickly, "Of course, you must not write to the house. You can leave a letter somewhere for me—say, somewhere about here. Stop!" she added, with a sudden girlish gayety, "see, here's ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... there creeps upon me a nameless, tingling sense of being haunted. But no! these gracious, silent, waving, weaving shapes are not of the Shadowy Folk, for whose coming the white fires were kindled: a strain of song, full of sweet, clear quavering, like the call of a bird, gushes from some girlish mouth, and fifty soft voices join ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... one of you. How much there is for you to do! You are frank and honest now, or ought to be; you have not learned to imitate the falseness of so-called proprieties. It is fully possible to keep young, genuine, girlish even, and at the same time to be womanly. The world is not sunshiny enough; there are too many November days in the year: bring fairer weather and fresh ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... own youthful experiences at school, finds relationships of the kind very common, usually between boys of different ages and school-classes. According to one observer, the feminine, or passive, part was always played by a boy of girlish form and complexion, and the relationships were somewhat like those of normal lovers, with kissing, poems, love-letters, scenes of jealousy, sometimes visits to each other in bed, but without masturbation, pederasty, or other grossly physical ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... considerable interest to the tones and words of the fair stranger who had so unexpectedly taken possession of his thoughts. Were it not for a slight shrillness and loudness at times, and the fashionable affectation of the day, her voice would have been sweet and girlish enough. As it was, it suggested an instrument tuned to a false key and consequently discordant with all true and womanly harmonies. Her conversation with young Minty was as insipid as himself, but occasionally Stanton's cynical banter evoked ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... lawns, it had always been in a group of four. Ah! those were the days when one went home and wept because the dear one—the handsome hero who filled half a girl's thoughts and was the object of more than half her worship—had not seen, one across the crowd; or he had seen, perhaps, but girlish modest eyes were forbidden to give the signal of approach. It was more maidenly then to be oblivious of a young man's presence. 'Now,' said, Miss Abingdon, 'when they see a young man whom they know—a pal I believe they ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... wondered more and more at the extremely youthful appearance of their companion. When they stopped at a shell-hole and washed the mud from their faces, the English boy, with his helmet off and the weather stains removed, showed a countenance of adolescent freshness, almost girlish; cheeks like pink apples, yellow curls above ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... The stranger's girlish form stamped itself deeply on Somerset's soul. He strolled on his way quite oblivious to the fact that the moon had just risen, and that the landscape was one for him to linger over, especially if there were any Gothic architecture ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... can't be too particular,-but such a child!" thought Mrs. Brownlow as the mufflings disclosed a tiny creature, angular in girlish sort, with an odd little narrow wedge of a face, sallow and wan, rather too much of teeth and mouth, large greenish- hazel eyes, and a forehead with a look of expansion, partly due to the crisp waves of dark hair being as short as a boy's. The nose was well cut, and each delicate ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... word "home" the boy flushed and something went soft in his eyes for a moment. In spite of his steel helmet and mud-stained uniform, he was a girlish-looking fellow—perhaps that was why his comrades were chaffing him—and I fancy the thought of Christmas made him yearn back to ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... the end of his life he remained "a poor little child worn out by a love that was beyond him."[13] But this man who lived so wild and adventurous a life expressed his passions with delicacy; and one finds an almost girlish purity in the immortal love passages of Les Troyens or the "nuit sereine" of Romeo et Juliette. And compare this Virgilian affection with Wagner's sensual raptures. Does it mean that Berlioz could not love as well as Wagner? We only know that Berlioz's life was made up ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... she had been leading in town there had been no playground. Her whole attention there had been given to the subjection of the wild impulses in which she now indulged. She laughed, she ran, she reveled in being just her care-free, girlish self. Don watched her with a new thrill. He felt as though she were taking him back to her early youth—as though she were filling up for him all those years of ...
— The Wall Street Girl • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... still girlish, but her face is womanly; a classic face, not like the man's in expression, but faintly resembling it in form, though her features, clearly outlined, have not the smallness of his. Her eyes are large and deep blue. There is enough rich color of lip, ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... turn your horses around and get," Iola commanded so imperatively, so threateningly that both men, in a sudden panic of fear—like nearly all rascals they were cowards and those two pistols in those two girlish hands might go off at any instant—whirled their horses around and galloped off, while a bullet from one of the barrels of Iola's pistol, whistling between their heads, added to ...
