Crossword-Solution: DOWDINESS 9 letters, 3 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 14

They had made me free of their ideal little rooms, full of books and pictures, and clean of the antimacassar taint; they had shown me their chapel, high, hushed; and faintly scented, beautiful with a strange new beauty born both of what it had and what it had not--that too familiar dowdiness of common places of worship.

For she was seeing what even her bedazzled eyes recognized as cheap dowdiness, and the smell that assailed her nostrils was that of a house badly and poorly kept--the smell of cheap food and bad butter cooking, of cats, of undusted rooms, of various unrecognizable kinds of staleness.

She felt that she must rise to the situation, must teach herself, must save herself from impending dowdiness and slovenliness.

Twelve years should not have changed a pretty blonde thing of nineteen to a worn, unintelligent-looking dowdy of the order of dowdiness which seems to have lived beyond age and sex.

With her small flat figure, her shabby heterogeneous dress, she was as dowdy as any Professor's wife at Wentworth; but her dowdiness (Margaret borrowed a literary analogy to define it), her dowdiness was somehow "of the centre." Like the insignificant emissary of a great power, she was to be judged rather by her passports than her person.