Word: spinsterly
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Thus Bernard Mead, timber magnate of Pauquette, Wis. There comes a day when, surrounded by his female relatives, including his spinster aunts, querulous mother, prolific wife and lusty offspring, he begins talking wildly of "seeing through" the eternal moil of creatures struggling to exist, acquire, mate and reproduce. He "sees through" to the essential, motile miracle of living?or something like that; neither he nor Miss Gale can quite express it. His wife sends for an alienist. He rushes off to Alia Locksley, the waiting one, hoping she will understand his prodigious discovery. But she is only sex-hungry...
...pendulum will swing too far and crash into sensationalism. Mr. Whipple says that when Mr. Sedgwick and Mr. Bridges took over the fate of the dying Atlantic Monthly they put in new blood and "hung quietly in the skeleton closet the notion that the Atlantic was a sort of spinster literary chaperone and that its buff cover conspicuously enough displayed would protect an unattended female anywhere in the world." The new governors of other magazines have done no less. The scarlet of Harper's may enclose as many and as vitriolic shafts directed against complacency as the verdant boards...
...joys of old age must have come to Senator Cummins when he read the news of his defeat, eyes were strained from studying long documents, his face was lined, his hair was white; he was 76-but now he would retire to the quiet home of his two spinster sisters, sleep long and sound, muse over his glorious days, write his autobiography. One evening last week he dined with a Des Moines banker, told him with unaccustomed zeal of the vivid political scenes which would appear in his book...
...BEAM'S?A spinster attempts to reform a villain who she believes will eat her alive...
Leading the rest in point of authority is a spinster of 50, the last crisp leaf of a Dutch-American tree, incredibly wealthy, intellectual, unable to sleep until dawn and therefore noted for midnight suppers from which her guests escape with difficulty. Her private musicians fill the remaining night hours with concerts from esoteric composers, to which she listens with "the finest contrapuntal ear of her day." It is she, Elizabeth Grier, ever alert for novelty, who attaches the young New Englander to the Cabala and involves him in its members' affairs...