— The Cave of Gold - A Tale of California in '49 • Everett McNeil
... a picture in which are represented the literary men of the period, grouped as in Raphael's School of Athens, with Goethe and Schiller occupying the centre. Upon the broad steps which lead to the elevation where they are standing, is the girlish figure of Bettina bending forward and holding a laurel wreath in her hand. This is the position which she occupies in the history of ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... her clear soft forehead was whiter than those of many so-called pale-faces; but her ruddy cheeks, her light-brown hair, and, above all, her bright brown eye showed that white blood ran in her veins. She was what men term a half-caste. She was young, almost girlish in her figure and deportment; but the earnest gravity of her pretty face caused her to appear older than she really was. March, unconsciously and without an effort, guessed her to be sixteen. He was wrong. She had only ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... without thinking of any one besides herself. Usually she could talk, but in that instant she had nothing to say. Then a carriage drew into the line of her vision, stopped at York's gate, and Mr. York alighted and swung to the ground a slim girlish figure and then helped his wife. Kate had a sudden inspiration. "But you would want to wait a little and join with Milly, wouldn't you?" she asked. "Uncle Robert always has been a church member. I think it's a fine stand for a ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... own age, and as I faced him I saw that he was thin, and had black hair, a yellowish skin, and dark eyes. He was showing his rather irregular teeth in a sneering smile that made his hooked nose seem to hang over his mouth, while his high-pitched, harsh, girlish voice rang and buzzed in my ears in a ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... have been eighteen years old, but there was nothing girlish in her gorgeous beauty. She was a red ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... a few moments, a noiseless figure of a girl, tall and slim, and deliciously sinuous. Cowperwood saw at first glance that she fulfilled all the promise of her picture, and was delighted. She had, he thought, a strange, shrewd, intelligent smile, which, however, was girlish and friendly. Without so much as a glance in his direction she came forward, extending her arms and hands in an inimitable histrionic manner, and exclaimed, with a practised and yet natural inflection: "Mother, dear! So here you are really! You know, I've been thinking of you all morning. ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... neither inquiring nor sympathetic; and her manner all the evening had a nervous dryness that took away the pleasure of their tete-a-tete. Any old friend of Letty's, indeed, could hardly have failed to ask what had become of that small tinkling charm of manner, that girlish flippancy and repartee, that had counted for so much in George's first impressions of her? They were no sooner engaged than it had begun to wane. Was it like the bird or the flower, that adorns itself only ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... present, in one unspeakable vibration? If not, then neither is it a weakness to be so wrought upon by the exquisite curves of a woman's cheek, and neck, and arms; by the liquid depth of her beseeching eyes, or the sweet girlish pout of her lips. For the beauty of a lovely woman is like music—what can one say more?" And so "the noblest nature is often blinded to the character of the woman's soul that beauty clothes." Hence "the tragedy of human life is likely to continue for a long time to come, in spite ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... She came over and perched herself on the side of the bed. She looked down at her mother. Then she bent and kissed her. Mrs. Brewster looked incredibly girlish with the lamp's rosy glow on her face and her hair, warmly brown and profuse, rippling out over the pillow. Scarcely a thread of grey in it. "You know, mother, I think dad isn't well. ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... surroundings, and in no small degree helped to dissipate the gloom. Indeed, had it not been for the picture in the hall, and for the twilight shadows and twilight footsteps in the stone passage, I should soon have ceased to think of ghosts. Ghosts, forsooth! When all around me vibrated with the sounds of girlish laughter, and the summer sunshine, sparkling on the golden curls of my child-wife, saw itself reflected a millionfold in the alluring depths of her azure eyes. In halcyon days like these who thinks ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... happened from the moment when the sallow maid entered the dressing-room again, closely followed by the call-boy, who knocked on the open door and spoke her stage name, until she found herself well out on the stage, in Rigoletto's arms, uttering the girlish cry which begins Gilda's part. The three notes, not very high, not very loud, were drowned in the applause that roared at ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... dance, hundreds of eyes followed him with admiration. "He has the key," said the women, appraising his slender elegance, medium stature, and muscular springs. And he, in abbreviated jacket and expansive shirt bosom, with his small, girlish feet encased in high-heeled patent leathers with white tops, danced gravely, thoughtfully, silently, like a mathematician working out a problem, under the lights that shed bluish tones upon his plastered, ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... very early. The girls were not as obtrusive as they had been. Miss Jessie Stevens did not bother him by coming up every five minutes to see what he thought of her dictation, as she had been wont to do. He was rather glad of this; it saved him importunate glances and words, and the propinquity of girlish forms, which had been more trying still. But what was the cause of the change? It was evident that the girls regarded him as belonging to Miss Conklin. He disliked the assumption; his caution took alarm; he would ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... pure again. So Lilith backward turned to holier days, Watching through misty tears where trod those ways Her feet in other times. Sudden and sweet Came down those paths a glimpse of flying feet; A sound of girlish laughter smote the air. In jealous rage, Lilith uprose to dare The guarding Angel's wrath. But, silver clear, The mocking laugh of Eblis caught her ear. "Thou hast forgot," he said, "this peaceful land, Living, ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... world. She flowered now beneath the sun of those dark lustrous eyes and the soft rain of that admiration from the greatest dramatic poet in the world. It really did seem to Edward Henry that she grew younger. Assuredly she grew more girlish and her voice improved. And then the bottles began to pop, and it was as though the action of uncorking wine automatically uncorked hearts also. Mr. Seven Sachs, sitting square and upright, smiled gaily at Edward Henry across the gleaming table and raised a glass. ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... tender young creature, all emotion, quivering at a word, aloof at a glance, prone to occasional introspection and mysterious daydreams; the next she was a young woman, tender but not shyly so, incredibly poised, almost formidably dignified on occasion, but with little girlish lapses into frolic and ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... demur, the treatment of a little boy. Charlie, for a long time, was almost a model of propriety. He was diligent in his studies, and observed the rules of the school with scrupulous care. He was fair, almost girlish, in appearance, and gentle in his speech. No one, merely observing the quiet, modest boy, going about his usual routine of duty, without noise or turbulence, would have dreamed of the sleeping volcano that lay beneath ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... except those whom she and her husband had more than once viewed suffering on the scaffold; but she had read books like the Colloquies of Erasmus with keen appreciation, she was instructed in the great controversy from the Catholic side, and one of the youthful exercises which remain written in her girlish hand is a letter to John Calvin in defence ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... unreality in all this. The real thing was the soul within, the longing, loving woman whose heart was heavy and unsatisfied. Jack was so lovable, he had in his nature so much nobility, if the world did not kill it, her life might be so sweet, and so completely fulfill her girlish dreams. All these schemes of a helpful, altruistic life had been in her dream, but how empty it was without the mutual confidence, the repose in the one human love for which ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... innocence?” This was asked so naïvely that I burst into a laugh, in which my host joined me. Unfortunately, this grandmamma, like Ellen Terry, cannot be made to understand that there are rôles she should leave alone, that with all the illusions the stage lends she can no longer play girlish parts with success. ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... questioning. He led the way, which was doubtless a familiar one, and the maid at the door, knowing him, admitted us at once to Madame's apartment. The woman, who sat alone in the dainty silk-hung boudoir, rose and came swiftly forward to greet Jerome, the radiant girlish smile changing quickly when she perceived me enter behind him. It was more the grande dame, and less the delighted woman, who acknowledged my presentation with courtly grace. Intuitively I felt her unvoiced inquiry of Jerome why he had not ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... was in the outstretched hands, the hot kiss lay upon the smooth, girlish neck, and then they looked ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... to be a kind of foreshadowing of Hope Wayne. The eyes were of a deep, soft darkness, that held the spectator with a dreamy fascination. The other features were exquisitely moulded, and suffused with an airy, girlish grace, so innocent that the look became almost a pathetic appeal against the inevitable ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... to dwell on your literary tastes,—how you have outgrown Moore and Festus-Bailey, and are fast getting through Byron. I won't pose you, by showing how your ideas in Art have changed,—what new views you have of life, society;—but think of your ideas of womanly, or rather, girlish beauty at different ages. By Jove, I should like to see your ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... A pretty girlish young man called Python, son of some Macedonian grandee, once by way of quizzing him asked a riddling question and invited him to show his acumen over it. 'I only see one thing, dear child,' he said, ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... She was very pretty, a girlish creature, thin and eager looking, with large tobacco-brown eyes full of a humorous, observant interest in everything. Her skin was dark and smooth as satin. Even her long throat and nervous hands, and the slim, lace-covered arms, were of the same satin-textured duskiness ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... and local colour to a story of the Restoration period, a brilliantly wicked interval in the social history of England, which, after the lapse of thirty years, I am still as bent upon taking for the background of a love story as I was when I began "Master Anthony's Record" in Esmondese, and made my girlish acquaintance with the Reading-room of the British Museum, where I went in quest of local colour, and where much kindness was shown to my youth and inexperience of the book world. Poring over a folio edition of the State Trials at my uncle's quiet ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... which her figure appeared, cameo-like. The flooding brightness lifted her form and face, seen in profile, into sharp relief, and the shadow which it cast on the grass made her appear the more tall and slender. Grown and subtly altered she undoubtedly was, thought Donald. The girlish curves and lithesomeness had not departed; but they carried a suggestion of approaching maturity. Her wavy hair no longer hung unbound about her face, but was dressed in two braids, one of which had fallen