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More "Slattern" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... doors, and "fluff" in the corners. But with the blessed mother-gift of patience, point out to her, again and again, the seemingly small details, the "hall-marks" of housewifery, which, heeded, make the thrifty, neat housekeeper, and, when neglected, the slattern. As she grows older, let her straighten the parlors every morning, make the cake on Saturdays, and show her that you regard her as your right-hand woman in all matters pertaining to domestic affairs. Give her early to understand that ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... a roar of laughter and approval, and a number of slattern women showing the effects of strong ale in their faces stepped boldly forward as competitors ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... following with the rest of his luggage, and as soon as she had had a few hours' sleep, he would take her to different shops. She clung on to his arm. Paris seemed very cold and cheerless, and she did not like the tall, haggard houses, nor the slattern waiter arranging chairs in front of an early cafe, nor the humble servant clattering down the pavement in wooden shoes. She saw these things with tired eyes, and she was dimly aware of a decrepit carriage drawn by ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... that he had not married a farm at all. He had married a woman—a thin-jawed, elderly slattern, whose sole beauty was her farm. How her jaws worked! The processions and congregations of words that fell and dribbled and slid out of them! Those jaws were never quiet, and in spite of all he did not say anything. There was not anything to say, but much ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... a purse out of a sow's ear. Fan will sag right down after marriage. Mark my words. She's a slattern in her blood, and before the honeymoon is over she'll be slouching around in old slippers and her nightgown. That is plain talk, Mr. Lester, but I can't let you go into this ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... The mother and daughter, they make the pair. It's a nice thing to go to church just to leer at the men. Dare to say it isn't true, little slattern! I'll dress you in a sack, just to disgust you, you and your priests. I don't want you to be taught anything worse than you know already. Mon Dieu! Just listen to me, ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... had soundly boxed before releasing him, Jack marched along in gloomy silence until he was conducted into his small, unplastered room. His uncle stalked out and shot the ponderous bolt behind him. Passing through the kitchen, he halted to scold the black cook as a lazy slattern and then sat himself down to a lonely meal. Jack was a problem which the finicky, middle-aged bachelor had been unable to solve. He had undertaken the care of the boy after his parents had died in the same week of a mysterious fever which ravaged ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... than I could help, for I did not know what villainy he might let me in for. Moreover, I carried Zeeta with me, being ashamed to leave her at the mercy of the old bully. Japp went up to the huts and hired a slattern to mind his house, and then drank heavily for three days ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... portion of that capital which thou seemest to think hid, stalking abroad by daylight, and in the open streets. Here, thou seest the wife of our neighbor, the pastry-cook; with what an air she tosses her head and displays the bauble thou sold'st her yesterday: well, even that slattern, idle and vain, and little worthy of trust as she is, carries about with her a portion of ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Lady Poverty was fair: But she has lost her looks of late, With change of times and change of air. Ah slattern! she neglects her hair, Her gown, her shoes; she keeps no state As once when her pure ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... Cyclops halted long In tattered cloak of army pattern, And Galatea joined the throng,— A blowsy apple-vending slattern; While old Silenus staggered out From some new-fangled lunch-house handy, And bade the piper, with a shout, To strike up Yankee ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... detestable. It may be that some of Mr. Tryan's hearers had gained a religious vocabulary rather than religious experience; that here and there a weaver's wife, who, a few months before, had been simply a silly slattern, was converted into that more complex nuisance, a silly and sanctimonious slattern; that the old Adam, with the pertinacity of middle age, continued to tell fibs behind the counter, notwithstanding the new Adam's addiction to Bible-reading and family prayer: that the children in the Paddiford ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... than they were going away; but he thought their average less apathetic than that of the saloon passengers, as he leaned over the rail and looked down at them. Some one had brought out an electric battery, and the lumpish boys and slattern girls were shouting and laughing as they writhed with the current. A young mother seated flat on the deck, with her bare feet stuck out, inattentively nursed her babe, while she laughed and shouted with the rest; a man with his head tied in a shawl walked about ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... receptacles; and the plant has been endowed with the sobriquet, "John Silver Pin, fair without and foul within." In the Eastern counties of England any article of finery brought out only occasionally, and worn with ostentation by a person otherwise a slattern, is called "Joan Silver Pin." After this sense the appellation has been applied to the Scarlet Poppy. Its showy flower is so attractive to the eye, whilst its inner juice is noxious, and stains the hands of those who thoughtlessly ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... fit comes on, I seize the pen, Rough as they run, the rapid thoughts set down; Rough as they run, discharge them on the town. Hence rude, unfinished brats, before their time, Are born into this idle world of rhyme; And the poor slattern muse is brought to bed, With all her ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... gave me pain to write; they will give the judicious patron pain to read; therefore we are quits. I think, as I look over their slattern paragraphs, of that most tragic hour—it falls about 4 P.M. in the office of an evening newspaper—when the unhappy compiler tries to round up the broodings of the day and still get home in time for ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... more to contend with than the ordinary verbal persecution. But late in the afternoon, when he had grown weary from the strain of the day, his special tormentor, a burly Irishman, took occasion, in passing, to push him rudely against a pert and slattern girl, who also was foremost in the tacit league of petty annoyance. She acted as if the contact of Haldane's person was a purposed insult, and resented it by a sharp slap of ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... be effected in a day or two? The utmost thing of practical value she could do was to buy a new, gay dressing-gown and a pair of high-heeled slippers. And Andrew, conscious of waning beauty, overlooked it in the light of her new and unsuspected coquetry. Where once the slattern lolled about the little salon, now moved an attractively garbed and tidy woman. Instead of the sloven, he found a housewife who made up in zeal for lack of experience. The patriotic soldier's mate replaced the indifferent and oft-times querulous ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... whose garments are bespattered with dag or dew: generally applied to the female sex, to signify a slattern. ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... else. The hopeful, confident, and cheerful attract the elements of success. A man's front or back yard will advertise that man's ruling mood in the way it is kept. A woman at home shows her state of mind in her dress. A slattern advertises the ruling mood of hopelessness, carelessness, and lack of system. Rags, tatters, and dirt are always in the mind before being on the body. The thought that is most put out brings its corresponding visible element to crystallize about you as surely and literally as the visible ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... Cyclops halted long In tattered cloak of army pattern, And Galatea joined the throng,— A blowsy, apple-vending slattern; While old Silenus staggered out From some new-fangled lunch-house handy, And bade the piper, with a shout, To strike up Yankee ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... in Italy, and still climbing. We saw a row of narrow, slattern cottages, their backs over the sea, and in front of them marched to and fro a magnificent soldier laced in gold, with chinking spurs and a rifle. Suddenly there ran out of a cottage two little girls, aged ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... the Eating-House had put her horse away—where, she did not know; and her meals had been brought to her by a middle-aged slattern, whose probing, suspicion-laden glances had been full of mocking significance. She had heard the woman speak of her to other female employees of the place—and once she had overheard the woman refer to her ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... the praises of economy? Why profess a taste for reading, when I loathe the sight of a sober volume? Why force myself up to a pitch of neatness, when my wardrobe would, by a single glance, prove me a slattern? ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... to her surprise the Stranger greets her with a request for a favor. "Give me a drink," he says. Christ was thirsty. He wanted a draught from Jacob's well. But far more He wanted a draught from this woman's heart. She was a slattern, an outcast. She was lower, in the estimation of the average Jew, than a street dog. Yet this weary Christ desired the gift of her burnt out and impoverished affections. So He says, "Give ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... horrible stories of witches and vampires, are the general subjects of the songs. The lament of the young bride who is treated almost like a slave by her father and mother-in-law, has a chorus: "Thumping, scolding, never lets his daughter sleep"; "Up, you slattern! up, you sloven, sluggish slut!" A wife entreats: "Oh, my husband, only for good cause beat thou thy wife, not for little things. Far away is my father dear, and farther still my mother." The husband who is tired of his wife sings: "Thanks, thanks to the ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... dark with that gawky country sweetheart has given her the fever that her betters have been having since the Avon come over bank. A wet autumn is more to be feared than Gammer's witches. Poor luck it is the lubberfolk aren't after the girl in truth; a slattern maid she is, her hearth unswept and house-door always open and the cream ever a-chill. The brownie-folk, I promise you, Will, pinch ...
