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More "Slatternly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... De Vac paced the length of this black alley in search of the little doorway of the building he sought. At length he came upon it, and, after repeated pounding with the pommel of his sword, it was opened by a slatternly old hag. ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... house of no more use than the late Lady Crawley's grand piano. Being a light-complexioned woman, she wore light clothes, as most blondes will, and appeared, in preference, in draggled sea-green, or slatternly sky-blue. She worked that worsted day and night, or other pieces like it. She had counterpanes in the course of a few years to all the beds in Crawley. She had a small flower-garden, for which ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... instanter into the apartment where I had discovered all the signs of female inquisitiveness, which I have before detailed. There I discovered a small woman, in a robe equally slatternly and fine, with a sharp pointed nose, small, cold, grey eyes, and a complexion high towards the cheek bones, but waxing of a light green before it reached the wide and querulous mouth, which, well I ween, seldom opened to smile upon ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to a shabby bath-house below, in which is a pool for bathing. The bath is very agreeable, the tepid water being singularly soft and pleasant. It has a slightly sulphurous taste. Its good effects are much certified. The grounds, which might be very pretty with care, are ill-kept and slatternly, strewn with debris, as if everything was left to the easy-going nature of the servants. The main house is of brick, with verandas and galleries all round, and a colonnade of thirteen huge brick and stucco columns, in honor of the thirteen States,—a relic of post-Revolutionary ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... immensely. The news of the landlord's visit had spread from cottage to cottage, awakening a mild excitement throughout the length of the row. The women showed themselves on the steps or on the sidewalks, very slatternly, without corsets, their hair coming down, dressed in faded calico wrappers just as they had come from the laundry tubs or the cook-stove. They bethought them of their various grievances, a leak here, a broken door-bell there, a certain bad smell that was supposed to have some connection ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... waking hours, when not in school, using it for playground, lunch-room, and loafing-place, and regarding it as pleasanter than home. Imagine going to school half fed and poorly clothed, sometimes the butt of a playmate's gibes because of a drunken father or a slatternly mother, required to study subjects that make no appeal to the child and in a language that is not native, and then back to the street, perhaps to sell papers until far into the night, or to run at the beck and call of the public as a messenger boy. ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... well as her betters. Why should she not? The old woman at the lodge, who always piqued herself on being spiteful, and crying down new ways, foretold from the first she would come to no good, and could not forgive her for falsifying her prediction; and Betty Barnes, the slatternly widow of a tippling farmer, who rented a field, and set up a cow herself, and was universally discarded for insufferable dirt, said all that the wit of an envious woman could devise against Hannah and her Alderney; nay, even Ned Miles, the keeper, her next neighbour, who had whilom ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... ankle-deep in desert drift—prototype of Berber in a sandstorm—as comfortless by night as day. But as in nature, so in the handiwork of men, even in the most repulsive shapes it is possible to find some saving feature. De Aar has one—one only. Its saving feature is where a slatternly Jew boy plays host behind the bar of a fly-ridden buffet. Here at prices which, except that it is a campaign, would be prohibitive, you can purchase ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... Isel. "And they bain't pretty words, Father—not by no manner of means. She's for ever and the day after interfering with every mortal thing one does. And her own house is just right-down slatternly, and her children are coming up any how. If she'd just spend the time a-scouring as she spends a-chattering, her house 'd be the cleanest place in Oxfordshire. But as for the poor children, I'm that sorry! Whatever they do, or don't do, they ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... of life in the Foreign Office; but Constance at that moment interposed to say that tea was waiting. She had herself taken the tea-things from the general servant, who had brought them to the door, and was a slatternly girl, ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... moment of absent-mindedness she bore to the Professor a son, whom she brings up on Spartan principles, and little else. Her home is a centre of slatternly discomfort. She rises early, but, having locked herself into her study, for the better composition of a discourse on "The Sacred Right of Revolt for Women," she forgets that both the tea and the coffee are locked in with her, and learns subsequently ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 29, 1890 • Various
... in a disreputable mob. Stray dogs sniffing at heaps of refuse, a group of tethered horses shivering under thin blankets in the hotel shed, a battered jitney or two stalled before shop and saloon. A Chinaman with a huge bundle upon his head, a slatternly woman brushing the dry, powdered snow from the path, a tawdry one pattering along, her rouged face pitiful in the clear merciless light; red-shirted miners crawling like ants to the yawning shaft-mouths half way up the mountainside.—This ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... sometimes a man and a woman—a teamster out of work or with his wages for the day, and with him a creature—a blear-eyed, slatternly looking woman, in a filthy calico gown. The man clutches her arm, as they sing and stagger up past the cafes. The woman holds in her claw-like hand a half-empty bottle of cheap red wine. Now and then they stop and share it; the man staggers on; the woman leers and dances and sings; a crowd forms ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... house. It was a rambling, dilapidated, two-story structure, sadly in need of paint and repairs, and bespeaking occupancy by a family none too well blessed with the better things of existence. They proceeded to the door and rang the bell. A slatternly woman answered their summons, and ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... and often cross in the morning; and she was careless and slatternly in her ways. But she did not object when Janice came down early to get her father's breakfast, and serve it daintily, as her mother had ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... partially thatched; the fences are made up of odds and ends. As for order, the whole place might have been strewn with the debris of a whirlwind and not have looked worse. As a natural consequence of all this slatternly disorder, fire is no uncommon occurrence; and when a fire begins, it seldom stops till it has licked the whole place clean—a condition not attainable by any ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... A slatternly, slipshod girl answered the bell, and having received her orders and the united available funds of the two comrades, speedily returned with a brace of frothing pint pots. The major ruminated silently over his cigarette for some time, ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... into the house to dance and sing until the morning, and leave on the hearth stone a piece of money as a reward behind them. But should the house be dirty, never would the Fairies enter it to hold their nightly revels, unless, forsooth, they came to punish the slatternly servant. Such was the popular opinion, and it must have acted as an incentive to order and cleanliness. These ideas have found expression ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... grey mule, when her glance lighted upon the stranger, who had come a few minutes earlier by the Applegate road. As he was a fine looking man of full habit and some thirty years, her eyes lingered an instant on his face before she turned with the news to her slatternly negro maid who was sousing the floor ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... of the road leading to destruction: but the landlord had some hazy notion on that point. He sat there day and night, and saw the destruction going on. He saw the blear-eyed, fuddled men that came to drown conscience in his stalls, and the slatternly women who came and went. Nevertheless he was a rosy, jocund fellow who appeared to have a good deal of the milk of human kindness about him, and would have looked on you with great surprise, if not scorn, ...
— Sunk at Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... of the Taufusi swamp, was a small collection of huts, jumbled together in squalor and dirt, with pigs dozing in the ooze and slatternly women beating out siapo in the shade. It was a dunghill of out-islanders, Nieues, Uveans, Tongans, Tapatueans, banded together in a common poverty; landless people of other archipelagoes, despised of the Samoans, and paying tribute to the lord of the soil—a few men ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... landlord, who seemed to be something of a beauty himself, discovered the merits of Amanda. Then he became markedly attentive. He was a large, fat, curly-headed person with beautiful eyes, a cherished moustache, and an air of great gentility, and when he had welcomed his guests and driven off the slatternly waiting-maid, and given them his best table, and consented, at Amanda's request, to open a window, he went away and put on a tie and collar. It was an attention so conspicuous that even the group of men in the far corner noticed and ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... undulated the horizon in so many artificial mole-hills, that it is full as unnatural as if it was drawn with a rule and compasses. Nothing is done to the house; there are not even chairs in the great apartment. My Lord Anson is more slatternly than the Churchills, and does not even finish children. I am going to write to Lord Beauchamp, that I shall be at Oxford on the 15th, where I depend upon meeting you. I design to see Blenheim, and Rousham, (is not that the name of Dormer's?) ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... Mistress Waynflete that a woman who broke her arm at the church door was a housewifely maiden who became a slatternly housewife after marriage. "There's no fear of Jane doing that," she replied; "she's as good as the ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... gone to swell the ranks of the rioters; another half—slatternly women and unkempt children—swarmed in the single street and gazed upward at the heights. Every ledge about the threatened buildings was black with men, men furious with hate and mad with liquor, men needing only ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... glory: its colors are those of life. No death but that of martyrdom, with its rosy blood, waving palm-branch and golden crown, is figured there. Life, and the joy of life, beauty so profuse that it can afford to have a few blemishes like a slatternly Venus, and the dolce far niente of poverty that neither works nor starves,—they lie all ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... than answer No. But he was obliged to answer No; and he saw a shade of disappointment on her face, as she checked a sigh, and looked at the low fire. Then he saw, also, that Mrs Plornish was a young woman, made somewhat slatternly in herself and her belongings by poverty; and so dragged at by poverty and the children together, that their united forces had already dragged ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... but Mrs. Burdon, a big, slatternly Missourian, with all the kindliness of a universal mother in her swarthy face and flaccid bosom, ushered them into the cave-like dwelling set in the sunny side ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... almost grotesque, were they not so sad. The composer lived a solitary life, and was very much at the mercy of his servants on account of his self-absorption and deafness. He was much worried by these prosaic cares. One story of a slatternly servant is as follows: The master was working at the mass in D, the great work which he commenced in 1819 for the celebration of the appointment of the Archduke Rudolph as Archbishop of Olmutz, and which should have been completed ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... life. At the Circus he paused awhile, breathing deep and filling out his lungs with fragrance of violets and narcissi, which flower-girls clamoured for him to purchase. He bought a bunch and smiled faintly, contrasting the beautiful significance of the name of the vendor's profession with the slatternly person to whom it was applied. Then onwards he went to Leicester Square where the dazzling lights of music-halls flared and quickened, and scarlet-lipped Folly smiled out upon him from street corners, and beckoned through the dusk. In the old days it had always been when ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... very gay, that life of hers, when one had to rustle for two, cook and work and wash, to say nothing of paying the rent. What odds was it if she was slatternly, dirty, coarse? Was there time to make herself look otherwise, and who was there to be pleased when she was all prinked out? Surely not a great brute of a husband who bit you like a dog, and kicked and pounded you as though you were made of iron. ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... drinking, bad living and bad dying. The men who haunted its dirty, narrow little streets were loafers and idlers and castaways. The women were, most of them, no better than they should be, and the children were the most slatternly and ill-bred in the whole of Glebeshire. Small credit to the Canons and the Town Councillors and the prosperous farmers that it was so, but in their defence it might be urged that it needed a very valiant Canon and the most fearless of Town Councillors to disturb that little ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... too, was married and had children; but Mrs. Ellerby never went into their cottages, and the shepherd and his wife concluded that it was because in both cases the children were rather puny, sickly-looking little things and were never very clean. The carter's wife, too, was a slatternly woman. One day when Mrs. Ellerby came in to see Mrs. Bawcombe the carter's wife was just going out of the door, and Mrs. Ellerby appeared displeased, and before leaving she said, "I hope, Mrs. Bawcombe, you are not going to mix too freely with your ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... the next morning and dressed in the room without fire, shivering now as they drew on their stockings, frozen stiff. They had their morning coffee in a chilly room downstairs, where sometimes their slatternly landlady appeared, lugubriously voluble. This morning they ate alone, in silence, and none too happily. Even Annie's buoyant spirits seemed inadequate. A trace of bitterness was in ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... should make it clear that she was not of the slatternly, dirty, lazy, half-breed type that pigs in a peignoir from twelve to twelve and snores again from midnight to midday. She was trim and dainty, used good perfume or none, rose early and went in the garden, loathed cheap and showy trash whether in dress, jewellery, ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... the first time in several months, she wore a tight-fitting dress, and her father, unconscious of her crimes, good-naturedly expressed his joy at seeing her 'once more dressed like a Christian lady, and not in the loose and slatternly robes she had ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... was five years old. It was all as competent and glossy as this bedroom. It had the best of taste, the best of inexpensive rugs, a simple and laudable architecture, and the latest conveniences. Throughout, electricity took the place of candles and slatternly hearth-fires. Along the bedroom baseboard were three plugs for electric lamps, concealed by little brass doors. In the halls were plugs for the vacuum cleaner, and in the living-room plugs for the piano lamp, for the electric fan. ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... affrighted at the wide, empty space overhead and round about them, finding the air too little medicated with smoke, soot, and graveyard exhalations, to be breathed with comfort, and feeling shelterless and lost because grimy London, their slatternly and disreputable mother, had suffered them to stray out ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... slatternly with increasing maternity. She spent her time in a rocking-chair, dipping snuff—a consolation imported from her former home—and lamenting the bad marriage she had made. Rodney ascribed his ill-fortune to unjust neighborly criticism. He farmed a little, he raised a little ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... house-keeping. Mrs. Hilary cast her eye about the room at the word, as if she had seen quite enough of it already, and this made Louise laugh again. She was no better in person than the room was, and she felt her mother's tacit censure apply to her slatternly dressing-gown. ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... locked up with her mother all that evening. The good little shrill woman, tender-eyed and slatternly, had to help try on dresses, and run about for pins, and express her critical taste in undertones, believing all the while that her daughter had given up music to go mad with vanity. The reflection struck her, notwithstanding, that it was a wiser thing for one of her sex to make friends among ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... looked about her, her mother stopped laughing and watched her face with a painful attention. Sylvia looked at the tall, dingy houses, the frowzy little shops, the swarms of dirty-nosed children, shrill-voiced, with matted hair, running and whooping in the street, at the slatternly women yelling unobeyed orders to them out of half-glimpsed, cheerless interiors, smelling of cabbage and dishwater. It was Sylvia's first sight of the life of city poor, and upon her face of disgust and revulsion her mother bent a ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... the dove's satiny plumage gently—and then drew back a little into shadow as she saw Robin Clifford step out from the porch into the garden and hurriedly interrupt the advance of a woman who just then pushed open the outer gate—a slatternly- looking creature with dark dishevelled hair and a face which might have been handsome, but for its unmistakable impress ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... customs in different parts of the kingdom. In one place, the Mayers went out very early to the woods, and gathering green boughs, decorated every door with one. A house containing a sweetheart had a branch of birch, the door of a scold was disgraced with alder, and a slatternly person had the mortification to find a branch of a nut-tree at hers, while the young people who overslept found their doors closed by a nail ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... The slatternly servant, who could speak only "Mex," had got no supper ready. Knight would let Annesley do nothing, but he deftly helped the woman to fry some eggs and make coffee. He tried to find dishes which were not cracked ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... numbered thirty-two in all, and rough-looking specimens of humanity they indeed appeared. We had two stewardesses, who also waited at table, and made themselves generally useful. These were slatternly in appearance, but were very attentive and kind-hearted. There were seven firemen, two working at the same time for four hours at a stretch, thus each couple did duty twice in the twenty-four hours; which means eight hours in the engine-room out of ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... splendor. And let me urge that impeccable mundane splendor, despite facile arguments to the contrary, is a very real and worthy achievement. It is regrettable, by the way, that the entrances and foyers to these grandiose interiors should be so paltry, slatternly, and inadequate. If the entrances to the great financial establishments reminded me of opera-houses, the ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... Hircus Oepagrus is, Tommy? Well, it is a big name for him, isn't it? And if you should ask that somewhat slatternly female, who appears to employ tubs for the advantage of others rather than herself, what the animal is, she would tell you it is a goat. See what a hardy, sturdy little creature he is; and how he lifts up his startled head, as the cars come thundering along, and bounds away as if he were ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... disconsolately along the shore of the island. Neither one of them was anxious to return to the shanty boat for another interview with the slatternly ...
