For the moment they faced each other, not as aunt and niece, not as child and adult, but as two human beings each with hatred for the other in her heart—Elizabeth Murray, tall and austere and thin-lipped; Emily Starr, white of face, her eyes pools of black flame, her trembling arms hugging her letters.
And Aunt Elizabeth was quite fine looking in a tall, thin, austere style, with clear-cut features and a massive coronet of iron-grey hair under her black lace cap.
"Go back and see if you have shut the door tight, and then lock it," said Miss Miranda, in her usual austere manner.
Never had the water seemed so wonderful, terrible, and austere.
Enthralled by austere traditions and that stern conscience of hers, she had never permitted herself to dream of the possibility of an escape from the parental servitude.
It seemed a face for the cloister, austere in contour, fervent in expression, the severity of it mollified by that resigned and spiritual melancholy peculiar to women who through the error of destiny have been born into a wrong environment.
He was free to confess that when he first knew me—or, rather, was in the habit of catching a passing glimpse of me from time to time—I satisfied him on this point: the gravity, the austere simplicity, obvious in this particular, were such as to inspire the highest hopes for my best interests.
Joseph Emanuel had arrived, as well as his austere brother, and at this very moment was relieving Ginevra at the piano.
That morning I was disposed for silence: the austere fury of the winter-day had on me an awing, hushing influence.
I wondered if she would justify her renown: with strange curiosity, with feelings severe and austere, yet of riveted interest, I waited.
A dark little man he certainly was; pungent and austere.
She never grudged a holiday; she allowed plenty of time for sleeping, dressing, washing, eating; her method in all these matters was easy, liberal, salutary, and rational: many an austere English school-mistress would do vastly well to imitate her—and I believe many would be glad to do so, if exacting English parents would let them.
" I looked back at the platform when we had left it far behind and saw the tall, austere figure of Holmes standing motionless and gazing after us.
Beyond the bar the sea, calm and austere, dreamed in the afterlight.
" And we all, including the rustic youth, drew round the table: an austere silence prevailing while we discussed our meal.
"You wouldn't think so if you saw my house in Hampstead," she said, a vision of that austere and hard-seated dwelling presenting itself to her mind, with nothing soft in it except the shunned and neglected Du Barri sofa.
Rose, so far had loosening and disintegration gone on in her character, now was beginning to think her obstinate strait-lacedness about his books and her austere absorption in good works had been foolish and perhaps even wrong.
Nothing of this money was spent on her house or dress; those remained, except for the great soft sofa, austere.
With dear days when the austere woods were beautiful and gracious in a dignified serenity of folded hands and closed eyes—days full of a fine, pale sunshine that sifted through the late, leafless gold of the juniper-trees and glimmered among the grey beeches, lighting up evergreen banks of moss and washing the colonnades of the pines.
The road was rough and rocky, like most Muskoka roads, but full of the austere charm of northern woods.