— A Warwickshire Lad - The Story of the Boyhood of William Shakespeare • George Madden Martin
... ago given 'Melia the go-by, they learned, in return for the ham and the tea; and they got her address and hunted her up in a back-street behind the Queen's Crescent, and W. Keyse failed to recognise his charmer of old in a red-nosed, frowsy slattern, married to a sweated German in the baking-trade and mother of two of the dirtiest kids you ever——! And Mrs. Keyse, to whom her William had expatiated upon the subject of his family, maintained a portentous dumbness, punctuated with ringing sniffs, during ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... a standstill. He had thought it all out beforehand, and so arranged it that it should lead up, in a shrewd, dignified way, to the matter itself. But now it was all in a muddle like a slattern's pocket-handkerchief, and the farmer did not look as if he had understood a single word of it. He lay there, taking a cake now and then, and looking helplessly ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... heard or e'en thought Mrs. Grundy Would sneer at the set of a bonnet or tress; Or say that she thought Miss Freelove's new pattern Of laces, or collars, or yard flowing sleeves, Looked more like the dress of a real Miss Slattern And not "so becoming"'s ...
— Nothing to Eat • Horatio Alger [supposed]
... dark cloak, having a wide and ample collar, which he threw over his head, as though anxious for concealment. The Doctor, having retired into his study, was not to be disturbed; but the stranger was urgent for admission, while Lettice Gostwich, Dee's help-at-all-work, a pert ungracious slattern, was fully resolved not to permit his ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... O slattern place, Is glory in your slack disgrace? Plump quack doctors sell their pills, Gentle grafters sell brass watches, Silly anarchists yell their ills. Shall we be as weird as these? In the breezes ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... slattern, who was known by the unpleasant name of Rya's Pup, declared that Walter Butler had gone to Johnstown to join St. Leger before Stanwix, and that the Tories would give the rebels such a drubbing that we would all be crawling on our bellies yelling ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... off at the lane-end towards his humble and dirty cottage in Main's Court. I might introduce you to his home,—but "home" it could scarcely be called. It was full of squalor and untidiness, confusion and dirty children, where a slattern-looking woman was scolding. Ransom's cottage, On the contrary, was a home. It was snug, trig, and neat; the hearthstone was fresh sanded; the wife, though her hands were full of work, was clean and tidy; and her husband, ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... of Tuesdays and Wednesdays, she hoped to help in some house with the cleaning, or in some slattern's abode with the weekly wash, for, as all know, there are some such sluts that the washing gets put off from day to day, till Saturday finds it still cluttering the washhouse instead of being brought in clean and sweet ...
— The White Riband - A Young Female's Folly • Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse
... But she has lost her looks of late, With change of times and change of air. Ah slattern, she neglects her hair, Her gown, her shoes. She keeps no state As once when her ...
— Later Poems • Alice Meynell
... nightgowns and wrappers be trimmed and made becoming just as much as dresses? A sick woman who isn't neat is a disagreeable object. Do, to please me, send for something pretty, and let me see you looking nice again. I can't bear to have my Helen turn into a slattern.'" ...
— What Katy Did • Susan Coolidge
... brisk grey slattern of a woman, Pattering along in her loose-heel'd clogs, Pushed the brass-barr'd door of a public-house; The spring went hard against her; hand and knee Shoved their weak best. As the door poised ajar, Hullabaloo of talking men burst ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... old carousal, and with eyes A hard, hot blue; her hair a frowsy flame, Bold, dowdy-bosomed, from her widow-frame She leans, her mouth all insult and all lies. Or slattern-slippered and in sluttish gown, With ribald mirth and words too vile to name, A new Doll Tearsheet, glorying in her shame, Armed with her Falstaff now she takes the town. The flaring lights of alley-way saloons, The reek of hideous gutters and black oaths Of drunkenness ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... I,—here's a crying shame! here's an interesting case for professors of moral hygiene! An apt, intelligent little man, with an empty mind, and a by-no-means overloaded stomach, I'll engage,—with a pride-paralyzed father, and a beer-bewitched slattern of a mother,—with his living to get, in San Francisco, too, and the world to make friends with,—who has never enjoyed the peculiar advantages to be derived from the society of little dirty boys, never been ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... I told young Gordon I wouldn't sanction, "The Woman spouting politics, the Man returning to a slattern's home." ...
— The Master of Mrs. Chilvers • Jerome K. Jerome
... teacher of dishonesty. Is it largely a matter of sham and pretense for the sake of social glory? Does it prefer a cheap veneer to a slowly acquired genuine article? Is the front appearance that of a dandy while the backyard looks like a slattern? Is the home striving for more than it deserves? Is it trying to get more out of life than it puts in? Evading taxes, avoiding duties, a community parasite, does it commend to children the arts of social cheating and lying? ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... what devotion you adore 'em! Treat me with so much complaisance, As fits a princess in romance! By your example and assistance, The fellows learn to know their distance. Sir Arthur, since you set the pattern, No longer calls me snipe and slattern, Nor dares he, though he were a duke, Offend me with the least rebuke. Proceed we to your preaching [5] next! How nice you split the hardest text! How your superior learning shines Above our neighbouring dull divines! At Beggar's Opera not so full pit Is ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... priest's daughter, he was fain, and went to Mitri's house to ask for water. The girl herself appeared in answer to his call, but, seeing who it was, ran back in terror, crying: "O mother, help! It is the Brutestant." Whereat a slattern dame came forth instead of her, and filled his can for him, ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... 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 left alone, except for the spasmodic appearances of the red-haired slattern. Gradually the dust began to settle and thicken on the dried cat-tails in the china vases upon the mantel; the "prize" red geranium dropped its blossoms and withered upon the sill; the soaking dish-cloths lay in a sloppy ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... her slowly over again from the blondine hair and the ash-colored V of unclean skin and waistless slop of slattern wrapper to clock work stockings and high ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... depicted a remarkable slattern, reader. Not at all. Hortense Moore (she was Mr. Moore's sister) was a very orderly, economical person. The petticoat, camisole, and curl-papers were her morning costume, in which, of forenoons, she had always been accustomed to "go her household ways" in her own country. She did not choose to ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... naturally to look upward at the stars than downward at the mud. The "naturalistic" writers are deceived in thinking that they represent life as it really is. If their thesis were true, the human race would have dwindled to extinction long ago. Surely a photograph of a slattern in the gutter is no more natural than a picture of Rosalind in the Forest of Arden; and no accuracy of imitated actuality can make it ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... last made her appearance, at once a slattern and a coquette; much emaciated, but still carrying the remains of beauty. She made twenty apologies for being seen in such odious dishabille, but hoped to be excused, as she had stayed out all night at the gardens with the countess, who was excessively fond of the horns. "And, ...
