Waiting woman

“ Unbeknown to the girl’s consciousness, though of course she has been aware of the phenomenon, every month Life has prepared her—her body has dressed itself, so to speak, for the act that will lead to the consummation of her destiny,—no wonder that after all these months and years of silent waiting and waiting, and elaborate and minute preparations for the guest, that there should be some bustle, some joyful apprehension, when a potential guest is at hand, or actually waiting. ”

“ Agnes Mowbray looked at him for a few moments. He saw that the tears came into her eyes. Then she gave an exclamation of impatience, saying:
“Psha! my friend. What does it matter in the general scheme of things if one woman dies waiting to marry the one man on whom she has set her heart? My dear Dick, what is life more than waiting—a constant waiting that is never repaid? Is any man, any woman, ever satisfied? No matter what it is that we get, do we not resume our waiting for something else—something that we think worth waiting for? ”

“ How can you leave your mother by herself in this way? Go, and stay with the poor woman, and tell her that she shall always have my good wishes. I am in want of a waiting woman now, and will gladly give her the preference. ”

“ Fortune hurried her steps, and Iris kept time with her. When they reached the house, the woman stopped and looked intently at the child.
"You can go straight upstairs at once, miss, and into the room," she said. "You need not knock; my mistress is waiting for you."
"Don't you think, Fortune, that mother is just a little wee bit better?" asked Iris again. There was an imploring note in her question this time.
"She will tell you herself, my dear. Now, be quick; don't keep her waiting. It is bad for people, when they are ill, to be kept waiting." ”

“ It is true, I cannot see that the same ill consequences would follow from the waiting woman, who, if she had been bred to read romances, may have some small subaltern or secondhand politeness; and if she constantly attends the tea, and be a good listener, may in some years make a tolerable figure, which will serve perhaps to draw in the young chaplain, or the old steward. ”

“ At one of my mass meetings of working women in the North I was told at its close that a woman wished to speak with me in private. As soon as I could disengage myself from the crowd of mothers who were always eager to shake hands with me, and to bless me with tears in their eyes for taking up their cause, I went down the room, and there, in a dimly-lighted corner of the great hall, I found a respectable-looking woman waiting for me. ”

“ She had been brought up as a waiting-maid of a young lady, the daughter of a gentleman, whose wife and family often visited the mistress of my own wife. I had frequently seen this woman when she was a young girl, in attendance upon her young mistress, and riding in the same carriage with her. The father of the young lady died, and soon after she married a gentleman who resided a few miles off. The husband received a considerable fortune with his bride, and amongst other things, her waiting-maid, who was reputed a great beauty among people of color. ”

“ I can wait: waiting and patience mean nothing to the eternal. I gave the woman the greatest of gifts: curiosity. By that her seed has been saved from my wrath; for I also am curious; and I have waited always to see what they will do tomorrow. ”

“ We know the picture of the waiting wife listening for footsteps while the clock ticks loudly in the silent house. The world has decreed that the woman and home must stay together, while the man goes about his business or his pleasures—the tied-up woman and the foot-loose man. ”

“ To be punctual is another of the engaged girl’s duties. She has no more business to keep her lover waiting than he has to keep her waiting. Tardiness is not a sign of maidenly indifference, as some damsels seem to think. ”

“ From the former (self-styled “handmaid” 1 Sam. xxv. 25 f.) is derived the colloquial use of the term for a waiting-woman (cf. Abigail, the “waiting gentlewoman,” in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Scornful Lady.) ”

“ Some women get used to waiting. I think [Pg 166] that those who do have closed the doors of their hearts to the keener range of feeling, having suffered so much that they say to themselves, “Here, I’ll suffer no longer.” There are yet others who pass through the pain of waiting, going by this thorny, bleeding, silent road of doubt and pain to a higher acquiescence. ”

“ Women have had to do a lot of waiting—long, weary waiting. The well-brought-up young lady diligently prepares for marriage; makes doilies, and hemstitches linen; gets her blue trunk ready and—waits. She must not appear anxious or concerned—not at all; she must just—wait. When a young man comes along and shows her any attention, she may accept it, but if after two or three years of it he suddenly leaves her, and devotes himself to some other girl, she must not feel hurt or grieved but must go back and sit down beside the blue trunk again and—wait! ”