— Madge Morton, Captain of the Merry Maid • Amy D. V. Chalmers
... mistress of Mellor over matters which, according to her, had been settled generations ago by "the Lord and natur'," Marcella certainly was in no mood to contradict her. She walked through the village on her return scanning everything about her—the slatternly girls plaiting on the doorsteps, the children in the lane, the loungers round the various "publics," the labourers, old and young, who touched their caps to her—with a ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... food of the Kingfisher; but it also eats various kinds of insects, shrimps, and even small crabs. It rears its young in a hole, which is made in the banks of the stream it frequents. It is a slatternly bird, fouls its own nest and its peerless eggs. The nesting hole is bored rather slowly, and takes from one to two weeks to complete. Six or eight white glossy eggs are laid, sometimes on the bare soil, but often ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph, Volume 1, Number 2, February, 1897 • anonymous
... lump from being first cousins to a Zanzibar foreshore, or kin to the approaches of a Zulu kraal. Gullies, holes, ruts, cobbles-stones awry, kerbstones rising from two to six inches above the level of the slatternly pavement; tram-lines from two to three inches above street level; building materials scattered half across the street; lime, boards, cut stone, and ash-barrels generally and generously everywhere; wheeled ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... who had regarded Mr. Barholm with a spice of disfavor, still could not look with ill-nature upon this pretty girl. The slatternly women nudged each other as she passed, and the playing children stared after their usual fashion; but even the hardest-natured matron could find nothing more condemnatory to say than, "Hoo's noan Lancashire, ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the whole caboodle," Blair said, angrily. It was his old shrinking from "ugliness." And everything at home was ugly;—the great old house in the midst of Maitland's Shantytown; the darkness and grime of it; the smell of soot in the halls; Harris's slatternly ways; his mother's big, beautiful, dirty fingers. "When she sneezes," Blair said, grinding his teeth, "I could—swear! She takes the roof off." He grew hot with shame when Mrs. Richie, whom he admired profoundly, ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... an easy-going, wool-witted creature, not ill-disposed, but sometimes mendacious and very indolent. Her life had always been what it was now—one of slatternly comfort and daylong gossip, for she came of a small tradesman's family, and had married an artisan who was always in well-paid work. Her children were two daughters, who, at seventeen and fifteen, remained ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... without adequate provision either for building or the upkeep of building; it bids him to keep it clean, but pays no servant to wash or sweep; and, while enjoining the absence of dirt, it checks and hampers that desire to decorate, which is the positive side of order and taste. The result is, broadly, slatternly schools. ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... negligee of the tables, littered with the plates and dishes, dreary survivors of a dozen breakfasts, he divined that he was the tardiest guest in the household. A slatternly young woman in a soiled shirt-waist—the waitress—received him with great calm and waved him toward a table by the window, where an unused cover was laid. He went meekly, dogged by her formidable presence. She stood over him and ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... to be a small, slatternly-looking craft, her hull and spars a dingy black, rigging all slack and bleached nearly white, and everything denoting an ill state of affairs aboard. The four boats hanging from her sides proclaimed her a whaler. Leaning carelessly ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... tea, I guess. Indeed, and the girls are very careless." She rang the bell with energy, and seconded her pull by going to the door and shouting out sharp directions, in Welsh, to Nest and Gwen, and three or four other rough, kind, slatternly servants. ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... woman of pretty good sense, but of slatternly habits. She had been so long without a lady to guide her that her original training was either forgotten or entirely disregarded. Once, when starting to Conacanarra for Christmas, I charged her to take advantage of the fine weather to give the passage ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... of loungers on the dirty wet platform, and Telford passed into the store. A couple of slatternly women were talking to Mrs. Rykman about "the Palmer row." Telford made his small purchases hastily. As he turned from the counter, he came face to face with a woman who had paused in the doorway to survey the scene with an air of sullen scorn. By some subtle intuition ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... fettered me. It is difficult to stow a large figure like mine away into trowsers. I felt as if my legs were in the stocks, and kicked them off in disdain—simply remarking—'what fools men are!' So, you don't like my short petticoats? and I hate your long ones. First, because they are slatternly and inconvenient; secondly, because they make your stockings dirty; and thirdly, because they give you the idea that they are intended to conceal crooked legs. So don't say ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... its former state—some scutcheon, some holy or courageous motto, on the lintel. The local antiquary points out where famous and well-born people had their lodging; and as you look up, out pops the head of a slatternly woman from the countess's window. The Bedouins camp within Pharaoh's palace walls, and the old war-ship is given over to the rats. We are already a far way from the days when powdered heads were plentiful ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Andrew gave her the benefit of his life's experience in the science. They travelled about with an aviary. And while Andrew, now unreproached, frowned, pencil in hand and notebook by his side, over the strategics of the Franco-Prussian War, Elodie, always in her slatternly wrapper, spent enraptured hours in putting her feathered troupe through their pretty tricks or in playing with them foolishly as one ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... many people there is too much resignation. It kills out energy. It is a weak, fretful, unhappy thing. People are reconciled, in a sad sort of way, to the fashion in which things go on. You have seen a poor, slatternly mother, in a way-side cottage, who has observed her little children playing in the road before it, in the way of passing carriages, angrily ordering the little things to come away from their dangerous and dirty play; yet, when the children disobey ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... Hammersmith, occupying a very plain and shabby little house, in a contiguous range of others like it, with no prospect but that of an ugly village-street, and certainly nothing to gratify his craving for a tasteful environment, inside or out. A slatternly maid-servant opened the door for us, and he himself stood in the entry, a beautiful and venerable old man, buttoned to the chin in a black dress-coat, tall and slender, with a countenance quietly alive all over, and the gentlest and most naturally courteous manner. He ushered us into ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... a woman, who, as a rule, utterly disregarded dress. She gave but little thought to her personal appearance. Like many other women of the middle class, she had sunk since her marriage from the trim, pretty girl to the somewhat slatternly matron. ...
— A Girl in Ten Thousand • L. T. Meade
... old chaise; the heaving horse wheezed as the stern parson gave his loins a thwack with the slackened reins and urged him down the turnpike which led away through the ill-kept fields, from the rambling, slatternly town. Stone walls that had borne the upheaval of twenty winters reeled beside the way. Broad scars of ochreous earth, from which the turnpike-menders had dug material to patch the wheel-track, showed ooze of yellow mud with honeycombs of ice rimming their edges, and supporting a thin film of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... disconsolately in a corner. It was hard to say to what class of people the house belonged; poor people they were of course; and things looked as if they were simply living there because too poor to live anywhere else. A slatternly woman stared at the intruders; a dirty child crawled over the hearth. Daisy could not endure to touch anything, except with the soles of her shoes. So she stood upright in the middle of the floor; ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... endowed as to climate, the chef-lieu of the Bouches du Rhone must be called a slatternly beauty; whilst embellishing herself, putting on her jewels and splendid attire, she has forgotten to wash her face and trim her hair! Not in Horatian phrase, dainty in her neatness, Marseilles does herself injustice. Lyons is clean swept, spick and span as a toy town; Bordeaux is coquettish ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... The old woman was a hideous old crone. Her hair was a matted gray mass, her teeth were gone, and her face was pinched, and so seamed with wrinkles, that she looked as though she might be over a hundred years old. The other woman was very dirty and slatternly. She had a dirty baby in her arms; her hair was in disorder, her face was greasy and smouched, and a filthy cloth, which might once have been white, was on her head. The women and children were all barefoot. As Bob approached, they all stared ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... day or hour charring, cleaning and cooking—came back every afternoon about four o'clock to see to the dinner, and that day she was already there. She admitted the visitor, though she could not conceal her anxious surprise at her boldness in calling in such slatternly garb. However, on the very threshold of the little salon, Madame Theodore stopped short in wonderment herself, for her sister Hortense was sobbing and crouching on one of the armchairs, upholstered in blue repp, of which she ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... "your slatternly wenches may be dead ere they match Mistress Hortense! As for wearing light colours, the devil himself is painted black. Let them who are doing shameful acts to the innocent walk shamefacedly! For shame, sirs, to cloak malice and jealousy of M. Picot ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... fallen upon evil days and become the abode of a number of petty tradesmen, such as cobblers, sellers of fruit and cheap drinks, dealers in second-hand goods of every description, and riffraff generally. It swarmed with dirty, slatternly women, still dirtier half-naked children, lean and hungry-looking dogs, and lazy, hulking men with brass ear-rings in their ears, the rags of tawdry finery upon their bodies, and their sashes perfect batteries ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... royal palms quite a hundred feet in height. The large unkempt garden at the side looked like a jungle in the hills, but was rich in colour and perfume. The gates were open and they could see the slatternly negro servants moving languidly about the rooms on the ground floor, while two slept under the banana tree. A gallery traversed the second story, its pillars covered with dusty vines. All of the rooms of this story evidently opened upon the gallery, but every door was closed. The ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... characteristic of the American point of view, than its author intended or would, perhaps, allow. In private life this is seen in the preference shown for diamond earrings and Paris toilettes over neat and effective household service. The contrast between the slatternly, unkempt maid-servant who opens the door to you and the general luxury of the house itself is sometimes of the most startling, not to say appalling, description. It is not a sufficient answer to ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... turn at agitating the button and shaking the gates; and with no more profit of his undertaking than Hickey. After a minute or two of it he acknowledged defeat with an oath, and turned away to browbeat the straggling vanguard of belated wayfarers,—messenger-boys, slatternly drabs, hackmen, loafers, and one or two plain citizens conspicuously out of their reputable grooves,—who were drifting in at the entrance to line the lobby walls with blank, curious faces. Forerunners of that mysterious rabble which is apparently precipitated out of ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... the plasterer's wife. A young woman, somewhat slatternly in herself and her belongings, and dragged by care and poverty already into wrinkles. She generally began her sentences with, "Well, not to deceive you." Thus: "Is Mr. Plornish at home?" "Well, sir, not to deceive you, he's gone to look for a job." "Well, not to deceive you, ma'am, I take it ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... position of the agricultural labourers. When anybody makes a quotation against Mr. Gladstone, the latter gentleman has a most awkward habit of asking for the date, the authority, and such like posers to men of slatternly memory, and doubtful accuracy. I have heard several of the wonderful Old Man's private secretaries declare that they had never been able to get over the dread with which this uncanny power of remembering everything inspired them—it was awe-inspiring, ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... summoned me to that haven for gents only. There were other landladies—landladies fat and German; landladies lean and Irish; landladies loquacious (regardless of nationality); landladies reserved; landladies husbandless, wedded, widowed, divorced, and willing; landladies slatternly; landladies prim; and all hinting of past estates wherein ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... rascal with shifty eyes and a debauched complexion, who showed a most unwelcome curiosity in his customer. As a last fatality, he wore a peaked cap like my own, and turned out to be an ex-sailor. I should have fled at the sight of him had I had the chance, but I was attended to first by a slatternly girl who, I am sure, called him up to view me. To explain my muddy boots and trousers I said I had walked from Esens, and from that I found myself involved in a tangle of impromptu lies. Floundering down an old groove, I placed my sister this time on ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... appeal of ancient buildings, the waving of tall trees, the faces of bright flowers, the songs of lively birds in the thicket—ay, and the intimations of death and decay as well, all that was ugly and wretched in humanity, the coarse song from the alehouse, the slatternly woman about her weary work, the crying of a child that had been punished, the foul oozings of the stockyard. These were all as real, as true impressions as the others. To strike some balance, neither to forget the ideal in the real, or to lose sight of the real in the ideal, ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... while he felt her pulse; he must have a refreshing nip from the famous bottle of Jamaica rum, which had lain in untroubled seclusion since before I was born, waiting some occasion of vast importance; and he must surely not take her unaware in a slatternly moment, but must find her lying on the pillows, wearing her prettiest nightgown, which was thereupon newly washed and ironed and stowed away in the bottom drawer of the bureau against his unexpected coming. But while the snow melted from the hills, and the folk returned ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... winter's noon was more night-like than the depth of summer's night; dim-purple brooded the low skies over the white earth, as Susan rode up to what had been Michael Hurst's abode while living. It was a small farm-house carelessly kept outside, slatternly tended within. The pretty Nelly Hebthwaite was pretty still; her delicate face had never suffered from any long-enduring feeling. If anything, its expression was that of plaintive sorrow; but the soft, light hair had scarcely a tinge of gray; the wood-rose tint of complexion yet ...