— English Satires • Various
... longed, as she had never longed before, to confront him in all her beauty; to be able to say to him, 'Choose where you will, can you buy form or face like this?' Instead she stood before him, prisoned in this shapeless dress, a slattern, a drab, a thing whereat to ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... failed in her work on her own farm, though she has brought untold blessings of progressiveness to the other farms around Ballygurteen; she has lost the appreciation of her husband. She whom we loved for a personality as winning as that of an Emma or a Tess is now a drudge, almost a slattern, gray-haired, hopeless, almost hated by a brutal husband. The loveless marriage has proved a curse. Upon the woman of his dreams so dethroned comes Brian Connor, now a successful novelist, and, finding how things are, falls, for all his intended restraint, into a fight with Tom, whom ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... a demi-god who hits the earth only in high places; the other to wed a wingless angel who will make his Edenic bower one long-drawn sigh of ecstatic bliss. The result is that one is tied up to a slattern who slouches around the house with her hair on tins, in a dirty collar and with a dime novel, a temper like aqua-fortis and a voice like a cat-fight; the other a hoodlum who comes home from the lodge at 2 a.m. and whoops and howls ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... known them shall know them no more forever; but in another sense it has never ceased to know them. I can't say how it is, exactly, but though you don't see them in Boston, you feel them. But here in New York—our dear, immense, slattern mother—who feels anything of the character of her great children? Who remembers in these streets Bryant or Poe or Hallock or Curtis or Stoddard or Stedman, or the other poets who once dwelt in them? Who remembers even ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... a too-short smock that showed long spider-thin legs above her low leather boots was playing with some sort of shimmery crystals, spilling them out into patterns and scooping them up again from the uneven stones of the floor. One of the women was a fat, creased slattern, whose jewels and dyed furs did not disguise her ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... pair of patent leather shoes, while he in return expected to wed a wingless angel who would make his Edenic bower one long drawn out sigh of aesthetic bliss. The result is very often that he is tied to a slattern, who slouches around the house with her hair in tins, a dime novel in her hand, with a temper like aqua fortis and a voice like a cat fight—a voice that would make a cub wolf climb a tree; a fashionable butterfly, whose heart is in her finery and her feathers; ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... that her appearance of fragrant immaculateness, when dressed, was due to a natural clearness of skin and eye, and to the way her blond hair swept away in a clean line from her forehead. For the rest, she was a slattern, with a vocabulary of invective that would have been a credit to any of the habitues of ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... a sulky slattern, indifferent, lazy, smoldering with passion,—dangerous. The sensuous quality of her beauty had never been more apparent than it was in the soiled cheap mountebank fineries which she had worn for so many performances ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... come under the influence of the dear woman who watched over me that first season, Mrs. Bradshaw, the mother of Blanche, one of the most devoted actresses I ever saw, and a good woman besides. From her I learned that because one is an actress it is not necessary to be a slattern. She used to say: ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... personal cleanliness. A young man who neglects his bath will neglect his mind; he will quickly deteriorate in every way. A young woman who ceases to care for her appearance in minutest detail will soon cease to please. She will fall little by little until she degenerates into an ambitionless slattern. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... Business World Self-Confidence The Slattern Following the Fashions Gaudy Attraction The Business Suit The Business Dress and Coat An Appeal ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... disease occasioned by incompetent mothers and nurses! Commit a child to the care of a worthless ignorant woman, and no culture in after-life will remedy the evil you have done. Let the mother be idle, vicious, and a slattern; let her home be pervaded by cavilling, petulance, and discontent, and it will become a dwelling of misery—a place to fly from, rather than to fly to; and the children whose misfortune it is to be brought up there, will be morally dwarfed and deformed—the ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... he had not married a farm at all. He had married a woman—a thin-jawed, elderly slattern, whose sole beauty was her farm. How her jaws worked! The processions and congregations of words that fell and dribbled and slid out of them! Those jaws were never quiet, and in spite of all he did not ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... had put her horse away—where, she did not know; and her meals had been brought to her by a middle-aged slattern, whose probing, suspicion-laden glances had been full of mocking significance. She had heard the woman speak of her to other female employees of the place—and once she had overheard the woman refer to her as "that ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... to nod three times," the little slattern replied; "but she looked like nothink but a dead one ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... Violet's appearance. He had accepted the fact that, in all household matters, his wife was a slut and a slattern; yet it staggered him when it first dawned on him that, in the awful deterioration of Granville and the Baby, the standard of her own toilette had gradually lowered. Then gradually he got inured to it. The tousled, ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... untold blessings of progressiveness to the other farms around Ballygurteen; she has lost the appreciation of her husband. She whom we loved for a personality as winning as that of an Emma or a Tess is now a drudge, almost a slattern, gray-haired, hopeless, almost hated by a brutal husband. The loveless marriage has proved a curse. Upon the woman of his dreams so dethroned comes Brian Connor, now a successful novelist, and, finding how things are, falls, for all his intended ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... na been here more than a week when theer comes a young woman to moind a loom i' th' next room to me, an' this young woman bein' pretty an' modest takes my fancy. She wur na loike th' rest o' the wenches—loud talkin' an' slattern i' her ways; she wur just quiet loike and nowt else. First time I seed her I says to mysen, 'Theer's a lass 'at's seed trouble;' an' somehow every toime I seed her afterward I says to mysen, 'Theer's a lass 'at's seed trouble.' It wur i' her eye—she had a soft loike brown eye, Mester—an' ...
— "Surly Tim" - A Lancashire Story • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... tell him," Lady Anne said graciously. She did not object to the honest pride in Walter Gray. He was probably a superior man for his station, being Mary's father. As for that poor slattern, Lady Anne had lived too long in the world to be amazed by the marriages men made, either in her own exalted circle ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... spindle-shanks. And just look at that fool Akoulna. Wasn't the girl a regular untidy slattern, and just look at her now! Where has it all come from? Yes, he has fitted her out. She's grown so smart, so puffed up, just like a bubble that's ready to burst. And, though she's a fool, she's got it into her head, ...
— The Power of Darkness • Leo Tolstoy
... dress, Would be if she heard or e'en thought Mrs. Grundy Would sneer at the set of a bonnet or tress; Or say that she thought Miss Freelove's new pattern Of laces, or collars, or yard flowing sleeves, Looked more like the dress of a real Miss Slattern And not "so becoming"'s ...
— Nothing to Eat • Horatio Alger [supposed]
... the stately farmhouse beauty of thirty years ago, was a stooping, haggard, broken-down wreck—not a slattern, but an overworked drudge, with a face fitter for seventy than for fifty years old, and a ghastly look ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... beauty, you know, a little on the wane, and wanting to be elaborately made up and curled and powdered and painted, and all that. She's a little of a slattern underneath the surface, you know, and doesn't bear to be taken unawares—mustn't be seen for at least an hour or two after she has got out of bed. All ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... Miss Scatcherd wrote in conspicuous characters on a piece of pasteboard the word "Slattern," and bound it like a phylactery round Helen's large, mild, intelligent, and benign-looking forehead. She wore it till evening, patient, unresentful, regarding it as a deserved punishment. The moment Miss Scatcherd withdrew after afternoon school, I ran to Helen, ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... married, and with whom she lived so happily at first, having three women working in her laundry, but afterward sinking with her husband, as was inevitable, to the degradation of her surroundings. He, gradually conquered by alcohol, brought by it to madness and death; she herself perverted, become a slattern, her moral ruin completed by the return of Lantier, living in the tranquil ignominy of a household of three, thenceforward the wretched victim of want, her accomplice, to which she at last succumbed, ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... his "assessments," that I should never be anxious now for fear his sermons might not please the "prominent" members of his church. But the most refreshing, rejuvenating of all was the thought that at last I could be a little less good. I looked at the slattern-formed men and women sitting in still rows across the little church, with their faces lit like candles from the preacher's face, and I experienced a peaceful remoteness from them and from the ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... witches and vampires, are the general subjects of the songs. The lament of the young bride who is treated almost like a slave by her father and mother-in-law, has a chorus: "Thumping, scolding, never lets his daughter sleep"; "Up, you slattern! up, you sloven, sluggish slut!" A wife entreats: "Oh, my husband, only for good cause beat thou thy wife, not for little things. Far away is my father dear, and farther still my mother." The husband who is tired of his wife ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... dollar devoted to housekeeping. She studied cooking in the best schools the city afforded. She meant to show her Knight a thing or two in this line when the time came. His wife would not be an ignorant slattern, the victim of incompetent servants. No servant could fool her. She would know the business of the house down to its ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... and with eyes A hard, hot blue; her hair a frowsy flame, Bold, dowdy-bosomed, from her widow-frame She leans, her mouth all insult and all lies. Or slattern-slippered and in sluttish gown, With ribald mirth and words too vile to name, A new Doll Tearsheet, glorying in her shame, Armed with her Falstaff now she takes the town. The flaring lights of ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... anxious for concealment. The Doctor, having retired into his study, was not to be disturbed; but the stranger was urgent for admission, while Lettice Gostwich, Dee's help-at-all-work, a pert ungracious slattern, was fully resolved not to permit his access ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... crying shame! here's an interesting case for professors of moral hygiene! An apt, intelligent little man, with an empty mind, and a by-no-means overloaded stomach, I'll engage,—with a pride-paralyzed father, and a beer-bewitched slattern of a mother,—with his living to get, in San Francisco, too, and the world to make friends with,—who has never enjoyed the peculiar advantages to be derived from the society of little dirty boys, never been admitted to the felicity of popular songs, nor exercised his pluck in a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... rapping at the black doors of the ash-bud, and the scent of the gean-tree flourish hung round the road by the river, vague, sweet, haunting, like a recollection of the magic and forgotten gardens of youth. Over the high and numerous hills, mountains of deer and antique forest, went the mist, a slattern, trailing a ragged gown. The river sucked below the banks and clamoured on the cascades, drawn unwillingly to the sea, the old gluttonous sea that must ever be robbing the glens of their gathered waters. And the birds ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... have depicted a remarkable slattern, reader. Not at all. Hortense Moore (she was Mr. Moore's sister) was a very orderly, economical person. The petticoat, camisole, and curl-papers were her morning costume, in which, of forenoons, she had always been accustomed to "go her household ways" in her own country. She did not choose ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... chickens come home to roost at last. The first Mrs. Kilquhanity had sworn, with an oath that took no account of the Cure's presence, that not a stick nor a stone nor a rag nor a penny should that Irish slattern have ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... women whom I met in towns, this farmer's wife was a slattern. She cared neither about her own appearance nor the look of her house. She did not wash her children. But she worked. The land was well tilled and her cattle well tended. There was no sign of neglect in the fields. Things might have been a little better, perhaps, the place more ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... improvised, That they've utterly ungrammaticised Our ungrammatical grammar). And the coals Burn holes, Or make spots like moles, And my lily-white tints, as black as your hat turn, And the housemaid (a matricide, will-forging slattern), Rolls The rolls From the plate, in shoals, When they're put to warm in front of the coals; And no one with me condoles, For the butter stains on my beautiful pattern. But the coals and rolls, and sometimes soles, Dropp'd ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... shave half as often as you used to, do you? No, nowadays you think you have me safe and don't have to bother about being attractive. If I had a music-box I could put your face into it and play all sorts of tunes, only I prefer to look at it. You are a slattern and a jay-bird and a joy forever. And besides, the first Stapleton seems to have blundered somehow into the House of Burgesses, so that entitles me to be a Colonial Dame on my father's side, ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... told young Gordon I wouldn't sanction, "The Woman spouting politics, the Man returning to a slattern's home." ...
— The Master of Mrs. Chilvers • Jerome K. Jerome
... addition to natural vanity, on the score of beauty, she was a good deal troubled with purse-pride, which, with a foolish susceptibility of flattery, was a leading feature in her disposition. In addition to this, she was an inveterate and incurable slattern, though a gay and lively one; and we need scarcely say that whatever she did in the shape of benevolence or charity, in most instances owed its origin to the influences of the weaknesses she ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... me about that slattern! I'd like to get my hands on her, that's all. I'd give that crittur a piece o' my mind! You'd like to be promoted into her class, would you? To go sportin' all night with the fellows? Just to be thinkin' o' ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... having come under the influence of the dear woman who watched over me that first season, Mrs. Bradshaw, the mother of Blanche, one of the most devoted actresses I ever saw, and a good woman besides. From her I learned that because one is an actress it is not necessary to be a slattern. She used ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... listened to the brawl, his chickens come home to roost at last. The first Mrs. Kilquhanity had sworn, with an oath that took no account of the Cure's presence, that not a stick nor a stone nor a rag nor a penny should that Irish slattern have ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... with his deepest bow. He was dazzled. He had come to this dreary place to talk politics. But now this was out of the question. And he began explaining to the Princess; Mila he had fancied was some slattern waiting on the old fanatic of a prince. He told Mila this in a few words, and soon the pair laughed and chatted. In the meantime Karospina, who had finished the letter, began to pace the apartment. Apparently he had ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... sense-degrading She, Who swayed and sickened, scourged and scarified The unwilling slaves of fashion and discomfort A quarter of a century since! She sat, A spectral, scraggy, beet-nosed, ankle-less, Obtrusive-panted, splay-foot, slattern-shape, Of grim Medusa-faced Immodesty, Caged cumbrously in a stiff, swaying, swollen, Shin-scarifying, hose-revealing frame Of wide-meshed metal, like a monster mousetrap— Hideous, indecent, awkward! Oh, I knew her— This loathly revenant, revisiting The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 21, 1893 • Various
... make me so," said Margaret, "or I should let you alone, and leave you a slattern. We should both hate it so! No, don't make me your mistress, Ethel dear—let me be your sister and play-fellow still, ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... afternoon he went to the inn and found a good number of villagers in the tap-room. He learned from them that there were cromlechs and Druid altars within walking distance of Tara, and decided on a walking tour. He wandered through the beautiful country, interested in Ireland's slattern life, touched by the kindness and simplicity of the people. "Poor people," he thought, "how touching it is to find them learning their own language," and he began to think out a series of articles ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... apparently find nothing so good as the facts of their native life. The more "commonplace" these facts the better they seemed to like them. Evidently they believed that there was a poetry under the rude outside of their mountaineers, their slattern country wives, their shy rustic men and maids, their grotesque humorists, their wild religionists, even their black freedmen, which was worth more than the poetastery of the romantic fiction of their fathers. In this strong faith, which need not have been a conscious creed, ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... and Simonne, his mistress and household drudge, entered the room. She was fully twenty years younger than himself, and under the slattern appearance which life in that house had imposed upon her there were vestiges of ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... one-eyed Cyclops halted long In tattered cloak of army pattern, And Galatea joined the throng,— A blowsy apple-vending slattern; While old Silenus staggered out From some new-fangled lunch-house handy, And bade the piper, with a shout, To strike up ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... For the first time in her life the flabby, foolish woman had to do with a person of firm will and bright intelligence; not being vicious of temper, she necessarily felt herself submitting to domination, and darkly surmised that the rule might in some way be for her good. All the sluggard and the slattern in her, all the obstinacy of lifelong habits, hung back from the new things which Miss Rodney was forcing upon her acceptance, but she was no longer moved by active resentment. To be told that she cooked badly had long ceased to be an insult, ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... a gipsy girl, with a pair of fine roguish eyes, came up, and, as usual, offered to tell our fortunes. I could not but admire a certain degree of slattern elegance about the baggage. Her long black silken hair was curiously plaited in numerous small braids, and negligently put up in a picturesque style that a painter might have been proud to have devised. Her dress was of a figured chintz, rather ragged, and ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... arrived home he found that Helen had been having her troubles, too. Mrs. Finn had disappointed her and sent a frowsy female, who exuded vile whisky and the unpleasant odors of a slattern. ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... "Sorry to have been out. Kid Fuller's lying over at Deger's. You know he was shot last night. He's got fever to-day. When Bland's away I have to nurse all these shot-up boys, and it sure takes my time. Have you been waiting here alone? Didn't see that slattern girl ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... John there dwelt his sister Peg, Once a wild lass as ever shook a leg When the blithe bagpipe blew—but, soberer now, She DOUCELY span her flax and milk'd her cow. And whereas erst she was a needy slattern, Nor now of wealth or cleanliness a pattern, Yet once a month her house was partly swept, And once a week a plenteous board she kept. And, whereas, eke, the vixen used her claws And teeth of yore, on slender provocation. She now was grown amenable to laws, A quiet ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... difficult. He discovered that Bella almost never washed and that her appearance of fragrant immaculateness, when dressed, was due to a natural clearness of skin and eye, and to the way her blond hair swept away in a clean line from her forehead. For the rest, she was a slattern, with a vocabulary of invective that would have been a credit to any of the habitues of ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... mamma, how good you are! Mamma, I promise you I'll never be a slattern. Here is more cotton than I can use up in a great while—every number, I do think; and needles, oh, the needles! what a parcel of them! and, mamma! what a lovely scissors! Did you choose it, mamma, or did it belong to ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... and squalid than they were going away; but he thought their average less apathetic than that of the saloon passengers, as he leaned over the rail and looked down at them. Some one had brought out an electric battery, and the lumpish boys and slattern girls were shouting and laughing as they writhed with the current. A young mother seated flat on the deck, with her bare feet stuck out, inattentively nursed her babe, while she laughed and shouted ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... shows of itself, that the Meg Dods of the tale cannot be identified with her namesake Jenny Dods, who kept the inn at Howgate,[I-B] on the Peebles road; for Jenny, far different from our heroine, was unmatched as a slattern. ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... are finger-smears on the doors, and "fluff" in the corners. But with the blessed mother-gift of patience, point out to her, again and again, the seemingly small details, the "hall-marks" of housewifery, which, heeded, make the thrifty, neat housekeeper, and, when neglected, the slattern. As she grows older, let her straighten the parlors every morning, make the cake on Saturdays, and show her that you regard her as your right-hand woman in all matters pertaining to domestic affairs. Give her early to understand that it is to her interest to keep her father's house looking neat, ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... at the mud. The "naturalistic" writers are deceived in thinking that they represent life as it really is. If their thesis were true, the human race would have dwindled to extinction long ago. Surely a photograph of a slattern in the gutter is no more natural than a picture of Rosalind in the Forest of Arden; and no accuracy of imitated actuality can make it more significant ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... toward her. Mr. Blight smiled, and well he might, for this slip of a girl gazing up at him was of his own blood, and all that was good in that blood found expression in her sweetness. He had come prepared to see a slattern, ill-fed, unkempt, the true daughter of shiftless parents and a wretched mountain home; he had found a graceful little body, and he wanted to take her into his ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... me to nod three times," the little slattern replied; "but she looked like nothink but a dead one till she got ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... country sweetheart has given her the fever that her betters have been having since the Avon come over bank. A wet autumn is more to be feared than Gammer's witches. Poor luck it is the lubberfolk aren't after the girl in truth; a slattern maid she is, her hearth unswept and house-door always open and the cream ever a-chill. The brownie-folk, I promise you, Will, pinch black ...
— A Warwickshire Lad - The Story of the Boyhood of William Shakespeare • George Madden Martin
... farm, though she has brought untold blessings of progressiveness to the other farms around Ballygurteen; she has lost the appreciation of her husband. She whom we loved for a personality as winning as that of an Emma or a Tess is now a drudge, almost a slattern, gray-haired, hopeless, almost hated by a brutal husband. The loveless marriage has proved a curse. Upon the woman of his dreams so dethroned comes Brian Connor, now a successful novelist, and, finding how things are, falls, for all his intended ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... Cadine," she said. "Oh, it's no use to deny it! I saw you together this morning in the tripe market, watching men breaking the sheep's heads. I can't understand what attraction a good-looking young fellow like you can find in such a slipshod slattern as Cadine. Now then, go and tell Monsieur Gavard that he had better come at once, while ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... just to be always sounding the praises of economy? Why profess a taste for reading, when I loathe the sight of a sober volume? Why force myself up to a pitch of neatness, when my wardrobe would, by a single glance, prove me a slattern? ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... and looked at Billy. She was very fat, and the red of her face deepened to purple unevenly about the sides of her nose. Her eyes were bright and black. She had opened a button or two at the top of her dress, and her general appearance, from her grey hair to her slattern heels, was disordered. Her cap had fallen off on to the ground, and Mr. Blee noticed that her parting was as a broad turnpike road much tramped upon by Time. The room smelt stuffy beyond its wont ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... fear his sermons might not please the "prominent" members of his church. But the most refreshing, rejuvenating of all was the thought that at last I could be a little less good. I looked at the slattern-formed men and women sitting in still rows across the little church, with their faces lit like candles from the preacher's face, and I experienced a peaceful remoteness from them ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... nothing more to contend with than the ordinary verbal persecution. But late in the afternoon, when he had grown weary from the strain of the day, his special tormentor, a burly Irishman, took occasion, in passing, to push him rudely against a pert and slattern girl, who also was foremost in the tacit league of petty annoyance. She acted as if the contact of Haldane's person was a purposed insult, and resented it by a sharp ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... it closer and rocked it against her shrunken breast a second and older woman appeared in the doorway, a witch-faced slattern who inquired ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... have made acquaintance. A dunce he always was, it is true; for learning cannot be acquired by leaving school and entering at college as a fellow-commoner; but he was now (in his own peculiar manner) as great a dandy as he before had been a slattern, and when he entered his sitting-room to join his two guests, arrived scented and arrayed in fine linen, and perfectly splendid ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... suffering and disease occasioned by incompetent mothers and nurses! Commit a child to the care of a worthless ignorant woman, and no culture in after-life will remedy the evil you have done. Let the mother be idle, vicious, and a slattern; let her home be pervaded by cavilling, petulance, and discontent, and it will become a dwelling of misery—a place to fly from, rather than to fly to; and the children whose misfortune it is to be brought up there, will be morally dwarfed and deformed—the cause of misery to themselves as ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... the year of grace 1750, and old Mother Corrigan sat outside her door in Slattern Alley, smoking her short black pipe with a relish; and't was a good day with her, for she had told his fortune that morning for Squire Tyrconnel, on his way to fight a duel in the Phcenix Park with Lawyer Daly; and when it was ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... not meaner, employments, which will qualify her to be a good mistress of a family, a good wife, and a good mother; for what can be more disgraceful to a woman than either, through negligence of dress, to be found a learned slattern; or, through ignorance of household-management, to be known to be a stranger ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... make a purse out of a sow's ear. Fan will sag right down after marriage. Mark my words. She's a slattern in her blood, and before the honeymoon is over she'll be slouching around in old slippers and her nightgown. That is plain talk, Mr. Lester, but I can't let you go into this trap with ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable. It may be that some of Mr. Tryan's hearers had gained a religious vocabulary rather than religious experience; that here and there a weaver's wife, who, a few months before, had been simply a silly slattern, was converted into that more complex nuisance, a silly and sanctimonious slattern; that the old Adam, with the pertinacity of middle age, continued to tell fibs behind the counter, notwithstanding the new Adam's ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... of eating utensils on the tables. Nevertheless Buck Daniels was not dismayed. He selected a corner-table by instinct and smote upon the surface with the flat of his hand. It made a report like the spat of a forty-five; heavy footsteps approached, a door flung open, and a cross-eyed slattern stood in the opening. At the sight of Buck Daniels sitting with his hands on his hips and his sombrero pushed back to a good-natured distance on his head ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... A little brisk grey slattern of a woman, Pattering along in her loose-heel'd clogs, Pushed the brass-barr'd door of a public-house; The spring went hard against her; hand and knee Shoved their weak best. As the door poised ajar, Hullabaloo of talking men burst out, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... had not seen in many months before. She holds her complexion still, but in everything else, even in this her new house and the best rooms in it, and her closet which her husband with some vainglory took me to show me, she continues the eeriest slattern that ever I knew in my life. By and by we to see an experiment of killing a dogg by letting opium into his hind leg. He and Dr. Clerke did fail mightily in hitting the vein, and in effect did not do the business after many trials; but with the little ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... servant who, by dint of displaying her self-esteem and self-respect even in her garb, reflects in her person the honor and the pride of her masters. From day to day she sank nearer to the level of that abject, shameless creature whose dress drags in the gutter—a dirty slattern. ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... cancer From being bruised and continually bruised, And swells into a purplish mass Like growths on stalks of corn. Here was I, a carpenter, mired in a bog of life Into which I walked, thinking it was a meadow, With a slattern for a wife, and poor Minerva, my daughter, Whom you tormented and drove to death. So I crept, crept, like a snail through the days Of my life. No more you hear my footsteps in the morning, Resounding on the hollow sidewalk ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... providential thing, as you call it, to find such a mother in the bargain! Now I might have discovered a slattern, or a scold, or a woman of bad character; or one that never went to church; or even one that swore and drank; for, begging your pardon, Miss Lucy, just such creatur's are to be met with; whereas, instead of any of these disagreeable ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... garden, in which the seed is planted, which brings forth the flower of social joy. A woman who is the soul of a beautiful home is a power in society. No matter what her talents may be, let it be known that she is a slattern at home, and she is without influence. The pen may serve as a feather to adorn her social life, but it looks mean when the use of it causes the neglect of ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... them shall know them no more forever; but in another sense it has never ceased to know them. I can't say how it is, exactly, but though you don't see them in Boston, you feel them. But here in New York—our dear, immense, slattern mother—who feels anything of the character of her great children? Who remembers in these streets Bryant or Poe or Hallock or Curtis or Stoddard or Stedman, or the other poets who once dwelt in them? Who remembers ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... the details of cooking and the most economical administration of every dollar devoted to housekeeping. She studied cooking in the best schools the city afforded. She meant to show her Knight a thing or two in this line when the time came. His wife would not be an ignorant slattern, the victim of incompetent servants. No servant could fool her. She would know the business of the house ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... of death's fingers. How happy he is when he knows that he will get well! In prospect, as his wound heals into the scar which will be the lasting decoration of his courage, his home and all that it means to him. What kind of a home has he, this private soldier? In the slums, with a slattern wife, or in a cottage with a flower garden in front, only a few minutes' walk from the green fields of the English countryside? But we set out to tell you about the kind of inferno in which this man got ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... greeted with a roar of laughter and approval, and a number of slattern women showing the effects of strong ale in their faces stepped boldly forward as competitors ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... stately farmhouse beauty of thirty years ago, was a stooping, haggard, broken-down wreck—not a slattern, but an overworked drudge, with a face fitter for seventy than for fifty years old, and a ghastly look ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... togs, by the way, make me feel rather shoddy and slattern. I intend to swing in a little stronger for personal adornment, as soon as we get things going again. When a woman gives up, in that respect, she's surely a goner. And I may be a hard-handed and ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... you know, a little on the wane, and wanting to be elaborately made up and curled and powdered and painted, and all that. She's a little of a slattern underneath the surface, you know, and doesn't bear to be taken unawares—mustn't be seen for at least an hour or two after she has got out of bed. All the more ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... capture a demi-god who hits the earth only in high places; the other to wed a wingless angel who will make his Edenic bower one long-drawn sigh of ecstatic bliss. The result is that one is tied up to a slattern who slouches around the house with her hair on tins, in a dirty collar and with a dime novel, a temper like aqua-fortis and a voice like a cat-fight; the other a hoodlum who comes home from the lodge at 2 a.m. and ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the perforated spire of St. Mary's, and all the City spires behind it now growing cold in the east, the other half seeing the spire of St. Martin's above the chimney-pots aloft in a sky of cream pink. Stalwart policemen urged along groups of slattern boys and girls; and after vulgar remonstrance these took the hint and disappeared down strange passages. Suddenly Esther came face to face with a woman whom she recognised ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... mother and daughter, they make the pair. It's a nice thing to go to church just to leer at the men. Dare to say it isn't true, little slattern! I'll dress you in a sack, just to disgust you, you and your priests. I don't want you to be taught anything worse than you know already. Mon Dieu! Just listen ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... as old carousal, and with eyes A hard, hot blue; her hair a frowsy flame, Bold, dowdy-bosomed, from her widow-frame She leans, her mouth all insult and all lies. Or slattern-slippered and in sluttish gown, With ribald mirth and words too vile to name, A new Doll Tearsheet, glorying in her shame, Armed with her Falstaff now she takes the town. The flaring lights of alley-way saloons, The reek of hideous gutters ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... footstep, and the asthmatic wheezing of a virago within, and Mme. Sauvage presently showed herself. Adrien Brauwer might have painted just such a hag for his picture of Witches starting for the Sabbath; a stout, unwholesome slattern, five feet six inches in height, with a grenadier countenance and a beard which far surpassed La Cibot's own; she wore a cheap, hideously ugly cotton gown, a bandana handkerchief knotted over hair which she still continued to ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... "we will take this daughter away with us."—"What! take a slattern like that? Why, all the people will laugh at you!"—"Maybe they will," said they.—Then the old woman scolded, and wouldn't let her go. "How can such a slut become the consort of the Tsar's son?" screeched she.—"Nay, ...
