maidenly

“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 in 1956 in Asbury Park, which was then, as it is today, a hub of gay life on the Jersey Shore, a bar was cited for serving men who “rocked and swayed their posteriors in a maidenly fashion.”

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.

We have a description of how she looked when she walked in on that masculine gathering: “A shining buckle clasped her robe at the neck; her hair was simply dressed, caught up in a knot behind. An ivory quiver hung upon her left shoulder and in her hand was a bow. Thus was she attired. As for her face, it seemed too maidenly to be that of a boy, and too boyish to be that of a maiden.”