— Half a Life-Time Ago • Elizabeth Gaskell
... suburbs, slatternly, half-clothed family groups of negroes watched us with curious eyes, and on the road aged colored men and women were occasionally met, who saluted us with grave dignity. No one seemed to be at work; sunshine ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... the slatternly landlady to Madame Laurent and Michel one day, "I no see how she live! Eat? Nothin', nothin', almos', and las' night when it was so cold and foggy, eh? I hav' to mek him build ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... about her resolution almost with her first look at Rose. Rodney's attempts at description of her had been well meaning; but what he had prepared his sister for, unconsciously of course, in his emphasis on one or two phases of their first acquaintance, had been a sort of slatternly Amazon. But the effect of this was, really, very happy; because when a perfectly presentably clad, well-bred, admirably poised young girl came into the room and greeted her neither shyly nor eagerly, nor with ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... it would be for you to conceive, even if I could describe, the careless desolation which pervaded the whole place; the shaggy unkempt grounds we passed through to approach the house; the ruinous, rackrent, tumble-down house itself, the untidy, slatternly all but beggarly appearance of the mistress of the mansion herself. The smallest Yankee farmer has a tidier estate, a tidier house, and a tidier wife than this member of the proud southern chivalry, who, however, inasmuch as he has slaves, is undoubtedly a much greater personage in his own ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... the events mentioned in the last chapter, the landlady of the Blue Lion, the little slatternly village inn where Mr. Hart and his granddaughter had their quarters, was somewhat disappointed, somewhat puzzled, and certainly possessed by the demon of curiosity when Hart told her that he and his granddaughter intended to take ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... visits was to my brother's chief. He was a master of foxhounds and hunted the country. And I well remember my astonishment, when the door of this gentleman's residence was opened to me by an extremely dirty and slatternly bare-footed and bare-legged girl. I found him to be a very friendly and hospitable good fellow, and his wife and her sister very pleasant women. I found too that my brother stood high in his good graces by virtue of simply having taken the whole work and ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... came out of his house and asked me if I would come and look at his child who was frightfully ill—his wife in despair. Without thinking of my little ones at home, I went into the house, where I found, in a dirty, smelly room, a slatternly woman holding in her arms a child, about two years old, who, I thought, was dead—such a ghastly colour—eyes turned up; however, the poor little thing moaned and moved and the woman was shaken with sobs—the father and two older children standing there, not knowing what to do. They told me the ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... shift to afford better quarters, perhaps, but it was to my original lodging in Bloomsbury that I drove from Waterloo. Some few belongings of mine were there, and I entertained a friendly sort of feeling for my good-hearted but slatternly landlady, and for poor, overworked Bessie, with her broad, generally smutty face, and lingering remains of a Dorset accent. The part of London with which I was familiar had resumed its normal aspect now, and people were going about their ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... about her business. As usual, her business was important and imperative; nothing was lightened for her this last day. She drove about from place to place in the hot, slatternly city, putting more than her usual vigour and directness into all she did. It seemed to her that the sunlight burning on the tiles, pouring through the crowded streets, had more than ever a vivid note; and so much ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... eager speculation, as one who pores over the high-sounding announcements in the agony column of the daily paper, and finds nothing but advertisement and triviality. He walked to the window, and stared out at the languid morning life of his quarter; the maids in slatternly print-dresses washing door-steps, the fishmonger and the butcher on their rounds, and the tradesmen standing at the doors of their small shops, drooping for lack of trade and excitement. In the distance a blue haze ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... in, with heart-sickness and chagrin at hopes or prophecies deferred; and night, and next morning, and still the general came not. So, much weeping at that vexing disappointment, after so many pains to please, Mrs. Tracy put aside her numerous aids and appliances, and lay slatternly a-bed, to nurse a head-ache until noon; and all had well nigh forgotten the probable arrival, when, to every body's dismay, a dusty chaise and four suddenly rattled up the terrace, and stopped at our identical ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the little kitchen leaning her elbows on the table. She was a tall, thin, sallow girl, aged twenty-three, by nature slatternly and careless but trained by Anna into superficial neatness. Her drab striped cotton dress and gray black checked apron increased the length and sadness of her melancholy figure. "Oh, Lord!" groaned Miss Mathilda to herself ...
— Three Lives - Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena • Gertrude Stein
... and a slatternly-looking woman of sinister aspect appeared at the threshold. Florence took no particular notice of her appearance, but asked, hurriedly, "How ...
— Ben's Nugget - A Boy's Search For Fortune • Horatio, Jr. Alger
... was about a couple of miles from Kelly's Court, and it was about half-past four when Lord Ballindine got there. He knocked at the door, which was wide open, though it was yet only the last day of March, and was told by a remarkably slatternly maid-servant, that her master was "jist afther dinner;" that he was stepped out, but was about the place, and could be "fetched in at oncet;"—and would his honour walk in? And so Lord Ballindine ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... Socrates asked a little boy, whether the same man could remember and not know the same thing, and the boy said No, because he was frightened, and could not see what was coming, and then Socrates made fun of poor me. The truth is, O slatternly Socrates, that when you ask questions about any assertion of mine, and the person asked is found tripping, if he has answered as I should have answered, then I am refuted, but if he answers something else, then he is refuted and not I. For do you really suppose that any one would ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... appearance, the hacienda has an owner; and with all their indolence, the lounging leperoa outside, and slatternly wenches within, have a master. He is not often at home, but when he is they address him as "Don Faustino." Servants ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... dog, which were not satisfactory and they made war on him in concert. This would have interested the citizens but it was too many on one to amount to anything as a fight, and so they commanded the peace and the foreign dog coiled his tail and took sanctuary under the wagon. Slatternly negro girls and women slouched along with pails deftly balanced on their heads, and joined the group and stared. Little half dressed white boys, and little negro boys with nothing whatever on but tow-linen shirts with a fine southern exposure, came from various ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... performing the morning duties of her household may wear a plain loose dress, made high in the neck, and with long sleeves fastened at the wrist. It must not look slatternly, and may be exceedingly ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... she could not understand what a comfort it was to have confided her trouble. Marcia went up to the tavern with almost a smile on her face, though her heart began to beat wildly as a slatternly girl led her into a big room at ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... and he hardly restrained a gasp, in which admiration was mingled with amazement. The ordinary observer would have seen only a pretty girl, of the fluffy blond type, smartly tailored in blue serge, with the skirt decorously slit. But Zeke saw a vision from another world than that of the slatternly mountain women, whose toil left them neither opportunity nor ambition for nicety in dress, which, indeed, was finally prohibited by ignorance as well as poverty. This girl stood out in startling relief, marvelous revelation ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... all that was homelike and comfortable passed from our little house. For three days after the funeral the neglected clothes still hung on the line in the back yard, but on the fourth morning a slatternly girl, with red hair and arms, came from the grocery store at the corner, and gathered them in. My little sister was put to nurse with Mrs. Cudlip next door, and when, at the end of the week, President went off to work somewhere ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... activities of the town centered chiefly about its tramway terminus, its smudgy station, its three or four moving-picture theatres, and its fetid pubs. On the pavements, in the roadways and at every crossing, corduroyed men yawned and spat, and slatternly women, most of them with whimpering infants in their arms, talked of shop or household cares and the frailties of their neighbors. Some, more alive to the big events of a clashing world, repeated the meagre news of the ha'penny press and dwelt with prideful fervor on the latest bit of heroism ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... style. Master Jeffreys whipped out his blade and ran, and Morgan went with him stride for stride. But the mob of ruffians disappeared as quickly as it had come forth; the cutpurse had been rescued, and the plunder he desired snatched by a slatternly wench. ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... very narrow, dirty street. I do not know where it is. A slatternly woman advanced from an ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... yards. They are let out in flats, and are crowded to overflowing with a dense population of lodgers. Peeps into their interiors reveal dirty, poorly furnished rooms, and large families, pigging squalidly together at meal times, while unkempt men and slatternly women lean from open windows, and scold in French, or chatter with crowds of ragged and bare-legged children, playing ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 481, March 21, 1885 • Various
... to the bed, and gave Mr. Robson a good shaking. The landlady, a slatternly sailor's wife, now entered with a light. Only a few minutes before, she had managed to get Tom undressed, ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... were part of the human machines out of which wealth was being ground. They went to the beer-shops at night in their dirty clothes, smelling of grease and dye, drank beer, played a few games, and harangued each other, and went home maudlin or stupefied. Perhaps it was more comfortable than the slatternly wives and crying children. Did it need to be so? If you gave the workingman a helping hand, did he turn straightway ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... entrance stands the civic museum, entrusted, just now, to the care of a quite remarkably ignorant and slatternly woman. It contains two rooms, whose exhibits are smothered in dust and cobwebs; as neglected, in short, as her own brats that sprawl about its floor. I enquired whether she possessed no catalogue to show where the objects, bearing ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... stood was small and cheerless; but it was all they could afford. Bridget frankly hated the ugliness and bareness of it; hated the dingy hotel, and the slatternly servants, hated the boredom of the long waiting for news to which apparently she was to be committed, if she stayed on with Nelly. She clearly saw that public opinion would expect her to stay on. And indeed ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... waited upon by a slatternly girl and the breakfast she brought to me was so bad (after Mary's cooking) that I could only make a pretense of eating it, but I kept my seat, absorbed by the forms coming and going, almost within the reach of my hand. Among the first to pace slowly ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... throughout the conversation. Undoubtedly she was a busy woman. "Up at half-past five," "to bed the last thing at night," "workin' fit ter drop," thirteen years of it, and for reward, grey hairs, frowzy clothes, stooped shoulders, slatternly figure, unending toil in a foul and noisome coffee-house that faced on an alley ten feet between the walls, and a waterside environment that was ugly and sickening, to ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... suddenly very small and very, very helpless—she was utterly spent. But there was something in her wide gray eyes—a dignity and a command—that completely dominated the shrewish wife of the hump- shouldered tailor, something that made the slatternly creature back out of the room, for Felicia Day, with her hand on the battered iron railing of the bed, had said ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... will of his prospective patroness. Cassandra had been taken away from Cornelia—she could not learn so much as whether the woman had been scourged to death for arranging the interview with Drusus, or no. Two ill-favoured slatternly Gallic maids, the scourings of the Puteoli slave-market, had been forced upon Cornelia as her attendants—creatures who stood in abject fear of the whip of Phaon, and who obeyed his mandates to the letter. Cornelia was never out of sight of some person whom she knew was devoted to Lentulus, ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... musicians were playing to that crowd of negroes and Arabs and Egyptians for a night's lodging and the price of a meal. There were four of them, and, so far as I could see, all four were Greeks. Two were evidently man and wife. They were both old, both slatternly and almost in rags; the man a thin, sallow-faced fellow, with grey hair and a black moustache; the woman fat, coarse of face, unwieldy of body. Of the other two, one it seemed must be their daughter, a girl of seventeen, not good-looking really, but dressed ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... saw in the window. There were barrels of oysters, hecatombs of lobsters, a few tremendous-looking crabs, and a tub full of pickled salmon; not, however, being aware of any connection between shell-fish and iniquity, he entered, and modestly asked a slatternly woman, who was picking oysters out of a great watery reservoir, whether he could have a ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... Sixteenth Street or Twenty-sixth. Always the same rows of red-brick or brownstone houses, all alike, the monotony broken only by infrequent warehouses or loft-buildings; always the same doubtful mounting of stone steps, the same searching for a bell, the same waiting, the same slatternly, suspicious landlady, the same evil hallway with a brown hat-rack, a steel-engraving with one corner stained with yellow, a carpet worn through to the flooring in a large oval hole just in front of the stairs, a smell of cabbage, a lack of ventilation. Always ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... Vive la France!" They waved flags—not the tri-colour, but flags which had been given them in Switzerland. They clung together dazed, women with slatternly dresses, children with peaked faces, men unhappy and unshaven. A woman caught sight of my uniform. "Vive l'Angleterre," she cried, and they all came stumbling forward to embrace me. It was horrible. They creaked like automatons. They gestured and mouthed, but the soul had ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... maternal to Peter; but to-night she was more so than usual. Looking at her as she stood in her loose, slatternly neglige, beneath the extravagantly blazing chandelier, the red bundle cuddling a round black head into her neck, her grey eyes smiling at him, lit with love and laughter and a pity that lay deeper than both, Peter was caught into her atmosphere of debonair and tranquil restfulness, ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... dull-eyed slatternly woman who had closed the door, and then at the boy, who still crouched close up under the window, whimpering like a whipped dog, but keenly watching all that was going on with his sharp restless dark eyes; then, making a determined attempt to be braver than ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... opened by a slatternly servant, who looked at him inquiringly, and not without curiosity. It must be remembered that Dick was well dressed, and that nothing in his appearance bespoke his occupation. Being naturally a good-looking boy, he might readily be mistaken ...
