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To-do   Listen
noun
To-do  n.  Bustle; stir; commotion; ado. (Colloq.)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"To-do" Quotes from Famous Books



... are improperly organized. But we know—old Franklin knew it—that four hours of useful work every day would be more than sufficient for supplying everybody with the comfort of a moderately well-to-do middle-class house, if we all gave ourselves to productive work, and if we did not waste our productive powers as we do waste them now. As to the childish question, repeated for fifty years: 'Who would do disagreeable work?' frankly I regret that none of our savants has ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell

... the Asiatic laborer is poor, the American laborer well-to-do, because the Asiatic earns little, the American much—a condition due to the fact that the American doubles, trebles, or quadruples his productive capacity, his earning power, by the use of tools and knowledge, machinery and ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe

... one of the outskirters of art leaves a fine stamp on a man's countenance. I remember once dining with a party in the inn at Chateau Landon. Most of them were unmistakable bagmen; others well-to-do peasantry; but there was one young fellow in a blouse, whose face stood out from among the rest surprisingly. It looked more finished; more of the spirit looked out through it; it had a living, expressive air, and you could see that his eyes took things in. My companion ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... at last, and we found ours on a sunny top just when the cold had pinched us almost beyond endurance, and joined a sparse group before the closed gate of the convent. The group was composed of poor people who had come for the dole of food daily distributed from the convent, and better-to-do country-folk who had brought things to sell to the monks, or were there on affairs not openly declared. But it seemed that it was a saint's day; the monks were having service in the church solely for their own edification, and they had shut us sinners out not only by locking the gate, ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells

... His position in life, his business, trade or calling were not to be easily fixed; a commercial man, an agent or "traveller" on his own account, well-to-do and prosperous, was the notion borne out by his dress, his white waistcoat and coloured shirt of amazing pattern (a hint of his Italian origin), his rings and the showy diamond pin in his ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths

... the satisfaction of relating their artistic misery with the magniloquence of a traveller narrating a tiger hunt. Others persist and put their self-esteem in it, but when once they have exhausted those resources of credit which a young fellow with well-to-do relatives can always find, they are more wretched than the real Bohemians, who, never having had any other resources, have at least those of intelligence. We knew one of these amateur Bohemians ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger

... from one or two persons who happened to be in this city, and such other facts as were brought out upon cross-examination of the witnesses called by the other side. By the careful selection of a few well-to-do and more fortunate colored men from that State, the majority of the committee secured some evidence tending to show that a portion of the Negroes of North Carolina are exceptionally well treated and contented, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various

... this to-do?" said she, in considerable dismay. Had she been wasting daylight and precious material for gossip, by lying in bed half-an-hour longer ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt

... feeling of contemptuous enmity is fully returned by the cit, who regards the free proprietor in the light of a boor and a bully. Moreover, it rankles in the Houseman's breast that no Stockader pays a farthing of head-money to the treasure-chest of the Doomsmen. Now and then some well-to-do proprietor may suffer loss from cattle thieving and rick burning, but as often as not the marauders pay full price for all they get. And this leads us to a consideration of the Doomsman himself, that foul excrescence upon our modern body politic. ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen

... sure, 'Twas not for nothing—the good bellyful, The warm serge and the rope that goes all round, And day-long blessed idleness beside! 105 "Let's see what the urchin's fit for"—that came next. Not overmuch their way, I must confess. Such a to-do! They tried me with their books; Lord, they'd have taught me Latin in pure waste! Flower o' the clove, 110 All the Latin I construe is "amo," I love! But, mind you, when a boy starves in the streets Eight years together, as my fortune ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning

... always alone. He was a bachelor, and slept in a room at the back of his office, cooking some of his meals himself, getting others at a restaurant close by. Though he had little visible practice, he was understood to be well-to-do and even more, and people tacitly inferred that he "shaved notes." The Methodists of Octavius looked upon him as a queer fish, and through nearly a dozen years had never quite outgrown their hebdomadal tendency to surprise at seeing him enter their church. He had never, it is true, professed ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic

... great contentedness as we have when after a fatiguing day we reach an hotel, and, having given our orders, know that speedily we shall sit down to an ample repast. Many of these Suras have been built at the expense of well-to-do natives impelled by different motives, for love of name—nam ke liye, as the natives say, a motive for which their countrymen continually give them credit—for the acquisition of religious merit, and from benevolent feeling. These ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy

... a great to-do about the matter. The affair was just serio-comic enough to attract nation-wide attention. And the story was a good one—the story of the anarchist-shoemaker who invoked the use of archaic, reactionary laws, in his battle against his less radical antagonists, the ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp

... these days many who will mock; but for my part I am proud of a race whose social relations are the last upon which they will retrench, whose latest yielded pleasure is their hospitality. It is a common feeling that only the WELL-TO-DO have a right to be hospitable: the ideal flower of hospitality is almost unknown to the rich; it can hardly be grown save in the gardens of the poor; it is ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald

... made Amy shrink in dread from the still narrower lodgings to which Reardon invited her. She knew how subtly one's self-respect can be undermined by sordid conditions. The difference between the life of well-to-do educated people and that of the uneducated poor is not greater in visible details than in the minutiae of privacy, and Amy must have submitted to an extraordinary change before it would have been possible for her to live at ease in the circumstances which satisfy a decent ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing

... low-priced editions of the Bible, printed on common paper (which was not introduced into Europe until the thirteenth century), cost a sum of money which a poor man would consider a fortune, and which even the well-to-do would hesitate to spend in days when money was scarce and its purchasing power was considerably different from what it is to-day. At a period not so very remote from the present a Bible was considered a valuable ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau

... "Eh, sich a to-do as he mak's about it you'd never believe," put in the wife, "he'll never let our Gaffer tak' a bit o' credit to hissel'—eh, it's terrible how he goes on! I b'lieve if he were fair deein' he'd get ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)

... could get into the House. I don't know any well-to-do blackguard of whom you might not predict as much. A seat in the House of Commons doesn't make a man a gentleman as far ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope

... are. As I told Lizy Jane, them folks in the big houses have Thanksgivin' dinners every day uv their lives, and men an' women in splendid do's to wait on 'em, so't Thanksgivin' don't mean anything to 'em; but we poor critters, we make a great to-do if we have a good dinner oncet a year. I've saw a pile o' this world, Mrs. Stacey-a pile of it! I didn't think they was so many big houses in the world as I saw b'tween here an' Chicago. Waal, I can't set here gabbin'; I must ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland

... dear, you do live in a fine palace, and you have jewels and grand dresses and—No, no, do not be indignant with ME. Did not you dream of these things AS WELL AS of love? Come now, be honest. It was always a prince, was it not, or, at the least, an exceedingly well-to-do party, that handsome young gentleman who bowed to you so gallantly from the red embers? He was never a virtuous young commercial traveller, or cultured clerk, earning a salary of three pounds a week, was he, Cinderella? Yet there are many charming commercial travellers, many delightful clerks ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome

... thirty years now since the practice of placing the dining-room above the kitchen, and of raising and lowering the courses by hydraulic power into the centre of the dining-table, had become universal in the houses of the well-to-do. The floor consisted entirely of the asbestos cork preparation invented in America, noiseless, clean, and pleasant to ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson

... fat-pig style, Mr Verloc, without either rubbing his hands with satisfaction or winking sceptically at his thoughts, proceeded on his way. He trod the pavement heavily with his shiny boots, and his general get-up was that of a well-to-do mechanic in business for himself. He might have been anything from a picture-frame maker to a lock-smith; an employer of labour in a small way. But there was also about him an indescribable air which no mechanic could have acquired in the practice ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad

... to-do; and, he was just wondering whether he should solve the Gordian knot by cutting and running, when, luckily, a man without a hat rushed in breathlessly from a neighbouring store, and coming up to the auctioneer, asked him if the wine was ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson

... country women, happened to be sitting near the well, and heard what Bopolûchî said. Being much struck by her beauty and spirit, he determined to marry her himself, and the very next day, disguised as a well-to-do farmer, he came to Bopolûchî's house laden with trays upon trays full of fine dresses, fine food, and fine jewels; for he was not a real pedlar, but a wicked robber, ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel

... not throw themselves, as she had hoped, upon the objects, choosing them according to their individual taste. If, indeed, the pupils are very poor children, this phenomenon does nearly always happen at once; but if they are well-to-do children, already sated by the variety of their possessions, and by the most costly toys, they are very rarely attracted at first by the stimuli presented to them. This naturally leads to disorder when the mistress makes a kind of chain of that "liberty" she is ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori

... relations living in Philadelphia, and it seemed to them somehow a guarantee of respectability to have relations in Philadelphia. Mrs. Sterling was not sorry to have Philip make his way among such well-to-do people, and she was sure that no good fortune could be too ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

... cultivation, may have placed within their reach an education the best possible for the development of their powers for the benefit of themselves and of the community; and, second, to provide for the comparatively well-to-do the means of pursuing useful studies in compensation for compelling them to provide for the instruction of their less ...
— The Philosophy of Teaching - The Teacher, The Pupil, The School • Nathaniel Sands

... never officially made public, since a discreet police force "found no clues"; for Fred Musgrave (of King's Garden), as befitted the dead man's well-to-do brother, had been at no little pains to insure constabulary shortsightedness, in preference to having the nature of Scott Musgrave's recreations unsympathetically aired. Fred Musgrave thereby afforded Lichfield a delectable opportunity (conversationally ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell

... No doubt already the few guests were arriving, stared at by the neighbors from their windows. The complacent bridegroom was by this time on his way to the home of the bride, or perhaps knocking at the door. Lansing knew him well, an elderly, well-to-do furniture-maker, who had been used to express a fatherly admiration for Mary. The bride was upstairs in her chamber, putting the finishing touches to her toilet; or, at this very moment, it might be, was descending the stairs to take the bridegroom's ...
— At Pinney's Ranch - 1898 • Edward Bellamy

... state of health is an impossibility. There can be no proper bodily health unless there be daily exercise. It is the same with everybody, no matter what the condition of life may be. Exercise is quite as necessary for the well-to-do man as it is for him who is not so circumstanced. The laws of health cannot be violated, and all the money in the world will not atone for neglect in this respect. Exercise is not a matter that can be carried out by proxy. No; each one must take ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)

... derangement." It seems so to us, although it is often an effort toward wisdom, i.e., toward the comprehension of things. It would be more correct to say, with Tylor, that it represents a state intermediate between that of a man of our time, prosaic and well-to-do, and that of a furious madman, or of a man ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot

... which the reforms of the Sixties had been the preparation. These reforms, one-sided and imperfect as they may have been, had none the less sufficed to create new economic conditions. On the one hand, a well-to-do middle-class, recruited almost entirely from non-aristocratic strata, sprang up; on the other, an industrial proletariat. Maxim Gorki emerged from this environment: and as a phenomenon he is explained by this essentially ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald

... breathed by a well-to-do gentleman in a ruby-colored velvet vest, and with a ruby-colored cheek, a ruby-headed cane in his hand, to a man in a gray coat and white tie, who, shortly after the interview last described, had accosted him for contributions to a Widow ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville

... tax-collector. If a rural landowner, he lived in a community which was economically self-sufficient, and consequently provincial to the last degree. The types of character which developed under such conditions were not wanting in amiable or admirable traits. The well-to-do provincial was often a scholar, a connoisseur in art and literature, a polished letter-writer and conversationalist, a shrewd observer of his little world, an exemplary husband and father, courteous to inferiors, warm-hearted to his friends. Sometimes he found in ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis

... Birlstone is a small and very ancient cluster of half-timbered cottages on the northern border of the county of Sussex. For centuries it had remained unchanged; but within the last few years its picturesque appearance and situation have attracted a number of well-to-do residents, whose villas peep out from the woods around. These woods are locally supposed to be the extreme fringe of the great Weald forest, which thins away until it reaches the northern chalk downs. ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle

... the residential district of Pera where I rented a small residence, typical of the well-to-do Turk of the middle class and quite in keeping with my assumed character. An elaborate residence would have aroused immediate suspicion, for there is no country on earth where curiosity and suspicion is so easily ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves

... England or any highly-civilized country. There are no dodging vagrants, no slatternly women, no squalid, starving babies. In fact, our civilization has not yet mounted to effervescence, so we have no dregs. Every white person on the ground was well clad, well fed, and apparently well-to-do. The "lower orders" were represented by a bright fringe of coolies and Kafirs, sleek, grinning and as fat as ortolans, especially the babies. Most of the Kafirs were dressed in snow-white knickerbockers and shirts ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various

... crowd in the street, a crowd in the door-way. Sharp elbows and angry tongues were there; street boys and soldiers, maids and scrub-women; peaceable police and stormy rabble. The army was new and the fashion. The well-to-do and the wharf-rats, everybody went to the Salvation Army. Within, the hall was low-studded. At the farthest end was an empty platform; unpainted benches, borrowed chairs, an uneven floor, blotches on the ceiling, ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof

... slave. Her name, which is a Gentile name, and her servile condition, make it probable that she was not a Jewess. If one might venture to indulge in a guess, it is not at all unlikely that her mistress, Mary, John Mark's mother, Barnabas' sister, a well-to-do woman of Jerusalem, who had a house large enough to take in the members of the Church in great numbers, and to keep up a considerable establishment, had brought this slave-girl from the island of Cyprus. At all events, she was ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren

... the back shop, beside Placquevent, in the midst of the topers, but Gorju—Gorju, rigged out like a well-to-do citizen, entertaining the company! ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert

... and ambitious hunter, and is fairly well-to-do as it goes on the Labrador. His one-room cabin was very comfortable, and he treated us to unwonted luxuries, such as butter, marmalade, and sugar ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace

... is left to the streets, there is no real alternative for either of them. Child life must be socially organized: no parent, rich or poor, can choose institutions that do not exist; and the private enterprise of individual school masters appealing to a group of well-to-do parents, though it may shew what can be done by enthusiasts with new methods, cannot touch the mass of our children. For the average parent or child nothing is really available except the established practice; and this is ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw

... refined world; an anomaly in the eyes of certainly one of the company. Yet the board had a character of its own, very far removed from vulgarity, and suiting remarkably well with the condition and demeanour of those who presided over it a comfortable, well-to-do, substantial look, that could afford to dispense with minor graces; a self-respect that was not afraid of criticism. Aunt Miriam's successful efforts ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell

... their occupation in life, it would at any rate give them some useful interest in their hours of recreation. As it is they know nothing, so they are interested in nothing. And this, of course, applies to the so-called educated people as well. It always amuses me to listen to the well-to-do discussing the working classes. To hear them one would think that the working classes were the only people who wasted their time, their money, and their store of health. It never seems to strike them that the working classes for the most part ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King

... our hospital camps was a civilian camp, where dwelt in tents or in rude shanties several hundreds of refugees. There were well-to-do farmers and their families, driven from their homes in Upper Natal; railway people, station-masters, guards, clerks, etc.; miners from Glencoe and Dundee; and not a few people from Ladysmith itself. The greater number of these were Scotch, and it was natural ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers

... delicious glass of Champagne. And then she thought of the girls, her friends, who used to sneer at her—of Emma Baker, who was so proud, forsooth, because she was engaged to a cheesemonger, in a white apron, near Clare Market; and of Betsy Rodgers, who made such a to-do about her young man—an attorney's clerk, indeed, that went ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray

... already been said about the first Bishop of Ely, who purchased land whereon his successors should build a palace. It is a broad street, and in times past was a place of residence for well-to-do people. ...
— Holborn and Bloomsbury - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant

... Frederick Philipse (1626-1702), who in 1674 was listed as the richest man in New York, and later owned the great Philipse manor and was for twenty years a member of the governor's council, had in 1662 married Margaret, widow of Pieter Rudolph de Vries, herself a well-to-do and enterprising merchant. She was the daughter of Adolf Hardenbroek of Bergen, and died before 1692. It is not necessary to accept in toto the diarist's estimate ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts

... cabins of these craft it is the fashionable thing amongst well-to-do Chinamen to hold their jamborees. They hire a particular junk for a certain date, and at the appointed hour the party assembles there, being received by two or three unprepossessing servants. Dinner, or whatever form the entertainment may ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready

... seats, and the shelves on which a few books made a fair show beside the bright tins and the scanty crockery, were of pine; and the horned heads of deer and wapiti made pegs for coats and caps, and rests for guns and rifles. It was a place of comfort; it had an air of well-to-do thrift, even as the girl's dress, though plain, was made of good, sound stuff, gray, with a touch of dark red to match the auburn ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker

... licked in a scrap of any kind, to have no one at all who loves him, to have nothing at all to do. The people of the so-called working class are more apt to be hungry, weary, and sick than the "educated and cultured" and well-to-do. Otherwise there is no one to say—because there is no way it can be found out—that their lives by and large are not so rich, subjectively speaking, as those with one hundred thousand dollars a year, or with ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker

... went to Dresden. We were so fortunate as to obtain excellent rooms and board with a Herr and Madame Rohn, a well-to-do couple, who, I am sure, took boarders far more for the sake of company than for gain. Herr Rohn had graduated at Leipzig, but having spent most of his life in Vienna, was a man of exuberant jollity—a man of gold and a gentleman, even as his ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland

... Gate, down into the outlying meadows and rye-fields, where, crossing and recrossing the swift St. Charles, it finally rises at Lorette above the level of the citadel. It is a lonelier road than that to Montmorenci, and the scattering cottages upon it have not the well-to-do prettiness, the operatic repair, of stone-built Beauport. But they are charming, nevertheless, and the people seem to be remoter from modern influences. Peasant-girls, in purple gowns and broad straw hats, and ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells

... built a pillared portico of introduction to a humble structure of narrative. For when you look at the old gambrel-roofed house, you will see an unpretending mansion, such as very possibly you were born in yourself, or at any rate such a place of residence as your minister or some of your well-to-do country cousins find good enough, but not at all too grand for them. We have stately old Colonial palaces in our ancient village, now a city, and a thriving one,—square-fronted edifices that stand back from the vulgar ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... century, if they could ever have done so. Nor would simplification of the requisites of a deed, such as has now been introduced in many jurisdictions, have been of much use at a time when only a minority even of well-to-do laymen could write with ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various

... generously supported. There is that leaven of ancient pride which also may be classed among the institutions of the place, and which operates in giving to a population by no means wealthy a habit of respectability, and a look for the most part well-to-do. But among none of these will be found the institution to which we are about to refer. The institution that we are to-day concerned to honour is compact, is self-supporting, is eminently philanthropic, has done more good with very limited means than any other, ...
— The Hero of the Humber - or the History of the Late Mr. John Ellerthorpe • Henry Woodcock

... little nose all bleeding. Then two Head-nurses rushed in, and two Foster-mothers, and ever so many pairs of nursery attendants, each taking the part of their respective nurslings, and there was a terrible to-do, for, of course, one Head-nurse said it was the fault of the other Head-nurse, and so on. In fact peace did not return until the party separated and the offender, Prince Yakoob, was being joggetted back to his mother by his excited attendants, while Princess Bija was having her swollen ...
— The Adventures of Akbar • Flora Annie Steel

... my Lord," answered Dick. "My family is not unknown to you; and I am not ashamed of my family, though my parents were small Lansmere tradesfolks, and I am—ahem!—a citizen of the world, and well-to-do!" added Dick, dropping his kid gloves into his hat, and then placing the hat on the table, with the air of an old acquaintance who wishes to make himself at home. Lord L'Estrange bowed and said, as he reseated himself (Dick being firmly ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... who have had the experience can appreciate the condition of things or rather lack of things, at the close of the war, and these conditions did not only affect the ex-slaves and colored people, but covered the entire south, and many former well-to-do slave owners now found themselves without a penny they could call their own, having been stripped of everything and compelled to start all over again. Surely "war is hell"—but slavery is worse. Early in the ...
— The Life and Adventures of Nat Love - Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick" • Nat Love

... of the girls, her friends, who used to sneer at her—of Emma Baker, who was so proud, forsooth, because she was engaged to a cheesemonger, in a white apron, near Clare Market; and of Betsy Rodgers, who make such a to-do about her young man—an attorney's clerk, indeed, that went about ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray

... a small black boy among us, evidently of pure blood, for his hair was wool and his colour black as ink. His parents must have been well-to-do, for the boy had been to Europe to be educated. The officers on board and some of the ladies played with him as they would play with a monkey. He had little more sense than a monkey, perhaps less, ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas

... rooms are allowed to each house. The two end rooms are larger than the centre one, where the door opens out into the street. Sometimes these rooms are plastered, but it is seldom; and then it is in the case of the well-to-do class.[72] ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams

... the other hanging down, they carried their burdens swiftly and safely, with a swinging, undulating gait as though it were a pleasure to them to move, and would require an effort to stop rather than to walk on forever. They wore shoes because they were well-to-do people, and chose to show that they were when they went up to the convent. But for the rest they were clad in the costume of the neighbourhood,—the coarse white shift, close at the throat, the scarlet bodice, the short, dark, gathered ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford

... located on the opposite side of Paterson Park from Elwood avenue, the street on which Susan Self and her father had resided. That didn't necessarily hold significance, the park was a large one and the Professor's section a well-to-do neighborhood, while Self's was just short of ...
— Status Quo • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... disease. Clearly this is affected by heat and cold; beyond question it is largely the result of inherited susceptibilities. Poverty or wealth has much to do with disease. Many poor people die of tuberculosis, for instance, where the well-to-do would live. The span of life of the rich is greater than that of the poor. The long list of diseases from under-nourishment is mainly from the poor. Age affects disease, increasing the hazard of death. The food ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow

... united in marriage. Each has been married before to an unloved mate who has conveniently died, leaving them both free to yield to the gentle pull of long-past youthful attachment. Their feeling for each other is only a mild friendship, but that does not appear to augur ill, since they are well-to-do, and their fine estate offers them both a plenty of interesting work. Edward has a highly esteemed friend called the Captain, who is for the moment without suitable employment for his ability and energy. Edward can give him just the needed ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... portion of her equipage, Mr Abel got into a little box behind which had evidently been made for his express accommodation, and smiled at everybody present by turns, beginning with his mother and ending with the pony. There was then a great to-do to make the pony hold up his head that the bearing-rein might be fastened; at last even this was effected; and the old gentleman, taking his seat and the reins, put his hand in his pocket to find a sixpence ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens

... Americans, to get away from personal and domestic service and to enter fields of work with better wages, shorter hours, and more independence.[64] To this may be added the increasing custom, indicating prejudice of well-to-do Americans, of giving preference to ...
— The Negro at Work in New York City - A Study in Economic Progress • George Edmund Haynes

... interest mainly from the fact that it concerned their new friend. Her parents had both passed away while she was young, and Ethel had always lived with her father's father, big Will Thompson, a man reputed very well-to-do for this section, and an energetic farmer from ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne

... been 'flu' at school, so they've sent some of us off while Matron fumigates the rooms. I thought I'd find you at the farm. There was a pretty to-do when it grew dark and you didn't turn up. The Doctor went to the Vicarage to ask if you were there, and they said you'd gone along the rocks fishing. So we took the boat and came to look for you. I say, you were in a jolly old mess, ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil

... dismal letter. In Taganrog we were on friendly terms with a well-to-do Polish family. The cakes and jam I ate in their house when I was a boy at school arouse in me now the most touching reminiscences; there used to be music, young ladies, home-made liqueurs, and catching goldfinches in the immense ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov

... was a man cutting fern in the wood—a labourer—and another cutting up thistles in a field; but with the exception of men actually employed and paid, I did not meet a single person, though the lane I was following is close to several well-to-do places. I call that a well-to-do place where there are hundreds of large villas inhabited by wealthy people. It is true that the great majority of persons have to attend to business, even if they enjoy ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies

... over the other. This I regret; but after the scale of victory turned, those on the winning side had little to do or to suffer, and one's interest is certainly with the hunted fugitive, or the slave in the Bermudas, rather than with the prosperous and well-to-do citizen. ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty

... clean and handsome appearance, but on closer inspection the streets are found to be very narrow, irregular, ill-paved and filthy. Almost the only decent buildings are the governor's palace, the British residency and the houses of some well-to-do merchants. The sea immediately east of the town has a considerable depth, but its navigation is impeded by sand-banks and a bar north and west of the town, which can be passed only by vessels drawing not more than 9 ft. of water, except at spring ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... good many of a similar character was to make me thoroughly discontented with, and more than half ashamed of, my lot. And the more I mixed with Doubleday and his set, the more I felt this. They all had the appearance of such well-to-do fellows, to whom expense seemed no object. They talked in such a scoffing way of the "poor beggars" who couldn't "stand" the luxuries they indulged in, or dress in the fashionable style ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed

... these conditions, wealth and poverty, are important disease factors. Tuberculosis is now a disease of the proletariat chiefly. The measures both of prevention and cure can be and are carried out by the well-to-do, but the disease must remain where there are the conditions of the slums. Of all the conditions favoring infant mortality poverty comes first. In Erfurt, a small city of Germany, of one thousand infants born in each of the different classes, there died of the illegitimate children three ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman

... his head to ease (Lined with blue shreds a ground-nest stirred). The Surgeon came—"Here's a to-do" "Ah!" cried the Major, darting a glance, "This fellow's the one that fired and spurred Down hill, but met reserves below— My boys, ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville

... them. "Something wrong, sir, in the back kitchen," said one of the policemen answering the sergeant while he opened the street door. A few yards down the passage there was a second door, with a man on the watch by it. "There's a nice to-do downstairs," the man announced, recognizing the sergeant, and unlocking the door with a key which he took from his pocket. "The landlord at the Dairy knows his lodgers, sir," Morcross whispered to Amelius; "the place is kept like a prison." As they passed through the ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins

... terrible to-do. Expostulations, explanations, entreaties, all alike failed to move Miss Cityswell's determination. The matter began to assume a darker complexion as we thought it over. Under ordinary circumstances, every gentleman present would consider it his ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay

... received the same notice," said Brissac, coolly; "and I have given all the necessary orders. Leave me to act, and keep you quiet, so as not to wake up those who will have to be secured. To-morrow morning you will see a fine to-do and the policists much surprised." During all the first part of the night between the 21st and 22d of March, Brissac went his rounds of the city and the guards he had posted, "with an appearance of great care and solicitude." He had some trouble ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... Concerts for the general public were not common, the orchestras being required for operatic performances in private houses, which were splendidly given, as well as for state balls and other functions. The chief business of the well-to-do (and Vienna was a rich city), was to gratify a love for music. The cultivated class lived a life of elegant leisure, music being its alpha and omega. As already stated, it was an established custom with the wealthy to maintain a ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer

... yet Harris felt confident a buyer would be found. The price asked was not unreasonable, especially when it was remembered that the crop would go to the purchaser, and was now almost ready for the binder. Bradshaw was in constant touch with well-to-do farmers from the South who were on the look-out for land, and his own banking facilities would enable him to forward the cash as soon as a sale was assured, without waiting for actual payment by the purchaser. So Harris was confident in the ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead

... miller, Etienne Arnauld by name, of the race of Gotz, Quagotz, Bisigotz, Astragotz, or Gahetz, as his people are described in the legal document. He married an heiress, a Gotte (or Cagot) of Biarritz; and the newly-married well-to-do couple saw no reason why they should stand near the door in the church, nor why he should not hold some civil office in the commune, of which he was the principal inhabitant. Accordingly, he petitioned the law that he and his wife might be allowed to sit in the gallery ...
— An Accursed Race • Elizabeth Gaskell

... almost killed by bandits. The good Samaritan had found the unfortunate on a lonely, rocky road, where, to this very day, depredations are sometimes committed upon travelers, and had put the injured man into the saddle, while this merciful and well-to-do man had walked till they got to the hotel, and the wounded man was put to bed and cared for. It must have been a very superior hotel in its accommodations, for, though in the country, the landlord was paid at the ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage

... though his name is richly worth remembrance, but they let him make them habitations of such graceful proportion and of such delicate ornament that they have become shrines of pious pilgrimage with the young architects of our day who hope to house our well-to-do people fitly in country or suburbs. The decoration is oftenest spent on a porch or portal, or a frieze of peculiar refinement; or perhaps it feels its way to the carven casements or to the delicate iron-work of the transoms; the rest is a simplicity ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... little chapel around the corner and make it look as artistic as he could decorate a rich mansion in the most exclusive Riverside Drive. Jack made as much money as any of his high grade fellow traders in Harlem, and he had no home responsibilities, his widow mother being what we might call well-to-do, for she owned considerable real estate in that vicinity, yet, Jack, every Monday morning had to obtain a loan for his carfare, and more than half a dozen young ladies all around Manhattan were particularly interested in Jack's welfare. ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden

... no surprise, but said calmly, "You are a well-to-do farmer, Mr. Cheshire. You have friends of ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various

... little American buggy, drawn by a capital pair of horses. The rest of the party followed in a waggonette. Our way at first lay through the suburbs of Glenelg. The houses which we passed had a well-to-do appearance, with scarcely any shops or workmen's dwellings to be seen. The road soon began to ascend, and before long became steep. As we climbed upwards towards Belair the view became so lovely that it was impossible to resist the temptation of ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey

... despised the tongue of the conquered Saxons, but, as time progressed, the two races intermarried, and the children could hardly escape learning some Saxon words from their mothers or nurses. On the other hand, many well-to-do Saxons, like parents in later times, probably had their children taught French because ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... experiences in prison and of his home-coming, but also of the venture that he was making. "If I succeed, mother," he said, "you must come to Brunford to live. And I mean to succeed. In twelve months from now I am going to be a well-to-do man. I've learnt pretty much all there is to know about manufacturing, and I've a good partner. And I mean to get on. But don't think I've forgotten the real purpose for which I came to the North. I have not found out much about my father yet, although I've tried, tried ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking

... regard it closely, a curious reflection arises. I suppose that, fifteen hundred years ago, the child of any well-to-do Roman citizen was taught just these same things; reading and writing in his own, and, perhaps, the Greek tongue; the elements of mathematics; and the religion, morality, history, and geography current in his time. Furthermore, I do not think I err in affirming, that, if such a ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley

... of duty, too, and as much courage as any others, only they do not make any to-do about it. I have a friend—a gentleman—who drove a stage-coach through the mountains for a while rather than do nothing, and who was held up one night and jumped from the stage on the robber, and chased him down ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page

... the next twenty years than he had written in the previous five: less in quantity and far less in quality and importance. The first interruption was the completion of his elaborate education by a grand tour. His generous father, who was well-to-do rather than rich, had acquiesced in his not so far earning one penny for himself, and was now prepared to provide him with about a thousand pounds of our present money to enable him to go abroad for a year or ...
— Milton • John Bailey

... the "Made-up Tie"? I gather from the fashionable novelist that no man can wear a made-up tie and be a gentleman. He may be a worthy man, clever, well-to-do, eligible from every other point of view; but She, the refined heroine, can never get over the fact that he wears a made-up tie. It causes a shudder down her high-bred spine whenever she thinks of it. There ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome

... to going out of business, Gainor, I should be but a lost man. I am not as well-to-do as thou ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell

... at his feet—in thought only, for in reality he would not have allowed me to do it, being a statesman and a man of modern political and enlightened ideas. I returned home, and when I announced that I'd been taken back into the service and should receive a salary, heavens, what a to-do there was!..." ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... people who founded Massachusetts Colony were well-to-do people, people of good family, aristocrats in fact. They were men accustomed to rule, accustomed to unquestioning obedience from their servants and those under them. They believed that the few were meant to rule, and the many meant to obey. The idea that every ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall

... novel. Except for La Vendee, his third novel, set in France during the Revolution, all his previous works were set in England or Ireland and dealt with the upper levels of society: the nobility and the landed gentry (wealthy or impoverished), and a few well-to-do merchants—people several strata above the social levels of the characters popularized by his contemporary Dickens. Most of Trollope's early novels were set in the countryside or in provincial towns, with ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope

... of wearing mourning after a bereavement is almost universal. Even the poorest endeavor to show their grief by donning a few shreds of black, while among the well-to-do an entire new wardrobe is felt to be obligatory. However our religion bids us look forward to a more perfect existence in the beyond, however truly death may be a relief from pain and suffering, custom, that makes cowards of us all, must be followed. ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... cloth, and are good, clean, sound, copies of such works as county histories, antiquarian books, sets of the learned societies' publications and of 'standard authors.' They are such stable and solid books as you will usually find in the libraries of the well-to-do middle classes. In short they are gilt-edged securities, and command a ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan

... a vast substratum of colliers; a thick sprinkling of tradespeople intermingled with small employers of labour and diversified by elementary schoolmasters and nonconformist clergy; a higher layer of bank-managers, rich millers and well-to-do ironmasters, episcopal clergy and the managers of collieries, then the rich and sticky cherry of the local coal-owner ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence

... that. I was enjoying the joke that appeared in the same relative position in last week's issue.' Now that's the point—the whole point. The Englishman always laughs over last week's Punch, not this week's, and that is why you will find a file of that interesting journal in the home of all well-to-do Britons. It is the back number that amuses him—which merely proves that he is a deliberative person who weighs even his humor carefully before giving ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs

... after Mr. Joyce's visit, the long summer vacation began. The children liked school, but none the less did they rejoice over the coming of vacation. It brought a sense of liberty, of long-days-all-their-own-to-do-as-they-liked-with, which it was worth going to school the rest of the year to feel. Each new morning was like a separate beautiful gift, brought and laid in their hands by an invisible somebody, who must be kind and a friend, since he continually did this delightful ...
— Eyebright - A Story • Susan Coolidge

... out their own carriages or work their own horses on Sunday; and there were many more who, though they did not possess carriages, used cabs with a freedom incompatible with poverty. As a general rule, they were much better off than the people at St. Paul's, more universally prosperous and well-to-do. And they were at the same time what you might safely call well-informed people—people who read the newspapers, and sometimes the magazines, and knew what was going on. The men were almost all liberal in politics, and believed in Mr. Gladstone with enthusiasm; ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant

... beyond a competence, money pours in almost against our will, while to those who long and labour for it, it comes not, or comes so slowly the life wears out in the waiting and the working. The Zabels, now! Once well-to-do ship-builders, with a good business and a home full of curious works of art, they now appear to find it hard to obtain even the necessities of life. Such are the freaks of fortune; or should I say, ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green

... reason for choosing him was that he had been attached to the service of the Emperor's brother, Prince Henry, during the latter's visit to the United States some years before. Dr. Hill spoke German excellently, was able and distinguished, and, if not a man of great means, was sufficiently well-to-do to represent his country becomingly at the Court of Berlin. His selection was in due course communicated for agrement to the German Foreign Office, and by it, also in due course, transmitted to the Emperor. The Emperor without ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw

... particle of their adornment the neatly laid-out, carefully-weeded beds, between which ran footpaths that hardly seemed wide enough for the birds to hop on. Susanna, moreover, distributed her gifts with great partiality. The children of well-to-do parents received the best and were allowed to give voice to their desires, which were frequently lacking in modesty, without being reproved; the poorer had to be satisfied with what remained, and received nothing ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various

... homeward trip were indeed enjoyable. First, the weather was fine all the way. I do not think we had one really rough day. The ship was full; not an empty berth. A "land boom" was on at the time; there was plenty of money about, and most of the passengers were well-to-do men taking their families home to have a good time. Land booms I have heard described as speculations in land, owing to which men with, say, a few hundred pounds quickly become possessed of as many thousands (on paper, not in land). Presently the boom cracks, the thousands disappear. I am ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon

... little save the details of his small world, which consisted of accompanying prisoners to and from the courts and the jails, and seeing that they did not get away. He was not unfriendly to a particular type of prisoner—the well-to-do or moderately prosperous—for he had long since learned that it paid to be so. To-night he offered a few sociable suggestions—viz., that it was rather rough, that the jail was not so far but that they could walk, and that Sheriff Jaspers would, in all likelihood, be around or could be aroused. ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser

... regions than in the cities. The demagogue and the "boss" find farmers impossible to control to their selfish ends. Vagabonds and idlers are out of place among them. They are a hard-headed, capable, and industrious class. As a rule, American farmers are well-to-do, not only earning a good living for their families, but constantly extending their holdings. Their farms are increasingly well improved, stocked, and supplied with labor-saving and efficient machinery. Their land is constantly growing ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts

... such a glancing of lights, such a whispering of voices, such a smoking and sputtering of wood newly lighted in a damp chimney, such an airing of linen, such a scorching smell of hot warming-pans, such a domestic bustle and to-do, in short, as never dragon, griffin, unicorn, or other animal of that species presided over, since they first began to interest themselves in ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens

... advantage of looking like a respectable man. There was a certain plump, well-fed rosiness about him, which, aided by a bright-coloured dress, joined to a continual fumble in the pockets of his drab trousers, gave him the air of a 'well-to-do-in-the-world' sort of man. Moreover, he sported a velvet collar to his blue coat, a more imposing ornament than it appears at first sight. To be sure, there are two sorts of velvet collars—the legitimate ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees

... establishment at Laurens, and while there paid court to the mother of Captain Hance. So smitten was he with her charms and graces, he paid her special attention, and asked for her hand in marriage. Young Johnson was fine looking, in fact handsome, energetic, prosperous, and well-to-do young man, with no vices that were common to the young men of that day, but the great disparity in the social standing of the two caused his rejection. The family of Hance was too exclusive at the time to consent ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert

... his name, Julian Maldonado, and that of his daughter, Felicita Maldonado. He was a well-to-do merchant of elderly years. I learned that his wife was dead and that their home was in Lima. The servants made me a bed in the room adjacent to my host. The next morning I was aroused by one of them ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds

... by the draft of 1813, which drew in the sons of well-to-do families who had escaped the regular conscription, and were now formed into a corps styled the "guards of honor." This heir-presumptive, who was killed at Hanau, had married early in life a rich woman, intending thereby to ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac

... of forty-five with small eyes and a face prematurely wrinkled. He was well-to-do, but how he had gained his money no one knew. He and his wife, however, were mean ...
— Mark Mason's Victory • Horatio Alger

... idyllic happiness of the farmer in the older settlements, Maria had very naturally come to believe that she was of the same mind; now she was no longer certain about it. But whoever was right she well knew that not one of the well-to-do young fellows at St. Prime, with his Sunday coat of fine cloth and his fur collar, was the equal of Paradis in muddy boots and ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon

... to talk so disrespectful of your pa's best friend. He's well-to-do an' has got the finest place in the county. Think how nice we'd be fixed, child. We'd never have to work no more," and the widow sighed as the girl looked into her face for the ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts

... this, so to speak, gloating over your losses is even more apparent. One comparatively well-to-do woman I know, seems to have a monopoly of funerals. There is always some relation dead, and off she goes with an important air, draped from head to foot in black; the picture of "loathed melancholy" outwardly; inwardly, glowing with pride; while all her neighbors stand outside their ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren

... by Monsieur Servien, who was fully persuaded that all boys admitted to so expensive a school born of well-to-do parents, whose society could not but prove advantageous to his son's manners and morals and to his future success ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France

... afterwards: but at the time of which we speak the well-to-do class among the Eginetans prevailed over the men of the people, who had risen against them in combination with Nicodromos, and then having got them into their power they were bringing their prisoners ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 2 (of 2) • Herodotus

... remembered the funny old mistress, whose assistant she had become, whom she had loved to help in the private school. And she still had the Bible that John Field had given her. She used to walk home from chapel with John Field when she was nineteen. He was the son of a well-to-do tradesman, had been to college in London, and was to devote himself ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence

... aspirations. Few in the regiment had not, and few there were who did not know that, in spite of Mayhew's avowed dislike for him, the girl had for a time encouraged. It may have been only to pique the others, for Fitzroy was clever, well-to-do, a rising man in the service; indeed, one who had "money in the bank and men in his toils," said elder ...
— Lanier of the Cavalry - or, A Week's Arrest • Charles King

... a kind of disloyalty in fighting against the Extreme Left of a movement to which they themselves belong; but they stand aloof. The women who are chiefly attracted to the ranks of the suffragettes belong to three classes: (1) Those of the well-to-do class with no outlet for their activities, who eagerly embrace an exciting occupation which has become, not only highly respectable, but even, in a sense, fashionable; they have no natural tendency to excess, but are easily moved by their social environment; some of these are ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... Quarterly Review, existing as an organ of the political Dissenters, and for as much play of mind as may suit its being that; we have the Times existing as an organ of the common satisfied well-to-do Englishman, and for as much play of mind as may suit its being that. . . . Directly this play of mind wants to have more scope, and to forget the pressure of practical considerations a little, it is checked, it is made to feel the chain. We saw this the other day in ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith

... Corniche road, I passed a hundred or so open taxicabs containing man and woman, and fully 75 per cent. of the men had their arms around their companions, and were kissing them. These were not peasants, remember, but well-to-do persons. In England such a scene would have caused a great scandal; in most American States the police would have charged the ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken

... within call when Mrs. Ferrars is told of it, for she was sent for as soon as ever my cousins left the house, for your sister was sure she would be in hysterics too; and so she may, for what I care. I have no pity for either of them. I have no notion of people's making such a to-do about money and greatness. There is no reason on earth why Mr. Edward and Lucy should not marry; for I am sure Mrs. Ferrars may afford to do very well by her son, and though Lucy has next to nothing herself, she knows ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen

... "when I was told that I had kinsfolk well-to-do, I did indeed indulge the hope that they might help me in my life. But I am no beggar; I look for no favours at your hands, and I want none that are not freely given. For as poor as I appear, I have friends of my own that will be blithe ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson

... appear, my romantic ideals of twenty years ago now reasserted their claim upon me. It was my ambition to marry into some orthodox family, well-to-do, well connected, and with an atmosphere of Talmudic education—the kind of match of which I had dreamed before my mother died, with such modifications as the American environment ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan

... the good lands had passed, without even a will to disturb them, except at distant intervals; and the present owner was Stephen Anerley, a thrifty and well-to-do Yorkshire farmer of the olden type. Master Anerley was turned quite lately of his fifty-second year, and hopeful (if so pleased the Lord) to turn a good many more years yet, as a strong horse works his furrow. For he was strong and of a cheerful face, ruddy, square, and steadfast, built up ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore

... mean? The men were about fifty years old. They were well-to-do people, well clad, well fed, and were felt instinctively by my father to belong to the academic classes. That one of them should be dressed like a sensible Englishman dismayed my father as much as that the other should have a watch, and ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler

... ball, of course," said Lord Lackington, still smiling. "Such a to-do! All the elderly sticks ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... Dr. Fiddler almost immediately after the Supreme Court's opinion was handed down. Later on, she came down to the city with her mother, who now received a small but sufficient income through the death and will of a fairly well-to-do bachelor brother. The old lady took a house in the Bronx and once a week Mr. Bingle journeyed northward by subway and surface lines to visit his wife. A smart little doctor from Dr. Fiddler's staff made occasional visits to the Bronx and looked the part of a wiseacre ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon

... and beautiful hostess of a country hotel, who has been besieged by lovers of almost every description, she repulses them all, because although they may be well-to-do and even wealthy and powerful, they have not pleased her fancy or awakened her heart. At last she forswears love entirely, being convinced that her ...
— Zanetto and Cavalleria Rusticana • Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti, Guido Menasci, and Pietro Mascagni

... to an excellent inn. The drive out through the arched gateway is an astonishment; it is the same length and breadth as one of the gates of Copenhagen. Villages and peasants' houses here assume a more well-to-do aspect than in Zealand, where one often on the way-side imagines one sees a manure-heap heaped upon four poles, which upon nearer examination one finds is the abode of a family. On the highroads in Funen one perceives only clean houses; ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen

... tinker passing by picked it up and put it in his wallet. But by this time Tom had got his mouth clear of the batter, and he began holloaing, and making such a to-do, that the tinker, even more frightened than Tom's mother had been, threw the pudding in the road, and ran away as fast as he could run. Luckily for Tom, this second fall broke the pudding string and he was able to creep ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel

... of Scott's novels a gentleman named Front de Boeuf pulls out a Jew's tooth every time he wants more money. Both our national dentists knew that a super-tariff on anything is the very thing that makes a large number of well-to-do people want it. People bought luxuries in this country and growled at the high cost of necessities. Most folk feel rather proud of a big price for a coat or a gown or a Chesterfield, if they can get even by skimping on the price of ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino

... landlord used his utmost endeavors to oust him, simply because he belonged to an unfashionable and unpopular race. At last he came across a landlord who was broad enough to rent him a good house, and he found a quiet resting place among a set of well-to-do and well-disposed people. ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper

... from the pen of a widely known educational expert, of the character of educational facilities in the well-to-do suburb of an Eastern city. After describing two of the newer schools (1911) Prof. Hanus continues,—"The Maple Avenue School is too small for its school population, without a suitable office for the principal or a common room for the teachers, and, of course, ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing

... who have done wrong, and the law has sent them out for a punishment; those who are very bad will be unable to do any more mischief, while those who have any good in them have chances given them to lead a new life.' Why some of them are getting to be well-to-do bodies, Nic, and married and have children, who will grow up better people in a new land. Don't you fret about the convicts, boy; but take them as you find them. When you have to do with the bad ones, keep them at a distance; and when you have to do ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn

... well-to-do man, they tell me," continued the father, "and can afford to part with his money. But he won't come forward to help the girl any other gait. I'll thank you just to take what's due, Muster Fenwick, and you can give her sister the change. ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope

... discovered virtue of Thrift. He was helping it by all these great establishments of his, which made the moral merits of Thrift manifest to the most callous hearts, simply by promising to pay ten per cent. interest on all deposits. And you didn't want necessarily to belong to the well-to-do classes in order to participate in the advantages of virtue. If you had but a spare sixpence in the world and went and gave it to de Barral it was Thrift! It's quite likely that he himself believed it. He must have. It's ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad

... of the well-to-do few influences have a greater effect upon the child, and so upon the man, than that exercised by the servants of the household in which he or she is brought up. And of those influences, upstairs or downstairs, none, of course, is so potent as that ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... been exhausted, from an intuitive dread of weariness. There was nothing to see. An old woman once bobbed out of an attic, and doused the flints with water. Harassed by increasing dread of the foul nightmare of nothing-to-do, the Thier endeavoured to establish amorous intelligence with her. She responded with an indignant projection of the underjaw, evanishing rapidly. There was no resource left him but to curse her with extreme heartiness. The Thier stamped his right leg, and then his left, and remembered the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... exactly envious, but looking through the iron railing at the gay array of lanterns in the vast garden, and the glowing mansion, and hearing the hubbub of cheerful voices and the laughter, he had a dawning sense that respectability, especially well-to-do respectability, had its ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson

... pudding or potato pie. The working classes in particular view the future with misgiving. The bond of sympathy between soldier and workers is stronger than that between soldier and any other class of citizen. The houses and manners of the well-to-do daunt most Tommies. "In their houses we feel out of it somehow," they say. "There's nothin' we can talk about with the swells, and 'arf the time they be askin' us about things that's no concern of ...
— The Amateur Army • Patrick MacGill



Words linked to "To-do" :   flutter, tumultuousness, disruption, storm centre, kerfuffle, splash, well-to-do, storm center, stir, hoo-ha, earthquake, tempest, uproar, convulsion, disturbance



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