“ All women know this pain of waiting; and when our time of waiting for a sweetheart is over, the sons we love go out into the world, and again we can do nothing but sit still and wait for news of the travelers, wait for the little, scant messages of love which their careless hands pen to us in some casual moment. The long days pass and the letters don’t come, and still we wait. We sit and wait for our children to be born, through the long months, with the black certainty of the birth that may be death staring us in the face. ”

“ Does it speak to you of the wearing ache of her waking—of the lonely hours of her watching alone, while your conscience rests in soothing sleep?”
“Yes, I think of her love, her patience, but the best of us have our faults, and a woman should not demand from the busy, anxious spirit of man all that romance promises and life but rarely yields.”
“You have been blessed with one who demands nothing; she suffers in silence. Her very gentleness, her patient womanliness should win you to right. ”

“ The better to consider it, consider that something of these sensations is the lot of every woman when, on her marriage eve, a girl, sleepless she lies through that night, imaging the womanhood that waits her beyond the darkness. It is the threshold of life for woman, this night before the vow, and has no counterpart in all a man's days from boyhood to grave. ”

“ How'd you have liked to be put out of it all at twenty-six? I can't marry. I suppose I'll love—most men go through that some time or other—but I can't know what it means to have a girl waiting for me as that girl is waiting for you now. ”

“ Her bridal is like the glorious pyre on which the Hindu widow once expired in religious ecstasy. It was not until she realized that I was going that Violet broke down.
There the burden was shifted to the other side. Delay is the suffering of man, separation the suffering of woman. I had my work to go back to; I had my friends and all the distractions of life in London. ”

“ Some of the noblest virtues of her sex imply great sensibility. What gives fortitude, in her case, such illustrious merit? Her extreme susceptibility of suffering. The blow, from which the gnarled oak will rebound, shall crush the frail dahlia. Why is patience a prime grace in woman? Not only because she has such burdens laid on her spirit, but still more for the reason that she feels so keenly their weight. ”

“ Now was I in wrath indeed, to be spoken to in tones of reproach when I had every reason to expect at least an excuse, if not an apology, for having been kept so [Pg 63] long waiting. I rose to my feet in leisurely fashion and made mademoiselle a most elaborate bow, as I replied in a voice as cool and haughty as her own:
"Had I been informed at what hour mademoiselle would require my presence, I should have been belted and hatted and not have detained your ladyship for even a moment, to say nothing of having wasted two good hours of my own time in idle waiting." ”

“ Here I swear that if we live to get out of this, I will not for all my days have anything to say to another living woman, and that wherever I go I will wait for her as faithfully as she waited for me. ”

“ The prettiest waiting-maid I have ever seen is that of Madame V——y, a lady who to-day plays at Paris a brilliant part among the most fashionable women, and passes for a wife who keeps on excellent terms with her husband. ”

“ Should you ever be tempted to abandon your home, so will you awake. Whatever trials may be the lot of your married life, though they may magnify themselves to your crushed spirit as beyond the nature, the endurance of woman to bear, resolve to bear them ”

“ The situation of a waiting-maid is, in some families, one of hard bondage. It seems as if her employers had forgotten that she is made of flesh and blood, and is therefore capable of having an aching head and weary limbs. ”

“ Only let me consider with what sentiments must that woman look upon me, if just previous to her meeting with her favoured lover I pay her my accustomed visit, and express my usual devotion and love for her,—the young, the virtuous wife, the tender, sensible, and devoted mother, as until this wretched moment I would have died to prove her. Can I, dare I, trust myself in her presence, with the knowledge of her being but too impatient for the arrival of that blessed hour which conveys her to her guilty [Pg 46] rendezvous and infamous paramour? ”

“ Indeed, I come to thee willingly and do not withhold myself from thee: there is none with us whom we need fear; and I wish to abide with thee as long as thou sojournest in this mountain and be thy companion. I offer myself to thee, for thou needest the service of women; and if thou know me, thy sickness will leave thee and health return to thee and thou wilt repent thee of having forsworn the company of women during thy past life. Indeed, I give thee good advice: so give ear to my counsel and draw near unto me.' Quoth he, 'Go out from me, O deceitful and perfidious woman! ”

“ For a few days we put up at a friend's house, for we were both very much fatigued, indeed, with our long journey and its incidental bustle and confusion. I was only seventeen years old at this time, the most romantic age of a woman's life—or rather she is standing on the borderland with girlhood just behind her, and all the joys of womanhood and matrimony just before. Anticipation invests all things with the glories of the rainbow. ”

“ In that period of their lives, on the point, so grave for their sex, of becoming maids, they are assailed by unaccountable fears, by a vague sense of sadness, by an imperious demand for solitude where to give a loose rein to languorous reveries, novel sensations at which their chaste instincts take alarm, symptoms of the awakening of the virginal heart, first and shadowy aspirations of the maid for the sweet pleasures and austere duties of the wife and mother—the sacred destinies of woman. ”

“ Therefore, there was no desire on my part to say a word to this little nursery maid; yet the swift look in her eyes made a thrill of coldness quiver through me. That a woman looks her disapproval of you can be borne. But it is hard to bear, that look in a woman's eyes which sees you not at all; when in one woman's face you read the disapproval of her whole sex. ”

“ But a captive woman, made for love, no mate, no nest, has she.
In the spring of young desire, young men and maids are wed together,
And the happy mothers flaunt their bliss for all the world to see. ”

“ They drank in silence, but as he put down his cup, she said, twinkling over hers, "Was I a wise woman?" and suddenly she felt the great loneliness of the house, and remembered that she was a woman, and this man's wife. She looked down that he might see no change. He did not answer, and the coals, dropping in the grate, were like little tongues clicking in distress. ”

“ You can laugh and sing, and tell stories, and never think of the clock; never think there's such a person as a wife belonging to you. It's nothing to you that a poor woman's sitting up, and telling the minutes, and seeing all sorts of things in the fire—and sometimes thinking something dreadful has happened to you—more fool she to care a straw about you!—This is all nothing. ”

“ Oh, if a woman could only know what she'd have to suffer before she was married—Don't tell me you want to go to sleep! If you want to go to sleep, you should come home at proper hours! It's time to get up, for what I know, now. ”

“ For, conscious as we are of the uncertainty of female fancies, the doubts they entertain on the most minute point, the hesitation which they display alike, in the refusal of an equipage or a thimble, an earring or a husband, we certainly consider it no small praise in a woman if she is found to be “certain” in anything. ”

“ It operates upon the woman who is seldom too late, so that when a journey is in expectation, all things are arranged in due time, leaving the last day more especially for attention to the claims of affection, and the regulation of household affairs, upon which will depend the comfort of her family during her absence. ”

“ She never keeps you waiting, but is always dressed and sitting in the parlor an hour before you arrive and is never in a hurry to get home and will walk for blocks beside you in the rain with her best hat on without caring. ”

“ As the two hundred and seventy-three days come to a close, our expectant mother approaches the day of labor with joy and gladness. The long, long waiting days so full of varied experiences, so full of the consciousness that she, the waiting mother, is to bring into the world a being which may have so many possibilities—well, even the anticipated pangs of approaching labor are welcomed as marking the close of the long vigil. These days have brought many unpleasant symptoms, they have been days of tears and smiles, of clouds and sunshine. ”

“ It is bad form to get excited over every little thing that happens. A two-minute delay, a brief unexplained stop, is enough to make some women fret and fume.
The woman who travels alone should maintain a great deal of dignity and reserve. ”

“ Weeks passed before the darkness cleared away. When I recovered my senses, I found my patient angel nursing me, although she was scarcely stronger than I was. But what will not a woman's love accomplish? ”

“ Ah, there is nothing on earth so interesting as a woman, with her tenderness, her solicitude for our welfare, her quiet reserve, her gentle listening, her brightness, her nobleness, her grace!
After Edith left me, taking her little girl by the hand, I confess I was desolate, overwhelmingly desolate. Why is it that one person can make night seem day to us; can bring perfect rest and content? ”