— Ragged Dick - Or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks • Horatio Alger
... was carefully done, that there was a knotted ribbon around her throat. It now occurred to him that she had always been fully dressed. He did not know—and probably never would unless she told him—that it was very easy (and comfortable for a woman) to fall into slatternly ways in this latitude. So long as she could remember, her father had never permitted her to sit at the table unless she came fully dressed. Later, she understood his reasons; and it had now ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... with all the natural energy of her disposition, which was so much exerted upon her culinary cares, that her two maids, on their return to the house, escaped the bitter reprimand which she had been previously conning over, in reward for their alleged slatternly negligence. Nay, so far did she carry her complaisance, that when Tyrrel crossed the kitchen to recover his saddle-bags, she formally rebuked Eppie for an idle taupie, for not carrying the gentleman's things to ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... about the creaking, straining tub to avoid the sun's piercing rays and the heat which, drifting back from the hot stack forward, enveloped the entire craft. There were but few passengers, some half dozen men and two slatternly attired women. Whither they were bound, he knew not, nor cared; and, though they saluted him courteously, he studiously avoided being drawn into their conversations. The emotional appeal of the great river and its forest-lined banks did not at first affect him. Yet he sought forgetfulness ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... breathing and standing place which even the smallest requires; such grudging of the needful solitude and separateness, alas! often to those that we love the best. It seems highly probable that among all their absurd and melancholy recollections of this wasteful and slatternly earth, the denizens of the Kingdom of Heaven will look back with most astonishment and grief on the fact of having lived, before regeneration, without a ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... bathing, caring for your hair, nails, teeth, and clothing. Wear plain clothes if need be, but DON'T wear soiled or ragged ones. And don't ever put a pin where a hook or button ought to be. No man can continue to love a woman who is slatternly. ...
— Happiness and Marriage • Elizabeth (Jones) Towne
... left the house, which at first she kept neat and pretty, and then let fall into slatternly neglect. She ceased to care for her dress or the child's; the time came when it seemed as if she could scarcely move in the mystery that beset her life, and she yielded to a deadly lethargy which paralyzed all her faculties ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... with the singular story which she had so briefly yet powerfully suggested. That she was a lady masquerading in rough clothing was evident even before she spoke, and the picture she made, sitting in the midst of that throng of rough men and slatternly women, had profoundly stirred his imagination. He longed to know more of her history, and it was the hope of still further serving her which led him to ride up ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... birds, and Andrew gave her the benefit of his life's experience in the science. They travelled about with an aviary. And while Andrew, now unreproached, frowned, pencil in hand and notebook by his side, over the strategics of the Franco-Prussian War, Elodie, always in her slatternly wrapper, spent enraptured hours in putting her feathered troupe through their pretty tricks or in playing with them foolishly as one plays with ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... stow a large figure like mine away into trowsers. I felt as if my legs were in the stocks, and kicked them off in disdain—simply remarking—'what fools men are!' So, you don't like my short petticoats? and I hate your long ones. First, because they are slatternly and inconvenient; secondly, because they make your stockings dirty; and thirdly, because they give you the idea that they are intended to conceal crooked legs. So don't say one ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... jabbering Chinamen and "dagoes," of miners off shift, drawn hither by curiosity, and of gamblers of all grades from the professional expert to the "tin-horn," Houston found his way around the corner of the building, down into an alley, dark, dismal and reeking with filth. Here were groups of slatternly, unkempt women, some of whom stared at him with brazen faces, while others slunk away, not quite lost ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... I am aware that you English are slatternly, ignorant, and extravagant managers," he continued pleasantly, "but my excellent friend and neighbour, Frau Wurm, has promised to take you ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... timidly and went in. A slatternly woman was giving supper to a half dozen children who were making a great deal of noise over it. The hurly-burly confused Matilda, and confused the ...
— Opportunities • Susan Warner
... Round the fire, slatternly and dirty, with hair uncombed, dress disordered, shoes down at heel, lolling, lounging, stooping in various attitudes, were some half-dozen women, Alice being nearest the fire on one side. Most of ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... and say:—The worthy Socrates asked a little boy, whether the same man could remember and not know the same thing, and the boy said No, because he was frightened, and could not see what was coming, and then Socrates made fun of poor me. The truth is, O slatternly Socrates, that when you ask questions about any assertion of mine, and the person asked is found tripping, if he has answered as I should have answered, then I am refuted, but if he answers something ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... sharp, and final, his lips stamping the enunciation of each word like the die of a machine. His wife sighed and remained silent. She was a large, stout woman, always dressed slatternly and always tired from the burdens of her flesh, her work, and ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... narrow, untidy street, strewn with the refuse from the market waggons and trucks which blocked the way, making all but pedestrian traffic an impossibility—at the piles of empty baskets in the gutter, and the slatternly crowd of loiterers. Then she looked up at me with a ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... would come into the house to dance and sing until the morning, and leave on the hearth stone a piece of money as a reward behind them. But should the house be dirty, never would the Fairies enter it to hold their nightly revels, unless, forsooth, they came to punish the slatternly servant. Such was the popular opinion, and it must have acted as an incentive to order and cleanliness. These ideas ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... square shoulders and a small head, pushing about in a crowd, he shouts and works his arms, he seems to be doing a great deal, in reality he is doing nothing; so Mr Meredith appears to me, and yet I can only think of him as an artist; his habit is not slatternly, like those of such literary hodmen as Mr David Christie Murray, Mr Besant, Mr Buchanan. There is no trace of the crowd about him. I do not question his right of place, I am out of sympathy with him, that ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... it was useless to argue. He perceived, beneath the slatternly use of words, the man, buttoned up in them, just as his body was buttoned up in a shoddy suit,—and he wondered more than ever that such a man should know the Elliots. He looked at the face, which was frank, proud, and beautiful, if truth ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... very plain and shabby little house, in a contiguous range of others like it, with no prospect but that of an ugly village-street, and certainly nothing to gratify his craving for a tasteful environment, inside or out. A slatternly maid-servant opened the door for us, and he himself stood in the entry, a beautiful and venerable old man, buttoned to the chin in a black dress-coat, tall and slender, with a countenance quietly alive all over, and the gentlest and most naturally courteous manner. He ushered ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... care to go without you. You wouldn't have her like one of those slatternly women you see standing at the corners, with their fists in their sides and their elbows sticking out, ready to talk to anybody that ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... There is no country in the world where the work of multiplying is carried on so prosperously as in my native island. Mr. Tim had married the girls' waiting-maid, who had been a kind friend of mine in the early times; and I had to go salute poor Molly next day, and found her a slatternly wench in a mud hut, surrounded by a brood of children almost as ragged as those of my friend ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... one, not military, wearing a slatternly sort of uniform but playing well enough as they came up through the thickening dusk, marching close to the ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... bye, I think it must have been her mother that I saw that morning when little Felix dragged me to a cigar-shop in quest of an ornamental crab-a handsome, slatternly hag sort of woman, who might have been ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... first time in several months, she wore a tight-fitting dress, and her father, unconscious of her crimes, good-naturedly expressed his joy at seeing her 'once more dressed like a Christian lady, and not in the loose and slatternly robes she had so long persisted ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... Seatown, in these latter days, was a place of bad drainage, bad drinking, bad living and bad dying. The men who haunted its dirty, narrow little streets were loafers and idlers and castaways. The women were, most of them, no better than they should be, and the children were the most slatternly and ill-bred in the whole of Glebeshire. Small credit to the Canons and the Town Councillors and the prosperous farmers that it was so, but in their defence it might be urged that it needed a very valiant Canon and the most fearless of Town Councillors to disturb that little ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... matters which, according to her, had been settled generations ago by "the Lord and natur'," Marcella certainly was in no mood to contradict her. She walked through the village on her return scanning everything about her—the slatternly girls plaiting on the doorsteps, the children in the lane, the loungers round the various "publics," the labourers, old and young, who touched their caps to her—with a moody and ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... village had gone to swell the ranks of the rioters; another half—slatternly women and unkempt children—swarmed in the single street and gazed upward at the heights. Every ledge about the threatened buildings was black with men, men furious with hate and mad with liquor, men needing only determined and resolute leaders to go in and finish ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... most effective. Unnoticed by either the Irishman or Waymark, the door had opened behind them, and there had appeared a little red-faced woman, in slatternly dress. It was Mrs. Tootle. She had overheard almost the whole of O'Gree's vivid comment upon his graphic illustration, in silence, until at length she could hold her peace no longer, and gave utterance to the teacher's name in a voice which trembled with rage ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... thirty-two in all, and rough-looking specimens of humanity they indeed appeared. We had two stewardesses, who also waited at table, and made themselves generally useful. These were slatternly in appearance, but were very attentive and kind-hearted. There were seven firemen, two working at the same time for four hours at a stretch, thus each couple did duty twice in the twenty-four hours; which means eight hours in the ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... former self. The prison food was not inviting; only when pangs of hunger forced her could she swallow the unappetizing half-cooked meats and sour bread which were brought to her on a tin plate by a slatternly negress. ...
— The Lost Despatch • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... the necessary breathing and standing place which even the smallest requires; such grudging of the needful solitude and separateness, alas! often to those that we love the best. It seems highly probable that among all their absurd and melancholy recollections of this wasteful and slatternly earth, the denizens of the Kingdom of Heaven will look back with most astonishment and grief on the fact of having lived, before ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... stairs, which groaned and creaked beneath their weight, and found Mother Guttersnipe lying on the bed in the corner. The elfish black-haired child was playing cards with a slatternly-looking girl at a deal table by the faint light of a ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... paid her for the straw we thought this was going a little too far, and F——, who had a fine taste for sarcasm, waved his coffee-cup eloquently in the direction of the two slatternly girls that were peddling the coffee to the soldiers through the window, and said "What? With all these beautiful daughters," and then continued with a graphic description ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry
... fortune brought to his door at a time when the forlornness of his changed position was continually accentuated by the untidy irregularity of his life and surroundings. He was only able to afford to engage the shiftless services of a slatternly negro girl, rendered insubordinate by her newly acquired freedom, and he had begun to feel that he should never again find himself encompassed by the decorous ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... sat there the slatternly woman slowly opened the door and stuck her head in. She grinned ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... at first inclined to treat the matter lightly, suspecting common drunkenness; however, he came, and after looking at the man's face, changed his tone, quickly enough. The early bird, who had picked up this fine worm, was sent off for a doctor, and the policeman rang and knocked at the door till a slatternly servant girl came down looking more than half asleep. The constable pointed out the contents of the area to the maid, who screamed loudly enough to wake up the street, but she knew nothing of the man; had never seen him at the house, and so forth. Meanwhile, ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... took the one thick slice she offered, slipped the handle of the tin of tea on his arm, and with the big basin, tied up in a blue handkerchief, in his other hand, marched off in the direction of the tin works, while slatternly Mrs. Fowley went back into ...
— Dick Lionheart • Mary Rowles Jarvis
... know what a Hircus Oepagrus is, Tommy? Well, it is a big name for him, isn't it? And if you should ask that somewhat slatternly female, who appears to employ tubs for the advantage of others rather than herself, what the animal is, she would tell you it is a goat. See what a hardy, sturdy little creature he is; and how he lifts up his startled head, as the cars come thundering along, and bounds ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... Clearly, he was a superfluous person in Stillwater. A mortar-splashed hod-carrier, who had seated himself on a pile of brick and was eating his noonday rations from a tin can just brought to him by a slatternly girl, gave Richard a spasm of envy. Here was a man who had found his place, and was establishing—what Richard did not seem able to establish in his own case—a right ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... mother's death all that was homelike and comfortable passed from our little house. For three days after the funeral the neglected clothes still hung on the line in the back yard, but on the fourth morning a slatternly girl, with red hair and arms, came from the grocery store at the corner, and gathered them in. My little sister was put to nurse with Mrs. Cudlip next door, and when, at the end of the week, President went off to work somewhere in a mining town in West Virginia, my father and I were ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... before. As she looked about her, her mother stopped laughing and watched her face with a painful attention. Sylvia looked at the tall, dingy houses, the frowzy little shops, the swarms of dirty-nosed children, shrill-voiced, with matted hair, running and whooping in the street, at the slatternly women yelling unobeyed orders to them out of half-glimpsed, cheerless interiors, smelling of cabbage and dishwater. It was Sylvia's first sight of the life of city poor, and upon her face of disgust and revulsion her mother bent a stern ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... a nursery without a nurse, too, so that partly accounted for it. Meg, the eldest, was only sixteen, and could not be expected to be much of a disciplinarian, and the slatternly but good-natured girl, who was supposed to combine the duties of nursery-maid and housemaid, had so much to do in her second capacity that the first suffered considerably. She used to lay the nursery meals when none of the little girls could be found to help her, and bundle on the clothes of the ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... was a strip of the identical silver ribbon which had encircled Pepin's throat—I called the dog Pepin—on the night I rescued him from the streets. Without hesitation I entered the shop and questioned a slatternly woman who sat behind the counter munching gruyere cheese and garlic. "Will you tell me, madame," said I with my most agreeable air, "whether you recollect having sold any of that tinsel ribbon lately, and to whom?" She was not likely to have much custom, ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... said the slatternly landlady to Madame Laurent and Michel one day, "I no see how she live! Eat? Nothin', nothin', almos', and las' night when it was so cold and foggy, eh? I hav' to mek him build ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... houses slatternly or idle would I have given thee, distaff, seeing that thou art a countryman of mine. For that is thy native city which Archias out of Ephyre founded, long ago, the very marrow of the isle of the three ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... Florrie, moving backwards, had now got nearly to the scullery door with her wringing and splashing and wiping; and she had dirtied even her face. As Hilda absently looked at her, she thought somehow of Mr. Cannon's white wristbands. She saw the washing and the ironing of those wristbands, and a slatternly woman or two sighing and grumbling amid wreaths of steam, and a background of cinders and suds and sloppiness.... All that, so that the grand creature might have a rim of pure white to his coat-sleeves for a day! It was inevitable. But the grand creature ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... grace and variety is just because these fine qualities have not ruled them. The higher graces of civilization halt among us; dainty and finished ways of living give place to common ways, while vulgar tastes, slatternly habits, clouds and despondency reign in the house. Little children under five years of age die in needless thousands because of the dull, unimaginative women on whom they depend. Such women have been satisfied with just getting along, instead of packing everything they do with brains, ...
— Why go to College? an Address • Alice Freeman Palmer
... clothiers and one pawnshop. It was just such a place as one would expect to meet the lowest types of humanity. Dirty children were playing in the half-deserted place, their blue lips and pinched faces speaking eloquently of their poverty. Italian hand-organ grinders were sitting on their door-steps, and slatternly women were leaning from their windows, exchanging gossip in loud, shrill tones. Occasionally a man would walk hurriedly up the narrow walk, carrying a suspicious bundle, and eyeing nervously every person he might meet, dodging suddenly into some one ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... man knelt down beside it, and patted it on its neck, and called on it by its name, as if unwilling to believe that it was gone. And while the Arabs laughed at him for doing so—for none seemed to pity him—a slatternly girl of sixteen or seventeen came scudding down the arcade, and pushed her way through the crowd until she stood where the dead ass lay with the man kneeling beside it. Then she fell on the man with bitter reproaches. "Allah blot out your name, you thief!" she ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... hurried away to the shabby little street where what he called "home" was. Tommy's home was a very homeless-looking sort of place. It was the smallest, dingiest, most slatternly house on a street noted for its dingy and slatternly houses. It was occupied by a slatternly mother and a drunken father, as well as by Tommy; and neither the father nor the mother took much notice of Tommy except to scold ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... husband. I'll tell you, that was a shocker. I'm not about to marry anybody. She was as tall as I was, which isn't so very much for a man, skinny to the point of emaciation, wearing a "borrowed" dress that didn't fit, and had that unmistakable slatternly look that you associate with white trash. On top of that, she was vain enough about her bucktoothed and pointed-nose features to keep her glasses in her purse, and as a result she went around peering at you from a distance of eight inches ...
— The Right Time • Walter Bupp
... not with complacency that the landlord saw his house given over to the destructive caprices of a drunken and uncontrollable mob. He had no means of freeing himself of his guests. When his slatternly wife had complained: "Them miners an' loggers jest louzes up a body's house," he had wagged his head dejectedly and spread his great black-nailed hands. "If that's ther wu'st thing they does hit'll be a plum God's blessin'," he replied. "Ther law p'intedly fo'ces a tavern-keeper ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... There were magnificent vegetables of all sorts in it, and if the fruits were meagre that was the fault of the rainy summer, perhaps. The market- place was very dirty, and so was the narrow street leading down from it to the Rhine, which ran swift as a mountain torrent along a slatternly quay. A bridge of boats crossing the stream shook in the rapid current, and a long procession of market carts passed slowly over, while a cluster of scows waited in picturesque patience for the draw ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the road which led toward Ashfield. The frosted pools crackled under the wheels of the old chaise; the heaving horse wheezed as the stern parson gave his loins a thwack with the slackened reins and urged him down the turnpike which led away through the ill-kept fields, from the rambling, slatternly town. Stone walls that had borne the upheaval of twenty winters reeled beside the way. Broad scars of ochreous earth, from which the turnpike-menders had dug material to patch the wheel-track, showed ooze of yellow mud with honeycombs of ice rimming their edges, and supporting a thin film ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... regrettable moment of absent-mindedness she bore to the Professor a son, whom she brings up on Spartan principles, and little else. Her home is a centre of slatternly discomfort. She rises early, but, having locked herself into her study, for the better composition of a discourse on "The Sacred Right of Revolt for Women," she forgets that both the tea and the coffee are locked in with her, and learns subsequently ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 29, 1890 • Various
... famine to-morrow. There is deep satisfaction in cooperating with such families to conquer difficulties. There is a deeper satisfaction, however, in turning a sham home into a real one; in teaching the slatternly, irresponsible mother the pleasure of a cleanly, well-ordered home; in helping a man who has lost his sense of responsibility toward wife and children to regain it. Even at the risk of drawing a too gloomy picture, I dwell in ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... Aurora. Slatternly slavey frock, soiled white apron, cap awry, large slippers tied on with string. (During Act 3: changes to grotesque colored dress: orange blossoms ...
— Oh! Susannah! - A Farcical Comedy in Three Acts • Mark Ambient
... in no ordinary degree. Therefore, on the very afternoon when trouble was brewing against Mosk in the Beorminster Police Office, the bishop of the See took his way to The Derby Winner. The sight of Dr Pendle in the narrow streets of the old town fluttered the slatternly dwellers therein not a little, and the majority of the women whisked indoors in mortal terror, lest they should be reproved ex cathedra for their untidy looks and unswept doorsteps. It was like the descent of an Olympian god, and awestruck mortals ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... Mr. Collings's proposals for the reform of the position of the agricultural labourers. When anybody makes a quotation against Mr. Gladstone, the latter gentleman has a most awkward habit of asking for the date, the authority, and such like posers to men of slatternly memory, and doubtful accuracy. I have heard several of the wonderful Old Man's private secretaries declare that they had never been able to get over the dread with which this uncanny power of remembering everything inspired them—it ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... They are let out in flats, and are crowded to overflowing with a dense population of lodgers. Peeps into their interiors reveal dirty, poorly furnished rooms, and large families, pigging squalidly together at meal times, while unkempt men and slatternly women lean from open windows, and scold in French, or chatter with crowds of ragged and bare-legged ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 481, March 21, 1885 • Various
... for you to conceive, even if I could describe, the careless desolation which pervaded the whole place; the shaggy unkempt grounds we passed through to approach the house; the ruinous, rackrent, tumble-down house itself, the untidy, slatternly all but beggarly appearance of the mistress of the mansion herself. The smallest Yankee farmer has a tidier estate, a tidier house, and a tidier wife than this member of the proud southern chivalry, who, however, inasmuch as he has slaves, is undoubtedly a much greater personage in his own estimation ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... "walking up and down" on a volume ([Greek text]). To such fellows it matters not that they make a book dirty and greasy, cutting the pages with their fingers, and holding the boards over the fire till they crack. All these slatternly practices, though they destroy a book as surely as the flames of Caesar's soldiers at Alexandria, seem fine manly acts to the grobians who use them. What says Jules Janin, who has written "Contre l'indifference des Philistins," "il ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... think they know best. There! Get downstairs, little bag o' bones.' With this, the undertaker's wife opened a side door, and pushed Oliver down a steep flight of stairs into a stone cell, damp and dark: forming the ante-room to the coal-cellar, and denominated 'kitchen'; wherein sat a slatternly girl, in shoes down at heel, and blue worsted stockings very much ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... containing a tumble down shack. A tall, gnarled man with long hair and beard stood before the door of the shack, a Winchester held in his hands in businesslike fashion. Behind him hovered a young woman, who must have been refined and beautiful once, but who now was slatternly, and two children. ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... the edge of the 'pike, with its gate-pole ready to be lowered by a rope, looking like any other toll place. But the woman was very brisk and Yankee-like, and different from the many slatternly persons who had before taken toll. She said her people came from "down East," but she herself was born in Ohio. She thought the old lady would like a cup of strong tea, and her dinner was just ready, and it did get lonesome eating by a body's self ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... returned to the post, Mrs. Forrest was fain to flatter herself that these frequent visits to her were impelled by an interest transcending the professional and rapidly becoming sentimental. It really did her good; gave her something to think about besides her woes; rescued her from the slatternly ways into which she was falling and restored a faded coquetry to her dress and mien; brightened her dreary eyes and lent color to her pallid cheek, and prompted her to surround herself with those domestic barricades against unhallowed ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... blow,—such a push as is the next thing to actual violence, and it sent her staggering from the sloppy bar at which their altercation took place against a bench by the wall, where she sat down pale and gasping, to the indignation of a slatternly woman nursing her child, and the concern of an honest coalheaver, who had a virago of ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... was sitting disconsolately in a corner. It was hard to say to what class of people the house belonged; poor people they were of course; and things looked as if they were simply living there because too poor to live anywhere else. A slatternly woman stared at the intruders; a dirty child crawled over the hearth. Daisy could not endure to touch anything, except with the soles of her shoes. So she stood upright in the middle of the floor; till ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... pottered about the yards, or pushed back their sunbonnets to stare vacantly at the advancing buggy. Dirty babies were tumbling about the cabins. There was a lean and listless yellow dog or two for every baby; and several slatternly black women were washing clothes on the shady sides of the houses. A general air of shiftlessness and squalor pervaded the settlement. There was no sign of joyous childhood or of ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... of land which seemed prepared for winter sowing were covered with stones. The farmhouse yard, into which they presently passed, was dirty and untidy. Segerson leaned down and knocked on the door with his whip. After a short delay, a slatternly-looking woman, with tousled fair hair, answered ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and repugnant to female delicacy and refinement, for a woman to ink the ends of her fingers in handling a pen; for a woman to be what was derisively called a "blue-stocking," or a literary woman. It was thought that nothing but pedantry, nothing but slatternly habits and neglected housekeeping, could come of it. But who would be willing to banish from the literary world to-day such names as Browning, Hemans, Stowe, and Gage? And if I were to fill out the catalogue of names, I might close my speech at the end of it, having tired you all ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... feeding the fire from a bundle of gorse that lay at one side of the hearth. She was a big, brawny, elderly woman with large bony hands, and a face that had hard and heavy features, which were dotted here and there with discolored warts. Her dress was slatternly and somewhat dirty. A soiled linen cap covered a mop of streaky hair, ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... delicacy, and also, of course, from the last words of the dying man. As to her being a person of refinement and well dressed, they are, as you perceive, handsomely mounted in solid gold, and it is inconceivable that anyone who wore such glasses could be slatternly in other respects. You will find that the clips are too wide for your nose, showing that the lady's nose was very broad at the base. This sort of nose is usually a short and coarse one, but there are a sufficient number ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... atmosphere of wholesomeness and comfort, he chose to spend the hours of the Sabbath during which the public-house was closed; and other hours. Small wonder, looking at the fine, capable figure of the woman, now bustling about with teapot and cups, he should esteem Mrs Brome personally above the slatternly ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... morning and dressed in the room without fire, shivering now as they drew on their stockings, frozen stiff. They had their morning coffee in a chilly room downstairs, where sometimes their slatternly landlady appeared, lugubriously voluble. This morning they ate alone, in silence, and none too happily. Even Annie's buoyant spirits seemed inadequate. A trace of bitterness was in ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... dark-eyed woman, well over thirty, somewhat inclined to be down-at-heel and slatternly, though not yet quite destitute of some small share of good looks; a woman solid of step and unattractive to the eye of youth; moreover, as they knew from recent experience, possessed ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... whipped out his blade and ran, and Morgan went with him stride for stride. But the mob of ruffians disappeared as quickly as it had come forth; the cutpurse had been rescued, and the plunder he desired snatched by a slatternly wench. ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... intervals, because, though he is not really a typical Don at all, he is exactly the sort of figure which would be selected as typical nowadays. The days of the absent-minded, unkempt, slatternly, spectacled, owlish Don are over, and one has instead a brisk professional man, fond of business and ordered knowledge, who is not in the least a man of the world, but a curious variety of it, a man of a small ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the left side is another door leading into Daniel Murray's workshop, and beside this door is a large dresser with crockery, &c. At the back beneath the window is a table near which KATE, the servant, a slatternly dressed girl of some thirty years of age or more, is seated. She is carefully examining some cakes of soda bread, and has a bucket beside her into which she throws the ...
— The Drone - A Play in Three Acts • Rutherford Mayne
... personal appearance. Allow plenty of time for bathing, caring for your hair, nails, teeth, and clothing. Wear plain clothes if need be, but DON'T wear soiled or ragged ones. And don't ever put a pin where a hook or button ought to be. No man can continue to love a woman who is slatternly. ...
— Happiness and Marriage • Elizabeth (Jones) Towne
... lads and lasses danced, not more than three at a time for lack of space, in jigs and reels and hornpipes. Above, on either side, there was a recess railed with iron, perhaps two feet wide and four long, which stood for orchestra and seats of honour. In the one balcony, five slatternly Irish lasses sat woven in a comely group. In the other was posted Orpheus, his body, which was convulsively in motion, forming an odd contrast to his somnolent, imperturbable Scots face. His brother, a dark man with a vehement, interested countenance, who made a ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... himself. As for his small income, and his still smaller domestic establishment, he looked at them both from the same satirically indifferent point of view. He called himself a pauper with a pedigree. He abandoned the entire direction of his household to the slatternly old woman who was his only servant, on the condition that she was never to venture near his books, with a duster in her hand, from one year's end to the other. His favorite poets were Horace and Pope; his chosen philosophers, Hobbes and Voltaire. He took his exercise and his fresh ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... was flanked by two royal palms quite a hundred feet in height. The large unkempt garden at the side looked like a jungle in the hills, but was rich in colour and perfume. The gates were open and they could see the slatternly negro servants moving languidly about the rooms on the ground floor, while two slept under the banana tree. A gallery traversed the second story, its pillars covered with dusty vines. All of the rooms of this story ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... any other deficiency. The laboring man marries; but he marries a woman who can add nothing to the comfort of his home; she supplies him with more mouths to feed, and she spoils that which is to be put into them; she becomes slatternly, feels her own incapacity, and, finding that she can do but little of her duty, soon leaves off trying to do it at all. As her family increases the discomforts of her home increase, and the end is frequently—drunkenness, violence, and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... and maternal to Peter; but to-night she was more so than usual. Looking at her as she stood in her loose, slatternly neglige, beneath the extravagantly blazing chandelier, the red bundle cuddling a round black head into her neck, her grey eyes smiling at him, lit with love and laughter and a pity that lay deeper than both, Peter was caught into her atmosphere ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... the principal food of the Kingfisher; but it also eats various kinds of insects, shrimps, and even small crabs. It rears its young in a hole, which is made in the banks of the stream it frequents. It is a slatternly bird, fouls its own nest and its peerless eggs. The nesting hole is bored rather slowly, and takes from one to two weeks to complete. Six or eight white glossy eggs are laid, sometimes on the bare soil, but often on the fish bones which, ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph, Volume 1, Number 2, February, 1897 • anonymous
... satisfactory and they made war on him in concert. This would have interested the citizens but it was too many on one to amount to anything as a fight, and so they commanded the peace and the foreign dog coiled his tail and took sanctuary under the wagon. Slatternly negro girls and women slouched along with pails deftly balanced on their heads, and joined the group and stared. Little half dressed white boys, and little negro boys with nothing whatever on but tow-linen shirts with a fine southern exposure, came from various directions and stood with their hands ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... are you?" demanded the amiable Filomena. "You just thank the stars you've got no children! If ever an honest woman were plagued with six good-for-nothing, sluttish, slatternly shrews of girls as me! Here's that Ankaret—I've told her ten times o'er to wash the tubs out, and get 'em ready for the pickling, and I come to see if they are done, and they've never been touched, and my ...
