The General was wholly absorbed in thought. He folded his arms, and paced silently to and fro between the windows which looked out upon the street and the second row which gave upon the garden. His wife lay the sleeping Abel on her knee, and little Moina lay in untroubled slumber in the low chair, like a bird in its nest. Her older sister stared into the fire, a skein of silk in one hand, a needle in the other.英文原著 · 《A Woman of Thirty》
At home, she found Granny Moan crouching in a corner with her head held between her hands, sobbing with her childish "he, he!" her hair dishevelled and falling from beneath her cap like thin skeins of gray hemp.英文原著 · 《AN ICELAND FISHERMAN》
"But won't you let us talk to her, Nils?" one of the lumbermen proposed. "It is a tangled skein, and I don't pretend to say that I can straighten it out. But two men have been killed and one crippled since the little chap was taken away. And in the three years he was with us no untoward thing happened. Now that speaks for itself, Nils, doesn't it?"英文原著 · 《Boyhood in Norway》
"Do not cry either, my little Delphine. Look up and let me kiss away the tears. There! I shall find my wits and unravel this skein of your husband's winding."英文原著 · 《Father Goriot》
During the latter part of the work much of the cable was found to be looped and twisted into 'kinks' from having been so slackly laid, and two immense tangled skeins were raised on board, one by means of the mast-head and fore-yard tackle. Photographs of this ravelled cable were for a long time exhibited as a curiosity in the windows of Messrs. Newall & Co's. shop in the Strand, where we remember to have seen them.英文原著 · 《Heroes of the Telegraph》