My newly found friend was pleased to admit that my personality and appearance would render my courtship of the elderly duenna a comparatively easy one.

Precisely that; like a sharp-eyed duenna to his own heart.

" "And she," replied the Count, "thinking more of propriety than of my enjoyment, had kept a frightful old duenna with her.

Never before or since was youthful beauty surrounded by such moustached duennas, squinting chambermaids, hunchbacked pages, and stumpy maids-of-all-work.

You would have found your mythical duenna a nuisance in real life.

"Madame Récamier, still young, and very handsome, and with an expression of naïveté in her charming countenance, made the impression on me of being a young lady in love, carefully watched over by too severe a duenna, her timid, gentle manner contrasted so strongly with the somewhat too masculine self-consciousness of her companion.

The water-shield (Hydropeltis) is chief maid-of-honor; she is a highborn lady, not without royal blood indeed, but with rather a bend sinister; not precisely beautiful, but very fastidious; encased over her whole person with a gelatinous covering, literally a starched duenna.