— Our Little Lady - Six Hundred Years Ago • Emily Sarah Holt
... home when they entered. A great slatternly girl, not so old as Bessy, but taller and stronger, was busy at the wash-tub, knocking about the furniture in a rough capable way, but altogether making so much noise that Margaret shrunk, out of sympathy with poor ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Arabs and Egyptians for a night's lodging and the price of a meal. There were four of them, and, so far as I could see, all four were Greeks. Two were evidently man and wife. They were both old, both slatternly and almost in rags; the man a thin, sallow-faced fellow, with grey hair and a black moustache; the woman fat, coarse of face, unwieldy of body. Of the other two, one it seemed must be their daughter, a girl of seventeen, not good-looking really, but dressed and turned out with a scrupulous ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... her first look at Rose. Rodney's attempts at description of her had been well meaning; but what he had prepared his sister for, unconsciously of course, in his emphasis on one or two phases of their first acquaintance, had been a sort of slatternly Amazon. But the effect of this was, really, very happy; because when a perfectly presentably clad, well-bred, admirably poised young girl came into the room and greeted her neither shyly nor eagerly, nor with any affectation ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... for, except some biscuits which he had asked two grudging curates to bring him, he had eaten nothing since breakfast-time. He sat down at an uncovered wooden table opposite two work-girls and a mechanic. A slatternly girl waited on him. ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... minute the upper half of the door was opened, and an oldish woman looked out. A dirty woman, with her hair all in fly-away order, and her dress very slatternly as well as soiled. ...
— What She Could • Susan Warner
... was about to knock at the door, when a collie dog flew from the barn behind, barking furiously, showing his teeth, and threatening to catch hold of her skirt. Much to her relief, he was called off by a slatternly, hard-featured woman, who, hearing the noise, came out of the house with a pail in her hand, and stood looking at her visitor in ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... boiled cabbage, bacon, eggs, a great chine from a wild boar, sausages, such as we eat nowadays, and flagons and jars of beer and wine, Along the board sat ranged in the order of the household the followers and retainers. Four or five slatternly women and girls served the others as they fed noisily at the table, moving here and there behind the men with wooden or pewter dishes of food, now and then laughing at the jests that passed or joining in the talk. ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle
... finding that he could leave the dock early, he made another effort. He stopped before one in a dingy row of small houses, uniformly depressing, in a street that ran into the Commercial Road, and rang the bell, which tinkled aggressively. A slatternly woman, with a bandage round her head and an air of drunken servility, responded to his inquiry for "Mrs. Crichton" by ushering him into a small back parlour, in which a pale girl in black sat with her head bent over a typewriter. She rose, ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... in the peace and love which flowed into the soul and the improved condition of society. In lowly homes where she visited, her presence was a benediction and an inspiration. Women careless in their household and slatternly in their dress grew more careful in the keeping of their homes and the arrangement of their attire. Women of the better class of their own race, coming among them awakened their self-respect. Prejudice and pride of race ...
— Trial and Triumph • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... palette do not always a picture make; mediocrity loves to mask itself behind artistic innovations. For the world at large impressionism spells improvisation—an easy-going, slatternly, down-at-the-heel process, facile as well as factitious. Albert Wolff must have thought these things when he sat for his portrait to Manet. His surprise was great when the artist demanded as many sittings as would have done the painstaking ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... heart to think of the contrast between them; to think that where nature had made so little difference, circumstances should have made so much, and that her mother, as handsome as Lady Bertram, and some years her junior, should have an appearance so much more worn and faded, so comfortless, so slatternly, so shabby. But Sunday made her a very creditable and tolerably cheerful-looking Mrs. Price, coming abroad with a fine family of children, feeling a little respite of her weekly cares, and only discomposed if she saw her boys ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... agitating the button and shaking the gates; and with no more profit of his undertaking than Hickey. After a minute or two of it he acknowledged defeat with an oath, and turned away to browbeat the straggling vanguard of belated wayfarers,—messenger-boys, slatternly drabs, hackmen, loafers, and one or two plain citizens conspicuously out of their reputable grooves,—who were drifting in at the entrance to line the lobby walls with blank, curious faces. Forerunners of that ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... knocking twice, a slatternly maid appeared and asked him to walk upstairs. Rupert followed her leisurely; he knew very well what sort of reception to expect, and was not surprised when she merely opened the drawing-room door, and left him to announce himself. "No ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... upon young Harry's conduct and idleness, as his friend the stern Colonel of the Twentieth Regiment. O blessed idleness! Divine lazy nymph! Reach me a novel as I lie in my dressing-gown at three o'clock in the afternoon; compound a sherry-cobbler for me, and bring me a cigar! Dear slatternly, smiling Enchantress! They may assail thee with bad names—swear thy character away, and call thee the Mother of Evil; but, for all that, thou art the best company ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... them—great event which was to take place so soon. Noll overheard one old fish-wife say, "We ben't slick 'nough for new housen; ther'll hev to be great scrubbin' an' scourin' that day, eh, Janet?" to her slatternly daughter-in-law; and the boy mentally prayed that this opinion would gain ground among all the fish-folk. If there was only some one to teach the children, and save them from the utter ignorance which was their ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... on the edge of the Taufusi swamp, was a small collection of huts, jumbled together in squalor and dirt, with pigs dozing in the ooze and slatternly women beating out siapo in the shade. It was a dunghill of out-islanders, Nieues, Uveans, Tongans, Tapatueans, banded together in a common poverty; landless people of other archipelagoes, despised of the Samoans, and paying tribute to the lord of the soil—a few ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... thing, and a sad thing, to remark in how many people there is too much resignation. It kills out energy. It is a weak, fretful, unhappy thing. People are reconciled, in a sad sort of way, to the fashion in which things go on. You have seen a poor, slatternly mother, in a way-side cottage, who has observed her little children playing in the road before it, in the way of passing carriages, angrily ordering the little things to come away from their dangerous and dirty play; yet, when the children disobey her, and remain where they ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... passer-by. We found that we were all right. We now proceeded stealthily along to the lane where Mother McCleary's whisky-shop was situated. I had no difficulty in recognising the old woman, as she had been well described to me. Her stout slatternly figure, her bleared eyes, her grog-blossomed nose,—anything but a beauty to look at. Her proceedings were not beautiful either. Going to the end of the counter where she was standing, ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... last words of the dying man. As to her being a person of refinement and well dressed, they are, as you perceive, handsomely mounted in solid gold, and it is inconceivable that anyone who wore such glasses could be slatternly in other respects. You will find that the clips are too wide for your nose, showing that the lady's nose was very broad at the base. This sort of nose is usually a short and coarse one, but there is a sufficient number of exceptions to prevent me from being dogmatic or from insisting upon this point ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to an appreciation of it. It impressed him agreeably that Alida should be trim and neat while about her work, and that all her actions were entirely free from the coarse, slovenly manner, the limp carriage, and slatternly aspect of the whole tribe which had come and gone during the past year. They had all been so much alike in possessing disagreeable traits that he felt that Alida was the only peculiar one among them. He never thought of ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... will find petty thieves, versatile rascals ripe for any mischief, and sweated factory workers; here sallow-faced anarchists boldly denounce the existing order of things to their fellows and scheme the millennium. Slatternly women quarrel at the doors, and horse-flesh is ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... too, understands the use of the "comforter," for should it roll in the dirty gutter she promptly returns it to its proper place, the baby's mouth. Untidy, slatternly girls, not over-clean, not over-dressed, and certainly not over-fed, we leave them to their play ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... clearing containing a tumble down shack. A tall, gnarled man with long hair and beard stood before the door of the shack, a Winchester held in his hands in businesslike fashion. Behind him hovered a young woman, who must have been refined and beautiful once, but who now was slatternly, and two children. ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... began to teem with rushing, half-naked clean children, one of the parents rose, either the mother, easy and slatternly, with her thick, dark hair loosely coiled and slipping over one ear, or the father, warm and comfortable, with ruffled black hair and shirt unbuttoned at ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... passengers his seat was his temporary home, and most of the passengers were slatternly housekeepers. But one seat looked clean and deceptively cool. In it were an obviously prosperous man and a black-haired, fine-skinned girl whose pumps rested on an immaculate ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... warm, pleasant evenings, the spacious, cheerful hall, with its tables and chairs, would be almost empty; but on nights like that on which this story opens, a dark, cold December night, the seats were apt to be well filled, mostly with slatternly, hard-featured women, and dull-faced children, who sat staring stolidly about, while the music and speaking went on; half stupefied by the warmth and tranquillity so foreign to ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... incident of his parochial life, when he had found a wretched shop-boy crouching by the water's edge, and trying to screw his courage up for the final plunge. It was a sordid little tragedy—an honest lad was caught in the toils of some slatternly Jezebel; she had made him steal for her, had spent his spoil, and then deserted him for his "pal"—his own familiar friend. Adrift on the world, beggared in character and fortune, and sore to the ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... had gone to swell the ranks of the rioters; another half—slatternly women and unkempt children—swarmed in the single street and gazed upward at the heights. Every ledge about the threatened buildings was black with men, men furious with hate and mad with liquor, men needing only determined ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... that a woman who broke her arm at the church door was a housewifely maiden who became a slatternly housewife after marriage. "There's no fear of Jane doing that," she replied; "she's as good as the guineas ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... to-day and a famine to-morrow. There is deep satisfaction in cooperating with such families to conquer difficulties. There is a deeper satisfaction, however, in turning a sham home into a real one; in teaching the slatternly, irresponsible mother the pleasure of a cleanly, well-ordered home; in helping a man who has lost his sense of responsibility toward wife and children to regain it. Even at the risk of drawing a too ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... itinerant musicians were playing to that crowd of negroes and Arabs and Egyptians for a night's lodging and the price of a meal. There were four of them, and, so far as I could see, all four were Greeks. Two were evidently man and wife. They were both old, both slatternly and almost in rags; the man a thin, sallow-faced fellow, with grey hair and a black moustache; the woman fat, coarse of face, unwieldy of body. Of the other two, one it seemed must be their daughter, a girl of seventeen, not good-looking really, but dressed and turned out with a scrupulous ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... was the landlady, and a famous cook. Kate Kebble, a slatternly girl of sixteen, helped her mother do the work and waited on the table. Chet Kebble, the landlord, was a silent old man, with billy-goat whiskers and one stray eye, which, being constructed of glass, usually assumed a slanting gaze and refused to follow the direction of its fellow. Chet ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... a big man with square shoulders and a small head, pushing about in a crowd, he shouts and works his arms, he seems to be doing a great deal, in reality he is doing nothing; so Mr Meredith appears to me, and yet I can only think of him as an artist; his habit is not slatternly, like those of such literary hodmen as Mr David Christie Murray, Mr Besant, Mr Buchanan. There is no trace of the crowd about him. I do not question his right of place, I am out of sympathy with him, that is all; and I regret that ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... confab and badger about the old days. She had casually learned that Landy had had to work as a boy, as a youth, and as a young man, that he had accumulated enough so that he could now enjoy the play-days once denied him. Yes, she would change her notes to say: "uncouth verbiage and slatternly dress are often assets in gaining information and are no hindrance in granting ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... thoughts were passing in his mind, a drowsy, slatternly charwoman, in an old black straw bonnet and grey bed-gown, opened one of the shutters, and throwing up the sash of the window by where Mr. Sponge sat, disclosed the contents of the apartment. The ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... a blow,—such a push as is the next thing to actual violence, and it sent her staggering from the sloppy bar at which their altercation took place against a bench by the wall, where she sat down pale and gasping, to the indignation of a slatternly woman nursing her child, and the concern of an honest coalheaver, who had a virago of ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... winter sowing were covered with stones. The farmhouse yard, into which they presently passed, was dirty and untidy. Segerson leaned down and knocked on the door with his whip. After a short delay, a slatternly-looking woman, with tousled ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... hither by curiosity, and of gamblers of all grades from the professional expert to the "tin-horn," Houston found his way around the corner of the building, down into an alley, dark, dismal and reeking with filth. Here were groups of slatternly, unkempt women, some of whom stared at him with brazen faces, while others slunk away, not quite lost ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... best—but there are worse—and it's Kavanagh's." I found it easily enough, and was ushered by a civil man, who emerged from the shop which occupies part of it, into a sort of reading-room with a green table. A rather slatternly but very active girl soon converted this into a neat breakfast-table, and gave me an excellent breakfast. The landlord found me a good car, and off I set for the residence of Father Maher, the curate of whom I had heard as one of the most fiery and intractable of the National League ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... above the dark and narrow street. Flakes of plaster had fallen from their blank walls, the archways that pierced them were foul and strewn with refuse, and a sour smell of decay and garbage tainted the stagnant air. Here and there a grossly fat, slatternly woman leaned upon the rails of an outside balcony; negroes, Chinamen, and half-breeds passed along the broken pavements; and the dirty, open-fronted wine-shops, where swarms of flies hovered about the tables, were filled with loungers ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... blankly. She had the feeling that her father was so remote from her that she could hardly see him. She opened her lips to speak, but at that moment the maid—the latest acquisition from the employment agency, a slatternly Irish girl—went through the dining-room on her way to answer the door-bell, and her father's amused comment cut her short. "Lydia, you'll have your guests thinking they're at a lunch counter if you let that girl go on wearing that ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... A young woman, somewhat slatternly in herself and her belongings, and dragged by care and poverty already into wrinkles. She generally began her sentences with, "Well, not to deceive you." Thus: "Is Mr. Plornish at home?" "Well, sir, not to deceive you, he's gone