forward across her breast. Shoes and ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... occasion of his 'first reading,' the laughter must have been inextinguishable; for, of course, Jack Scott's run-away marriage had made much gossip in Oxford Common Rooms, and the singular loveliness of his girlish wife (described by an eye-witness as being "so very young as to give the impression of childhood,") stirred the heart of every undergraduate who met ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... of a very bright and very girlish smile, and he found himself thinking that she could not be so much ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... new moon and it nestled about her pretty head in a profusion of luxuriant clusters and pared her nails too, Thursday for wealth. And just now at Edy's words as a telltale flush, delicate as the faintest rosebloom, crept into her cheeks she looked so lovely in her sweet girlish shyness that of a surety God's fair land of Ireland did not hold ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... her heart had taken it upon herself to see that it was placed in my hands. I learned later that, much to the amusement of many of the guests, she had been awaiting my arrival for several hours. It seems almost needless to add that I carried my flowers throughout the evening with much girlish pride and pleasure. ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... the way. But suddenly he extinguished it again, and drew us close in to the rocks that edged the road. We saw coming toward us in the darkness two figures. They rode small horses. Their faces could not be seen; but as they passed our silent, motionless forms, one said in a clear, sweet, girlish voice: ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... insupportable. There were no Europeans for miles around and there remained only the diversions of an occasional shikar. The tour of the previous autumn and winter months on which he had been accompanied by his girlish bride, had spoilt him for bachelor life; for though Joyce had disliked the inconveniences of camping, she had suffered them meekly, seeing that to have objected would have been both selfish and unkind. But the coming of the child had roused in her active opposition ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... the water laughed around her in a duet of brook and wind. Anne had always loved that brook. Many a dream had she spun over its sparkling water in days gone by. She forgot lovelorn youths, and the cayenne speeches of malicious neighbors, and all the problems of her girlish existence. In imagination she sailed over storied seas that wash the distant shining shores of "faery lands forlorn," where lost Atlantis and Elysium lie, with the evening star for pilot, to the land of Heart's ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... up wonderingly at the sweet girlish faces gathered about her. "I think you must be a—a company of angels," a sharp sob broke the attempt at a laugh—for she was still very weak. "You are all so good ...
— The Outdoor Girls on Pine Island - Or, A Cave and What It Contained • Laura Lee Hope
... think that I could ever be loved; but perchance my devotion may win for me toleration. Since that morning when you smiled upon me with generous girlish impulse, divining the misery of my lonely and rejected heart, you reign there alone. You are the absolute ruler of my life, the queen of my thoughts, the god of my heart; I find you in the sunshine of my home, the ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... diversion would prove when he once fell into this train of black thoughts; but she could not refrain from essaying the hopeless task by holding up her apron of homespun cloth full of cotton rolls, pretty in their whiteness and roundness and softness, meantime coquettishly turning her still girlish head on one side, and saying: "Now, Mr. Browne, why don't you praise my cotton? Did you ever ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... ambush there; but yonder also stands the soldier lover, and possible greeting, after long, weary absence, is there. What fear can master that overpowering hope? Estrangement of families, political disagreement, a separated loyalty, all melt away, are fused together in the warmth of girlish love. Taxes, representation, what things are these to come between two hearts? No Tory, no traitor is her lover, but her own brave hero and true knight. Woe! woe! the eager dream is broken by mad war-whoops! Alas! to those fierce wild men, what ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... pillow, eating them during the night without any bread. Several times at about one o'clock in the morning Florent almost fancied that Leon was giving a supper-party; for he heard low whispering followed by a sound of munching jaws and rustling paper. And then a rippling girlish laugh would break faintly on the deep silence of the sleeping house like the ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... father, and her own girlish love of gold and rank, it was not for Henry that she cared, not for the old Lord, but for Francis, the younger son. Did Francis know of this? They were secretly lovers, the old scandal reported; and the scandal, it may be, had reached ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... onyx, sard, Coral, and moonstone—round her wrist it gleamed A coil of splendid colour, while she held, Unthreaded yet, the bead to close it up Green turkis, carved with golden gods and scripts. Lulled by the cadence of the garden stream, Thus lay they on the clustered carpets, each A girlish rose with shut leaves, waiting dawn To open and make daylight beautiful. This was the antechamber of the Prince; But at the purdah's fringe the sweetest slept— Gunga and Gotami—chief ministers In ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... pair enjoyed the society of their children as they grew up. Fred, the eldest son, who had shared some of his father's later campaigns, was being prepared for admission to West Point. The General's pet was his only daughter, Nellie, who was bright and beautiful, and whose girlish prattle was far more attractive to him than the compliments of Congressmen or the praises ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore |
