Word: spinsterism
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...sullen and cantankerous. "If that boy," he fumed, "ever shows the first inclination towards music, or noises disguised as such, I will kill it." Musical noises were just what the boy did incline to, and nothing his father said or did could stop him. On Sundays, his mousy spinster aunt sneaked him off to a church where he could hear an organ. By the time he was eleven, he was composing a church service every week ("I used to write like the devil in those days," he apologized later). He toured the petty courts of Italy and Germany, played...
...walls rumored to be bulletproofed against Civil War draft rioters. George S. Bowdoin, a partner of J. P. Morgan, acquired it some 20 years later. In its backyard is a cemetery with eight weathered headstones-one for each of the chow dogs buried there by Bowdoin's spinster daughter, Edith, who died five years ago. What was left of gilt and ormolu in the house glistened under new fluorescent lights. Businesslike desks, clacking typewriters and paid workers crowded the high-ceilinged chambers...
...humanizing process, Charles Boyer developed his part of the self-continued husband who had no purpose in life other than proving his prowess of seduction into that of a warm, likeable person. His interest in Janet Spencer, a spinster who had retreated to an aesthetic world, arose from an intellectual affinity he had never found in his invalid, self-pitying wife. Miss Spencer poisoned the wife assuming that she thus freed the husband for herself. It actually freed him to marry an eighteen year old girl with whom he had been having an affair...
...slight, silver-haired spinster boarded a plane for Africa last week on a strange errand. Esther Cummings was off to visit Egypt, Ethiopia, the Sudan and the Belgian Congo, to put in practice a phonetic language-learning system she had been taught by her missionary father. With it, she thought she could get the hang of any native tongue in three or four days. Her mission (sponsored by the United and Southern Presbyterian Boards): to teach the natives how to teach their own languages to the missionaries...
...name the spade, anything. Briefly, the movie niece (Susan Hayward) is young, has led a void life caring for the old lady (Agnes Moorehead), has compensated by poring over the poet's letters, has conceived a coy necrophilia for him. By day she is the cold spinster, by night ah! with her kitten and her finch and that sill ver oubliette which holds the letters (sweet counterfeits of passion!), she is indeed a very Mab of love. The publishing fellow (Robert Cummings), sniffing out the letters, blunders into her dream, effects a gentle transfer of her affects...