to look for a job." "Well, not ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... many artificial mole-hills, that it is full as unnatural as if it was drawn with a rule and compasses. Nothing is done to the house; there are not even chairs in the great apartment. My Lord Anson is more slatternly than the Churchills, and does not even finish children. I am going to write to Lord Beauchamp, that I shall be at Oxford on the 15th, where I depend upon meeting you. I design to see Blenheim, and Rousham, (is not that the name of Dormer's?) and Althorp, and Drayton, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... strong fortress till its threatful mass had sunk to an abject heap. Thus all devouring Death—nay, nay! it is all sheltering, all restoring mother Nature, receiving again into her mighty matrix the stuff worn out in the fashioning toil of her wasteful, greedy, and slatternly children. In her genial bosom, the exhausted gathers life, the effete becomes generant, the disintegrate returns to resting and capable form. The rolling oscillating globe dips it for an aeon in growing sea, lifts it from the sinking waters of its thousand year bath ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... a lump from being first cousins to a Zanzibar foreshore, or kin to the approaches of a Zulu kraal. Gullies, holes, ruts, cobbles-stones awry, kerbstones rising from two to six inches above the level of the slatternly pavement; tram-lines from two to three inches above street level; building materials scattered half across the street; lime, boards, cut stone, and ash-barrels generally and generously everywhere; wheeled traffic taking its ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... and straw; the hay-ricks are mere slovenly heaps, partially thatched; the fences are made up of odds and ends. As for order, the whole place might have been strewn with the debris of a whirlwind and not have looked worse. As a natural consequence of all this slatternly disorder, fire is no uncommon occurrence; and when a fire begins, it seldom stops till it has licked the whole place clean—a condition not attainable by ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... knotted ribbon around her throat. It now occurred to him that she had always been fully dressed. He did not know—and probably never would unless she told him—that it was very easy (and comfortable for a woman) to fall into slatternly ways in this latitude. So long as she could remember, her father had never permitted her to sit at the table unless she came fully dressed. Later, she understood his reasons; and it ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... they bain't pretty words, Father—not by no manner of means. She's for ever and the day after interfering with every mortal thing one does. And her own house is just right-down slatternly, and her children are coming up any how. If she'd just spend the time a-scouring as she spends a-chattering, her house 'd be the cleanest place in Oxfordshire. But as for the poor children, I'm that sorry! Whatever they do, or don't do, they ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... to be something of a beauty himself, discovered the merits of Amanda. Then he became markedly attentive. He was a large, fat, curly-headed person with beautiful eyes, a cherished moustache, and an air of great gentility, and when he had welcomed his guests and driven off the slatternly waiting-maid, and given them his best table, and consented, at Amanda's request, to open a window, he went away and put on a tie and collar. It was an attention so conspicuous that even the group of men in the far corner ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... labors of a family of ten members, including four or five young children, and, looking, seemed at once to throw them into system; matured her plans, arranged her hours of washing, ironing, baking, and cleaning; rose early, moved deftly; and in a single day the slatternly and littered kitchen assumed that neat, orderly appearance that so often strikes one in New England farm-houses. The work seemed to be all gone. Every thing was nicely washed, brightened, put in place, and staid in place; the floors, when cleaned; remained clean; ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the tenderest parts in your own little volume, at the end of such a slatternly scribble as this, but indeed they cost us some tears. I scrawl away because of interruptions every moment. You guess how it is in a busy office—papers thrust into your hand when your hand is ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... one thick slice she offered, slipped the handle of the tin of tea on his arm, and with the big basin, tied up in a blue handkerchief, in his other hand, marched off in the direction of the tin works, while slatternly Mrs. Fowley ...
— Dick Lionheart • Mary Rowles Jarvis
... woman was a hideous old crone. Her hair was a matted gray mass, her teeth were gone, and her face was pinched, and so seamed with wrinkles, that she looked as though she might be over a hundred years old. The other woman was very dirty and slatternly. She had a dirty baby in her arms; her hair was in disorder, her face was greasy and smouched, and a filthy cloth, which might once have been white, was on her head. The women and children were all barefoot. As Bob approached, ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... crept in, pitilessly intensifying the squalor of the room, and until the dawn was broadening into daylight. Then two of Campion's men from Barbara's Building arrived to relieve us. Before we went, however, the neighbour who had taken charge of the children came in to help the slatternly wife light a fire and make some tea. I have enjoyed few things more than the warm, bitter stuff which I drank out of the broken mug in that ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... inconvenience to myself that his circumstances allow. Many folks make what they are pleased to call unconventionality a mere cloak for selfish disregard of the feelings and tastes of others. Bohemianism too often means piggish sloth or slatternly ineptitude. ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... out to be a small, slatternly-looking craft, her hull and spars a dingy black, rigging all slack and bleached nearly white, and everything denoting an ill state of affairs aboard. The four boats hanging from her sides proclaimed her a whaler. Leaning carelessly over the bulwarks were the sailors, wild, haggard-looking ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... time accordin' to popular opinion a suffragist wuz a slatternly woman with uncombed locks, dangling shoe strings, and bloomers, stridin' through an unswept house onmindful of dirty children or hungry husband, but the world moves onward and public opinion with it. Suffragists are the best mothers, the best ...
— Samantha on the Woman Question • Marietta Holley
... bell was answered by a rather slatternly maid, who informed the visitor that she guessed Mr. Pearson was in; he 'most always was around lunch time. So Captain Elisha waited in a typical boarding-house parlor, before a grate with no fire in it and surrounded by walnut and plush furniture, until Pearson himself ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... one of some pretensions, but had now fallen upon evil days and become the abode of a number of petty tradesmen, such as cobblers, sellers of fruit and cheap drinks, dealers in second-hand goods of every description, and riffraff generally. It swarmed with dirty, slatternly women, still dirtier half-naked children, lean and hungry-looking dogs, and lazy, hulking men with brass ear-rings in their ears, the rags of tawdry finery upon their bodies, and their sashes perfect batteries of murderous-looking knives. They were a villainous, ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... brutes of burden. If I had seen in one of those mills (but I did not, though I looked for something of this kind with a sharp eye), the most lisping, mincing, affected, and ridiculous young creature that my imagination could suggest, I should have thought of the careless, moping, slatternly, degraded, dull reverse (I HAVE seen that), and should have been still well pleased ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... it clean, but pays no servant to wash or sweep; and, while enjoining the absence of dirt, it checks and hampers that desire to decorate, which is the positive side of order and taste. The result is, broadly, slatternly schools. ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... was uninviting at any time and to Julie, who had stared at the rows of slatternly kept backyards until she grew familiar with each battered garbage can, the sight was hateful. The rain had driven even the starved alley cats to cover, and with a sigh forlorn in its wretchedness, she turned from the window and contemplated her nicely furnished bedroom. The two days she ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... to where she sat looking curiously, apathetically at him; her gray hair straggling down on her dirty cotton frock open at the neck over shrivelled yellow skin; soiled old hands hanging carelessly over slatternly garments; stockingless feet stuck into a great tattered pair of men's shoes. Nothing seemed changed since he saw her last save that the hair had been black then, and the skin not so wrinkled. Aunt Sally had been good natured always, even when she was drunk; her husband, when he came home was always ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... horror, as if things inanimate still partook of men's dread at men's deeds. If you passed through the corridor and saw in the shadow of the wall that homeliest of instruments cast away and forgotten, you would smile at the slatternly housework. But if you knew that a corpse had been borne down those stairs to the left,—borne along those floors to that marriage-bed,—with the blood oozing and gushing and plashing below as the bearers passed with their burden, then straight that dead thing would take the awe of the dead being; ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Sussex agricultural labourer called Alliner, she was a stout person, with most peculiar prominent epileptic eyes, such eyes as one usually associates with men of letters or criminals. And yet there was nothing in her. She was just a lazy, slatternly, easy-going body, rather given to drink. Her husband was a thin, dirty, light-hearted fellow, who did his work and offended nobody. Her eldest daughter, a pretty and capable girl, was wild, got into ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... the children of a drunken father, a slatternly mother. Brought up in a comfortless, poverty-stricken home, without any religious teaching or influences, what wonder that they became addicted to most of the petty vices,—that they acquired an unenviable reputation ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... rickety stairs, which groaned and creaked beneath their weight, and found Mother Guttersnipe lying on the bed in the corner. The elfish black-haired child was playing cards with a slatternly-looking girl at a deal table by the faint light of ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... underbred servility which Darrell had thought perceptible in her epistolary compositions. There was elegance too, void both of gaudy ostentation and penurious thrift, in the furniture and arrangements of the room. The income he gave to her was not spent with slatternly waste or on tawdry gewgaws. To ladies in general, Darrell's manner was extremely attractive—not the less winning because of a certain shyness which, implying respect for those he addressed, and a modest undervaluing of his own merit, conveyed compliment ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... hopeful when we met them again on our return. We chatted with and encouraged them all, pointing out the general healthy, well-conditioned look of the residents. Went on board. How strangely changed the ship appeared! Sunny, motionless, and quiet; no noisy children, no slatternly, slipshod women rolling about the decks, no slush, no washing of dirty linen in dirtier water. There was the old mate in a clean shirt at last, leaning against the mainmast, and smoking his yard of clay; the butcher close—shaven and clean; the sailors smart, and welcoming ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... for playground, lunch-room, and loafing-place, and regarding it as pleasanter than home. Imagine going to school half fed and poorly clothed, sometimes the butt of a playmate's gibes because of a drunken father or a slatternly mother, required to study subjects that make no appeal to the child and in a language that is not native, and then back to the street, perhaps to sell papers until far into the night, or to run at the beck and call of the public ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... "Sirs," said I, "your slatternly wenches may be dead ere they match Mistress Hortense! As for wearing light colours, the devil himself is painted black. Let them who are doing shameful acts to the innocent walk shamefacedly! For shame, sirs, to cloak malice and jealousy of M. Picot under religion! New England will ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... to houses slatternly or idle would I have given thee, distaff, seeing that thou art a countryman of mine. For that is thy native city which Archias out of Ephyre founded, long ago, the very marrow of the isle of the three capes, a town of honourable men. {153} ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... group of loungers on the dirty wet platform, and Telford passed into the store. A couple of slatternly women were talking to Mrs. Rykman about "the Palmer row." Telford made his small purchases hastily. As he turned from the counter, he came face to face with a woman who had paused in the doorway to survey the scene ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... insisted on a singe. Ser Perth watched with a mixture of intentness and amusement. The barber trimmed the tufts from over Dave's ears and clipped the hair in his nose, while a tray was pushed up and a slatternly blonde began ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... as far as a protest Alice turned in to the entrance of a building and climbed a flight of stairs. She pushed a button. A woman of rather slatternly ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... which he occupied with the one servant good fortune brought to his door at a time when the forlornness of his changed position was continually accentuated by the untidy irregularity of his life and surroundings. He was only able to afford to engage the shiftless services of a slatternly negro girl, rendered insubordinate by her newly acquired freedom, and he had begun to feel that he should never again find himself encompassed by the decorous ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... while performing the morning duties of her household may wear a plain loose dress, made high in the neck, and with long sleeves fastened at the wrist. It must not look slatternly, and may be exceedingly beautiful ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... come a few minutes earlier by the Applegate road. As he was a fine looking man of full habit and some thirty years, her eyes lingered an instant on his face before she turned with the news to her slatternly negro maid who was sousing the floor with a bucket ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... inquiries of Hawkins's dog, which were not satisfactory and they made war on him in concert. This would have interested the citizens but it was too many on one to amount to anything as a fight, and so they commanded the peace and the foreign dog coiled his tail and took sanctuary under the wagon. Slatternly negro girls and women slouched along with pails deftly balanced on their heads, and joined the group and stared. Little half dressed white boys, and little negro boys with nothing whatever on but tow-linen shirts with a fine southern exposure, came from various directions and stood with their ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... show them her house-keeping. Mrs. Hilary cast her eye about the room at the word, as if she had seen quite enough of it already, and this made Louise laugh again. She was no better in person than the room was, and she felt her mother's tacit censure apply to her slatternly dressing-gown. ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... the republic are often seen paraded opposite the plaza, and though they are sure to recall the French Zouaves, yet they lack their admirable discipline and perfection of company movements. Indeed, to speak plainly, the author has never seen a more slatternly, knock-kneed, uncouth body of soldiers than the rank and file of the Mexican army. The white gaiters of the French Zouaves moving all together have a fine effect when a body of them are marching through a Parisian boulevard; but the Mexican ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... haven for gents only. There were other landladies—landladies fat and German; landladies lean and Irish; landladies loquacious (regardless of nationality); landladies reserved; landladies husbandless, wedded, widowed, divorced, and willing; landladies slatternly; landladies prim; and all hinting of past estates wherein there ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... I arrived at the house. A slatternly, sulky woman opened the door to me. "Oh! I suppose you're another doctor," she muttered, staring at me with scowling eyes. "I wish you were the undertaker, to get her out of my house before we all catch our deaths of her! There! there's the other doctor coming ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... fire, slatternly and dirty, with hair uncombed, dress disordered, shoes down at heel, lolling, lounging, stooping in various attitudes, were some half-dozen women, Alice being nearest the fire on one side. Most of them had pipes in their mouths. On the table were cups and saucers, a loaf and some ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... that they took but a doubtful pleasure, being half affrighted at the wide, empty space overhead and round about them, finding the air too little medicated with smoke, soot, and graveyard exhalations, to be breathed with comfort, and feeling shelterless and lost because grimy London, their slatternly and disreputable mother, had suffered them to stray out of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... manifest condemnation for other sins. And in this guise she would go about the house from morning to night on days not made sacred by the use of the carriage. Now Lotta Luxa was clean in the midst of her work; and one would have thought that the cleanliness of the maid would have shamed the slatternly ways of the mistress. But Madame Zamenoy and Lotta Luxa had lived together long, and probably knew each ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope
... schoolmistress, so full of craving to learn and to be good, and to be loved by God, so audaciously ambitious of becoming a teacher, and so confident of being a good Jewess always. Satchel in hand, the little girl sped up the stairs swiftly, despite her cumbrous, slatternly boots, and Esther, holding her bag, followed her more slowly, as if she feared to contaminate her by the touch of one so weary-worldly-wise, so full of ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... refreshing nip from the famous bottle of Jamaica rum, which had lain in untroubled seclusion since before I was born, waiting some occasion of vast importance; and he must surely not take her unaware in a slatternly moment, but must find her lying on the pillows, wearing her prettiest nightgown, which was thereupon newly washed and ironed and stowed away in the bottom drawer of the bureau against his unexpected coming. But while the snow melted from the hills, ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... awake and stirring. It was an important day for the landlord of the inn, as it was that of the principal fair, which brought crowds of people of all sorts to the town. Both Jankiel's daughters, two strong, plain, and slatternly girls, with the help of the boy Mendel, whose stupid, malicious face bore the traces of Reb Moshe's training, were busy preparing the two guest rooms for the arrival of distinguished customers. Next to the guest rooms was the large bar-room, where, during the fair, crowds of country people were wont ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... like pigs," and their appearance and surroundings justified her mother's repugnance to that form of existence. They were mostly cousins, who inhabited dingy houses with engravings from Cole's Voyage of Life on the drawing-room walls, and slatternly parlour-maids who said "I'll go and see" to visitors calling at an hour when all right-minded persons are conventionally if not actually out. The disgusting part of it was that many of these cousins were rich, so that Lily imbibed the idea that ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... the soul of the adventurer was infinitely young. He looked at it all with a certain steadfastness that seemed to say, "Yes, I see you! You are hideous, slatternly, unfriendly; but through all the disguise I recognize you. Through the mask I trace the features—subtle, alluring, fascinating. You are ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... sniffing at heaps of refuse, a group of tethered horses shivering under thin blankets in the hotel shed, a battered jitney or two stalled before shop and saloon. A Chinaman with a huge bundle upon his head, a slatternly woman brushing the dry, powdered snow from the path, a tawdry one pattering along, her rouged face pitiful in the clear merciless light; red-shirted miners crawling like ants to the yawning shaft-mouths half ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... dove's satiny plumage gently—and then drew back a little into shadow as she saw Robin Clifford step out from the porch into the garden and hurriedly interrupt the advance of a woman who just then pushed open the outer gate—a slatternly- looking creature with dark dishevelled hair and a face which might have been handsome, but for its unmistakable impress of ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... this period—things sometimes almost grotesque, were they not so sad. The composer lived a solitary life, and was very much at the mercy of his servants on account of his self-absorption and deafness. He was much worried by these prosaic cares. One story of a slatternly servant is as follows: The master was working at the mass in D, the great work which he commenced in 1819 for the celebration of the appointment of the Archduke Rudolph as Archbishop of Olmutz, and which should have been completed ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... lift, but it was out of order; a grimy card, tucked into the lattice of the doorway, proclaimed the fact. So they mounted flight after flight of stairs, and finally halted before a doorway bearing Major Hunt's card. A slatternly maid ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... not at home when they entered. A great slatternly girl, not so old as Bessy, but taller and stronger, was busy at the wash-tub, knocking about the furniture in a rough capable way, but altogether making so much noise that Margaret shrunk, out of sympathy with poor Bessy, who had sat ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... favorite with his own sex. Indeed, he gets a good deal more abuse from them than is necessary. His is a harmless failing and it soon wears out. Besides, a man who has no foppery at twenty will be a slatternly, dirty-collar, unbrushed-coat man at forty. A little foppishness in a young man is good; it is human. I like to see a young cock ruffle his feathers, stretch his neck, and crow as if the whole world belonged to him. I don't like a modest, retiring ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... looked extremely pale, and somewhat emaciated; yet, for the first time in several months, she wore a tight-fitting dress, and her father, unconscious of her crimes, good-naturedly expressed his joy at seeing her 'once more dressed like a Christian lady, and not in the loose and slatternly robes she had so long persisted ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... I fancy he is one of the stupid class of criminals. We often talk together, but there is not much to be got out of him; he usually keeps his eye on someone else's pewter, and he is catholic in his taste for drinks. Of late he has been accompanied by three other persons—a stout, slatternly woman, whom he named as his wife; a rather pretty, snub-nosed girl, who dresses in tawdry prints; and a red-faced, thick-set, dark fellow, who grins perpetually and shows a nice set of teeth. The elder man confidentially informed me that the stout young ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... with shifty eyes and a debauched complexion, who showed a most unwelcome curiosity in his customer. As a last fatality, he wore a peaked cap like my own, and turned out to be an ex-sailor. I should have fled at the sight of him had I had the chance, but I was attended to first by a slatternly girl who, I am sure, called him up to view me. To explain my muddy boots and trousers I said I had walked from Esens, and from that I found myself involved in a tangle of impromptu lies. Floundering down an old groove, I placed my sister this time ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... small house in one of the slums. The husband was out, but the wife and family were all gathered together in the back room. There were five children, ranging in age from ten down to two, and the mother looked the very picture of slatternly discomfort. We asked the usual questions, and I was just turning to go, when I heard a violent fit of convulsive coughing from a dark corner. The mother got up and went to the corner. I couldn't help following, and saw the most miserable spectacle I ever set eyes on. In a sort of cradle was ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 25, 1891 • Various
... heavy wooden table, loaded with coarse food—black bread, boiled cabbage, bacon, eggs, a great chine from a wild boar, sausages, such as we eat nowadays, and flagons and jars of beer and wine, Along the board sat ranged in the order of the household the followers and retainers. Four or five slatternly women and girls served the others as they fed noisily at the table, moving here and there behind the men with wooden or pewter dishes of food, now and then laughing at the jests that passed or joining in the talk. A huge fire blazed ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle
... best. There! Get downstairs, little bag o' bones.' With this, the undertaker's wife opened a side door, and pushed Oliver down a steep flight of stairs into a stone cell, damp and dark: forming the ante-room to the coal-cellar, and denominated 'kitchen'; wherein sat a slatternly girl, in shoes down at heel, and blue worsted stockings very much ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... doors very near together, and our young adventurer tried the next one. It was quickly opened, and a very slatternly young woman appeared to him with a baby in her arms, and three almost babies hanging to various portions of ...
— Three People • Pansy
... bath is very agreeable, the tepid water being singularly soft and pleasant. It has a slightly sulphurous taste. Its good effects are much certified. The grounds, which might be very pretty with care, are ill-kept and slatternly, strewn with debris, as if everything was left to the easy-going nature of the servants. The main house is of brick, with verandas and galleries all round, and a colonnade of thirteen huge brick and stucco columns, in honor of the thirteen States,—a relic of post-Revolutionary times, when ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... at description of her had been well meaning; but what he had prepared his sister for, unconsciously of course, in his emphasis on one or two phases of their first acquaintance, had been a sort of slatternly Amazon. But the effect of this was, really, very happy; because when a perfectly presentably clad, well-bred, admirably poised young girl came into the room and greeted her neither shyly nor eagerly, nor with any affectation of ease, a girl ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... this was better than hiring some one. His children had married or "run off" and left him. So the old wife went back into the treadmill. She was obsessed with the idea of work. She would not sleep. Sometimes she would spring out of the bed in the dead hours of the night, kindle a fire in the slatternly stove, and "start breakfast." She was always hurrying from one ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... nothing in the dining-room to invite the criticism of Helen and her aunt, even though they had been disposed to be critical; there was no evidence of slatternly management. Everything was plain, but neat. The ceiling was high and wide; and the walls were of dainty whiteness, relieved here and there by bracket-shelves containing shiny crockery and glassware. The oil-lamps ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... door opened, and a slatternly woman in a soiled print dress came shuffling down the flagged pathway to the gate. She wore cloth boots, and Tilda took note that one ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... fallen. The theatres are all full, but not full of the sort of people who demand excellence. Perhaps it would be unfair to judge the opera by a performance of "Parsifal," that heavily over-dressed story of sentimental religiosity and pedestrian symbolism, but it was done in the most slatternly perfunctory style. The theatre was crowded. But it was a strangely mixed crowd. In lonely grandeur in one of the boxes were three Englishmen in evening dress. In the fifth row of the stalls was a servant-girl who kept asking her neighbours ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... soon swept away, for the detachment was composed of about fifty unhappy, thin-looking men in white flannel jackets, sitting about or leaning over the bulwarks, smoking and watching the dock quay where stood a group of slatternly-looking women, staring wearily at the ship; and now and then one of them would wave a hand or a handkerchief to the men in white flannel, a salute as often as not evoking no response, though sometimes ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... no Kami, one of the great actors in recent historic events, who was assassinated not far off, outside the Sakaruda gate of the castle. Besides these, barracks, parade-grounds, policemen, kurumas, carts pulled and pushed by coolies, pack-horses in straw sandals, and dwarfish, slatternly-looking soldiers in European dress, made up the Tokiyo that I saw between Shinbashi ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... Ellerby never went into their cottages, and the shepherd and his wife concluded that it was because in both cases the children were rather puny, sickly-looking little things and were never very clean. The carter's wife, too, was a slatternly woman. One day when Mrs. Ellerby came in to see Mrs. Bawcombe the carter's wife was just going out of the door, and Mrs. Ellerby appeared displeased, and before leaving she said, "I hope, Mrs. Bawcombe, you are not going to mix too freely with your neighbours or let your children go too ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... came in here praising spring in its words. You are happy because you have sold a poem, probably for more than it is worth. But why do you praise spring? What do you fellows do it for? You know perfectly well that it is the most capricious, the most treacherous, the most delusive, deadly, slatternly, down-at-heels, milkmaid-handed season of the year, without decision of character or fixed principles, and with only the vaguest raw-girlish ideals, a red nose between crazy smiles and streaming eyes. If it did not come at the end ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... the button and shaking the gates; and with no more profit of his undertaking than Hickey. After a minute or two of it he acknowledged defeat with an oath, and turned away to browbeat the straggling vanguard of belated wayfarers,—messenger-boys, slatternly drabs, hackmen, loafers, and one or two plain citizens conspicuously out of their reputable grooves,—who were drifting in at the entrance to line the lobby walls with blank, curious faces. Forerunners ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... and as deftly as if she had never demonstrated a problem in Euclid or heard of Sophocles. In what way had women become unfitted for their sphere by a liberal education? In no way whatever. If some highly educated women are inefficient housekeepers, and slatternly in their persons, so also are many who neither know how to read nor write; just as there are many impracticable, inefficient, and slovenly men who are highly educated, and ignorant men who are also incompetent ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... carried on so prosperously as in my native island. Mr. Tim had married the girls' waiting-maid, who had been a kind friend of mine in the early times; and I had to go salute poor Molly next day, and found her a slatternly wench in a mud hut, surrounded by a brood of children almost as ragged as those of ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... place of bad drainage, bad drinking, bad living and bad dying. The men who haunted its dirty, narrow little streets were loafers and idlers and castaways. The women were, most of them, no better than they should be, and the children were the most slatternly and ill-bred in the whole of Glebeshire. Small credit to the Canons and the Town Councillors and the prosperous farmers that it was so, but in their defence it might be urged that it needed a very valiant Canon and the most fearless of Town Councillors to disturb that little nest. ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... wool-witted creature, not ill-disposed, but sometimes mendacious and very indolent. Her life had always been what it was now—one of slatternly comfort and daylong gossip, for she came of a small tradesman's family, and had married an artisan who was always in well-paid work. Her children were two daughters, who, at seventeen and fifteen, remained in the house with her doing little or nothing, though they were ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... not used to the bustle of London streets or to crossing them alone. She did it, however, after a few false starts, and so turned down a quiet side street and rang at the bell of a house in it. A slatternly girl ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... widow had barely made a living for herself and her daughter out of the uncertain boarders. Mortimer had paid his share, but she had encouraged him to dress well and no one knew the value of "front" better than he. After her death, three years ago, Gora had turned out the boarders and the last slatternly wasteful cook and let her rooms to business women who made their morning coffee over the gas jet. The new arrangement paid very well and left her time for lectures at the University of California, and for other studies. A Jap came ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... groaned. One was desolate, deserted, the door swinging from one hinge, the chimney fallen, every paling of the fence gone and the roof of the little barn caved in. Smoke was coming from Steve Hawn's chimney, and in the porch were two or three slatternly negro women. The boy knew the low, sinister meaning of their presence on public works; and these blacks ate, slept, and plied their trade in the home of Mavis Hawn! All the old rebellion and rage of his early years came back to him and ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... to the drawing-room and bedroom stories he found no relief. His eyes could discover nothing that was not mean, ugly, frowzy, and unimaginative. He pictured the heavy, gloomy, lethargic life within. The slatternly servants pottering about the bases of the sooty buildings sickened and saddened him. A solitary Earl's Court omnibus that lumbered past with its sinister, sparse cargo seemed to be a spectacle absolutely tragic—he did not know why. The few ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
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