— Cossack Fairy Tales and Folk Tales • Anonymous
... shaded lamp G.J. could study the marvellous articulation of the arms at the bare shoulders. The close atmosphere was drenched with femininity. The two women, one so stylish and the other by contrast piquantly a heavy slattern, hid nothing whatever from him, bestowing on him with perfect tranquillity the right to be there and to watch at his ease every mysterious transaction.... The most convincing proof that Christine was authentically young! And G.J. had ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... her opportunity, and she painted Dan Hewlett and his household in no flattering colours. Molly was a slattern, and Dan was a thief, and the children ate up Judith's dainties, and they all preyed upon her. It was a perfectly horrid life for a good, well-trained, high-principled person to lead. In fact, she poured out all the ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... particular against the girl," said Sarah, "but it's my bounden belief that she'll turn out a slattern. Thar's something moonstruck about her—you can tell it by that shiftin' skeered-rabbit look in her eyes. She's just the sort to sweep all the trash under the bed an' think ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... at last made her appearance, at once a slattern and a coquette; much emaciated, but still carrying the remains of beauty. She made twenty apologies for being seen in such odious dishabille, but hoped to be excused, as she had stayed out all night at the gardens with the countess, ...
— English Satires • Various
... bull in a china shop; all the fat in the fire, diable a' quatre[Fr], Devil to pay; pretty kettle of fish; pretty piece of work[Fr], pretty piece of business[Fr]. [legal terms] disorderly person; disorderly persons offence; misdemeanor. [moral disorder] slattern, slut (libertine) 962. V. be disorderly &c. adj.; ferment, play at cross-purposes. put out of order; derange &c. 61; ravel &c. 219; ruffle, rumple. Adj. disorderly, orderless; out of order, out of place, out of gear; irregular, desultory; anomalous &c. (unconformable) 83; acephalous[obs3], deranged; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... long In tattered cloak of army pattern, And Galatea joined the throng,— A blowsy, apple-vending slattern; While old Silenus staggered out From some new-fangled lunch-house handy, And bade the piper, with a shout, To ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... to make a home for her where she could be his own, and for ever. All the vehement passion of his Highland nature was concentrated upon the accomplishing of this purpose. That he should ever have come to love Mandy Haley, the overworked slattern on her father's Ontario farm, while a thing of wonder, was not the chief wonder to him. His wonder now was that he should ever have been so besottedly dull of wit and so stupidly unseeing as to allow the unlovely exterior of the girl to hide the radiant ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... the first time noticed the appearance of her companion, and readily guessed that the word which she could not remember, was "slattern." She was a fat, chubby little girl, with a round, sunny face and laughing blue eyes, while her brown hair hung around her forehead in short, tangled curls. The front breadth of her pink gingham dress was plastered ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... with the rest of his luggage, and as soon as she had had a few hours' sleep, he would take her to different shops. She clung on to his arm. Paris seemed very cold and cheerless, and she did not like the tall, haggard houses, nor the slattern waiter arranging chairs in front of an early cafe, nor the humble servant clattering down the pavement in wooden shoes. She saw these things with tired eyes, and she was dimly aware of a decrepit carriage drawn ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... her surprise the Stranger greets her with a request for a favor. "Give me a drink," he says. Christ was thirsty. He wanted a draught from Jacob's well. But far more He wanted a draught from this woman's heart. She was a slattern, an outcast. She was lower, in the estimation of the average Jew, than a street dog. Yet this weary Christ desired the gift of her burnt out and impoverished affections. So He says, ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell
... feature of this period was a preoccupation with permanency. Jerrybuilding, architectural mode since the first falsefront was erected over the first smalltown store, practically disappeared. The skyscrapers were no longer steel skeletons with thin facings of stone hung upon them like a slattern's apron, while the practice of daubing mud on chickenwire hastily laid over paper was discontinued. Everyone wanted to build for all time, even though the Grass might seize upon their effort next week. In New York the Cathedral of St John the Divine was finally completed ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... fair: But she has lost her looks of late, With change of times and change of air. Ah slattern, she neglects her hair, Her gown, her shoes. She keeps no state As once when ...
— Later Poems • Alice Meynell
... French women whom I met in towns, this farmer's wife was a slattern. She cared neither about her own appearance nor the look of her house. She did not wash her children. But she worked. The land was well tilled and her cattle well tended. There was no sign of neglect in the fields. ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... pain to write; they will give the judicious patron pain to read; therefore we are quits. I think, as I look over their slattern paragraphs, of that most tragic hour—it falls about 4 P.M. in the office of an evening newspaper—when the unhappy compiler tries to round up the broodings of the day and still get home in time ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... of wheels, the wife, a coarse ill-dressed slattern, came out to see what could bring strangers to such an out-o'-the-way place at that late hour. "Puir Jeanie! I can weel imagine the fluttering o' her heart when she spier'd of the woman for ane Willie Robertson, and asked if he was ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... Eating-House had put her horse away—where, she did not know; and her meals had been brought to her by a middle-aged slattern, whose probing, suspicion-laden glances had been full of mocking significance. She had heard the woman speak of her to other female employees of the place—and once she had overheard the woman refer to her as "that stuck-up ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... wrappers be trimmed and made becoming just as much as dresses? A sick woman who isn't neat is a disagreeable object. Do, to please me, send for something pretty, and let me see you looking nice again. I can't bear to have my Helen turn into a slattern.'" ...
— What Katy Did • Susan Coolidge
... in conspicuous characters on a piece of pasteboard the word "Slattern," and bound it like a phylactery round Helen's large, mild, intelligent, and benign-looking forehead. She wore it till evening, patient, unresentful, regarding it as a deserved punishment. The moment Miss Scatcherd withdrew after afternoon school, I ran to Helen, tore it off, ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... died of consumption when Pinkey was eleven, and two years later her father had married his housekeeper. She proved to be a shiftless slattern, never dressed, never tidy, and selfish to the core under the cloak of a good-natured smile. She was always resting from the fatigue of imaginary labours, and her house was a pigsty. Nothing was in its place, and nothing could be found when it was wanted. This, ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... with the sobriquet, "John Silver Pin, fair without and foul within." In the Eastern counties of England any article of finery brought out only occasionally, and worn with ostentation by a person otherwise a slattern, is called "Joan Silver Pin." After this sense the appellation has been applied to the Scarlet Poppy. Its showy flower is so attractive to the eye, whilst its inner juice is noxious, and stains the hands of those who thoughtlessly crush ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... things, they will leave you in great Negligence of it implies an indifference about pleasing Neither retail nor receive scandal willingly Never quit a subject till you are thoroughly master of it Never seem wiser, nor more learned, than the people you are with Never slattern away one minute in idleness Never to speak of yourself at all Not one minute of the day in which you do nothing at all Not to admire anything too much Oftener led by their hearts than by their understandings Out of livery; which makes them ...
— Widger's Quotations from Chesterfield's Letters to his Son • David Widger
... demonstrator who could not wait till midnight to show his ardent patriotism and his public spirit by risking life and property. The saloons were all doing a land-office business, with the holiday impending and the thermometer at 97. Now and then, slattern women, in foul clothes and with huge, gelatinous breasts, could be seen rushing the growler, at the "family entrance" of some low dive. Even little girls bore tin pails, for the evening's "scuttle o' suds" to be consumed on roof, or in back yard of stinking tenement, ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... now hung sluttishly over her ear. She longed, as she had never longed before, to confront him in all her beauty; to be able to say to him, 'Choose where you will, can you buy form or face like this?' Instead she stood before him, prisoned in this shapeless dress, a slattern, a drab, a thing ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... worked with thy pencil and slate, Master Thomas! Well, ten times, as I said, took I back the gown for the trimmings; and was she content after all? I warrant you no, or my ears did not pay for it. She wished, she said, that the slattern sempstress had not touched the gown, for nought had she done but botched it. Now what think you had the sempstress done ...
— The Hunchback • James Sheridan Knowles
... future for him, why is he tortured with the inspiring idea of the eternal pursuit of the still flying goal of perfection? Is it possible that the hero and the martyr and the saint, whose experience is laden with painful sacrifices for humanity, are mistaken? and that the slattern and the voluptuary and the sluggard, whose course is one of base self indulgence, are correct? Is it credible that, with no justifying explanation hereafter, it should be ordained that the more gifted and disinterested a man is the more he shall uselessly suffer, from his sympathetic ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... out than to stay in," she said to herself as she remembered that this hour would be her one chance of taking air and exercise unobserved. She heard the main door of the house open and, looking over the banister, saw a slattern with bucket and mop passing into some back passage. She went lightly down and out into the ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... The woman, a slattern, who was known by the unpleasant name of Rya's Pup, declared that Walter Butler had gone to Johnstown to join St. Leger before Stanwix, and that the Tories would give the rebels such a drubbing that we would all be crawling on our bellies yelling for quarter ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... me for want of a better friend. Thus as he began to take a most earnest interest in parish work, and in schemes for the benefit of the people, our Sunday conversations became less controversial, and we gossiped about schools and school-treats, cricket-clubs, drunken fathers, slattern mothers, and spoiled children, and how the evening hymn "went" after the sermon on Sunday, like district visitors at a parish tea-party. What visions of improvement amongst our fellow-creatures we saw as we wandered about amongst the gooseberry-bushes, Rubens following at my heels, ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... the eyes that I bring ye, O brave in your jewels, and dainty. But a draggle-tail, dirty-foot slattern Would dub me ill-favoured and sallow. Nay, many a maiden has loved me, Thou may of the glittering armlet: For I've tricks of the tongue to beguile them And turn ...
— The Life and Death of Cormac the Skald • Unknown
... the contents of the larder in the hope of tempting him with some delicacy that was not on the table. The trim servant girl who had waited so staidly and respectfully at table had now developed into a perfect slattern who had the habit of answering her mistress back, sometimes in a way that almost amounted to bullying, and who seemed to have as much to say in the concerns of the family as any one of its members. The kitchen, too, obtruded and ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... small portion of that capital which thou seemest to think hid, stalking abroad by daylight, and in the open streets. Here, thou seest the wife of our neighbor, the pastry-cook; with what an air she tosses her head and displays the bauble thou sold'st her yesterday: well, even that slattern, idle and vain, and little worthy of trust as she is, carries about with her ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... confident, and cheerful attract the elements of success. A man's front or back yard will advertise that man's ruling mood in the way it is kept. A woman at home shows her state of mind in her dress. A slattern advertises the ruling mood of hopelessness, carelessness, and lack of system. Rags, tatters, and dirt are always in the mind before being on the body. The thought that is most put out brings its corresponding visible ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... for us! a coarse, fat female, her dingy cap, with its faded ribbons, awry upon her unkempt hair; eyes hookless, holes buttonless, upon her shabby gown; a boot-lace trailing on the ground. When we clergy visit Mrs. Dowdy's home, or the residence of her sister, Mrs. Slattern, and find that, though it is towards evening, they have not tidied either self or house, we know why the children are unhealthy and untaught, and why the husband prefers the warmth and cleanliness of ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... given 'Melia the go-by, they learned, in return for the ham and the tea; and they got her address and hunted her up in a back-street behind the Queen's Crescent, and W. Keyse failed to recognise his charmer of old in a red-nosed, frowsy slattern, married to a sweated German in the baking-trade and mother of two of the dirtiest kids you ever——! And Mrs. Keyse, to whom her William had expatiated upon the subject of his family, maintained ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... And just look at that fool Akoulina. Wasn't the girl a regular untidy slattern, and just look at her now! Where has it all come from? Yes, he has fitted her out. She's grown so smart, so puffed up, just like a bubble that's ready to burst. And, though she's a fool, she's got it into her head. "I'm the mistress," she ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... clamour, So improvidently have improvised, That they've utterly ungrammaticised Our ungrammatical grammar). And the coals Burn holes, Or make spots like moles, And my lily-white tints, as black as your hat turn, And the housemaid (a matricide, will-forging slattern), Rolls The rolls From the plate, in shoals, When they're put to warm in front of the coals; And no one with me condoles, For the butter stains on my beautiful pattern. But the coals and rolls, and sometimes soles, Dropp'd ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... uncouth heaviness, yet gave them way kindly enough; but certain dull-eyed, frowzy-headed women seemed to push purposely against her grandfather, and one of them swore at Lydia for taking up all the sidewalk with her bundles. There were such dull eyes and slattern heads at the open windows of the shabby houses; and there were gaunt, bold-faced young girls who strolled up and down the pavements, bonnetless and hatless, and chatted into the windows, and joked with other such girls whom they met. Suddenly a wild outcry rose from the ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... slowly over again from the blondine hair and the ash-colored V of unclean skin and waistless slop of slattern wrapper to clock work stockings ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
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