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“I’ll try, but it was a very ungentlemanly thing to do, I didn’t think you could be so sly and malicious, Laurie,” replied Meg, trying to hide her maidenly confusion under a gravely reproachful air.

And it's adapted with a heightened, soap opera-y sense of dramatic irony conveyed through longing glances, annoyed walking, and maidenly sighing.

In defiance of maidenly decorum and racial taboos, she asks Jack in for tea.

Last year’s sleeper trend with its treacly allusions to butter churns, quilting bees and starchily kitted-out sister wives, has given way to something less like a costume, less aggressively maidenly.

To him Sara White exuded “an intense something concealed by an air of supreme innocence and maidenly reserve.”