Adventuress

Despite her aloofness, Mrs. Grant did now and then steal a glance at Mrs. Pope to see if this brazen creature [526] would betray in any manner the fact that she was sleeping with the senator, but the adventuress was a wily one who disclosed nothing. ❋ Michener, James (1982)

"Hum -- maybe my adventuress was the same person in disguise," Mr. Palmer thoughtfully observed. ❋ Mrs. Georgie Sheldon (1884)

Meanwhile, Irene Adler has been running around as the kind of adventuress I thought "adventuress" meant when I was a little kid reading the first few paragraphs of "A Scandal in Bohemia". ❋ Unknown (2009)

It was exciting, it was really valuable, to have to that extent rubbed shoulders with an "adventuress"; it showed one that for the adventuress there might on occasion be much to be said. ❋ Henry James (1879)

"adventuress," which has an ugly sound, but of which no one exactly knows the precise meaning, began to be bruited about. ❋ H. Lovett Cameron (N/A)

"adventuress" in thinking of herself, as being more genteel and mentally aristocratic than the cruder words by which Barney and Old ❋ Leroy Scott (1902)

She had always been an adventuress, filled with energy and curiosity. ❋ George Heymont (2012)

A disjointed diptych inspired by the largely unlamented Duchess of Windsor, it contains little that's original or insightful about the American adventuress Wallis Simpson, or her empire-rattling love for Edward VIII. ❋ John Anderson (2012)

Think Buenos Aires, runaway Nazis, giant dice in the opening shot and musical numbers – all grafted on to a three-way melodrama of outrageous sexual provocation and emotional blackmail that's played like a minuet by scheming adventuress Hayworth and her two knock-kneed beaus itinerant gambler Glenn Ford and scarfaced casino boss George Macready on a gigantic, lavishly appointed set that amounts to a fantasia on mid-century Hollywood's notions of Latin-Americanness. ❋ Unknown (2011)

Frankie then sets off for Paris and en route keeps company with a spinster adventuress. ❋ Thomas Gladysz (2011)

Carstairs' wife, the mysterious foreign adventuress. ❋ Unknown (2011)

It's hard not to delight in a book where the writer and adventuress Freya Stark, in Beirut during the 1958 crisis, wanders out onto the embassy balcony despite the gunfire, saying: "I can always recognize feu de joie; they shoot because they're happy — you can hear that they are only celebrating." ❋ ROBERT MESSENGER (2010)

Ever the bold adventuress, Lucy Waltham has decided to go hunting for a husband. ❋ Nalini Singh (2009)

Of the specials, the second, Planet of the Dead (disc two), is my favorite, because it introduced the high-class thief and adventuress Lady Christina, played by Michelle Ryan (The Bionic Woman). ❋ Unknown (2010)

In the eyes of the court and the entire country, she was an adventuress who hid her guilty relationship behind a façade of prudishness. ❋ Unknown (2010)

The details seem to fit together, but one wonders if the biographer's image of Syrie as a cold, calculating adventuress isn't too colored by Somerset's own jaundiced spin on the issue. ❋ Unknown (2010)