Word: squalidity
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...Peter in college, where he was studying for the priesthood. A big. middle-aged Irish woman, proud, foolish, intense, domineering, Mrs. Fury had known poverty all her life, hut had never lost her spirit, controlled her magnificent temper, or grown resigned to the ways and morals of the squalid district of the English seaport where she lived. She had met her husband. Dennis, when she jumped from an excursion steamer to save a child, had been saved in turn by him. Strict and unforgiving, she had closed the door on her son Desmond when he took a lovely but mysterious...
Traveler Balfour found Oriental night life squalid, Damascus disappointing, with trams and a dump heap of wrecked automobiles bulking large in his impressions. He saw no cedars on Lebanon, was bored by the Syrian desert, slept soundly in the wilderness while his companions complained that the howling of jackals kept them awake. But at Baalbek Traveler Balfour's up-to-date boredom crumbled as he brooded over the temples of the past, felt his heart beat more rapidly as he awakened to the enchantment of the legendary cities of the East...
...dozen other great Dickensian characters live and move and have their being in this picture. Best of the lot, though, is Mr. Micawber, played by W. C. Fields, red-nosed, dazzled, grandiloquent and undespairing. It is Micawber, hounded by creditors but never for an instant quailing at their squalid naggings, who first protects young David Copperfield in London. It is Micawber whose fine denunciation of Uriah Heep brings David Copperfield finally to its conclusion...
...parents of Fleur, the prostitute, were illiterate. French-Canadian mill hands, the father an alcoholic, the mother notoriously immoral. Fleur's first affair, when 11, was with the father of her mother's bastard. The family lived in squalid poverty, were chased from hovel to hovel, sometimes for not paying rent, sometimes for debauching the neighborhood. Fleur's adolescent peccadillos took place in cellars. Later she became a common street walker...
...neither women nor married men; hence, they were bachelors liable to the tax. Other men could escape the levy by means of a hasty marriage to one of Turkey's still ample supply of women. But the poverty-stricken eunuchs could neither marry nor pay. Clustering in their squalid club rooms last week, they squealed in outraged impotence...