"Smug" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not to jostle them in the gateway. It consisted of Mr. Dunborough, Lord Almeric, and two other gentlemen; one of these, an elderly man, who wore black and hair-powder, and carried a gold-topped cane, had a smug and well-pleased expression, that indicated his stake in the meeting to be purely altruistic. The ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... procession of y^e Yeare! For it irketh my Soule y^t eache Monthe shoude come so aptlie after y^e Month afore, & Nature looke so Smug, as She had done some grete thinge.—Surelie if she make no Change, she hath work'd no Miracle, for we knowe wel, what we maye look for.—Y^e Vine under my Window hath broughte forth Purple Blossoms, as itt hath eache Springe these xii Yeares.—I wolde have ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... bitter mood. The little matter of the delayed letter had brought out that alien streak in him again, and once more he saw the Griersons as he had seen them in the early days of his return, unsympathetic, prejudiced, almost smug. He had been striving hard to win their approval. He had given up Lalage; he had written only things of which they could approve; he had become engaged to a girl essentially of their ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... an engraver and etcher of genius. You must have seen his work. It is much sought after by certain amateurs now. He began by being revolutionary in his art, and ended by becoming a revolutionist, after his wife and child had died in want and misery. He used to say that the bourgeoisie, the smug, overfed lot, had killed them. That was his real belief. He still worked at his art and led a double life. He was tall, gaunt, and swarthy, with a long, brown beard and deep-set eyes. You must have seen him. ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... live side by side, and converse in the same language, if they are so absolutely dominated by their own form of religious thought, as to be as helpless as idiots in the presence of any other, can we expect that the ordinary British traveller, "brandishing his Bible and his bath," strong in the smug conviction of his mental, moral, and religious preeminence, will be a very sympathetic, conscientious, and reliable interpreter of the religion of the Zulu ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... long talking with pleasure with my wife, and so up and to the Office with Tom, who looks mighty smug upon his marriage, as Jane also do, both of whom I did give joy, and so Tom and I at work at the Office all the morning, till dinner, and then dined, W. Batelier with us; and so after dinner to work again, and sent for Gibson, and kept him also till eight at night, doing much ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... Innocence—these steeds do gallop for sufficient reason, namely—they are to gallop bidden being ridden, bestridden and chidden by whip and spur applied by certain trusty men o' my company, which men go habited, decked, dressed, clad, guised and disguised as smug, ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... wives of eunuchs (they have their excuses, of course, and who knows but the masquerade is somewhat unnecessary); to the pedantic ones who barricade themselves heroically behind their own belchings; to the smug ones who walk with their noses ecstatically buried in their own rectums (I have nothing against them, I swear); to the righteous ones who masturbate blissfully under the blankets of their perfections; to the righteous ones ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... Charles to-day in a new hat, frock, waistcoat, shirt, and stockings; he was as clean and smug as a gentleman, and upon perceiving my surprise, he told me that it was from the Pharo Bank. He then talked of the thousands it had lost, which I told him only proved its substance, and the advantage of the trade. He smiled, and ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... clear enough to me," he said bluntly. "It's the old story of one too many trusted. He hears our plans and then the smug-faced villain peaches. Next week he sees us all scragged at Tyburn. But he's made a little mistake this time, sink me! He won't live to see the Chevalier O'Sullivan walk off the cart. If you'll give me leave, I'll put a name to the gentleman. He's what they ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... the whole of Grande Mignon will know it," he said to himself. "Then they will want to know why, but that is easy enough to lie about. Hang that Mallaby woman! Who would ever think she'd squeal? Yes, and Schofield, the smug crook! They're the two that are doin' the damage ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... him, I saw a tawny spark in his black eyes. Vandeman fronted him with the flamboyant embroidered monogram on his shirt sleeve, the carefully careless tie, the utterly good clothes, and, most of all, at the moment, the smug satisfaction in his face of social and human security. I thought of what that Frenchman says about there being nothing so enjoyable to us as the troubles of our friends. "Needn't think you can put it all over the boy when he's ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... the sight, so common alas! in England, of the affluent spinster, "growing pointlessly rotund on rich food at one of the smug hotels or boarding-houses for parasitic nonentities, which are distributed so plentifully all over the land," while thousands of promising young men had to wait too long before they were able to take their bride to the altar. It was her view that this feature of social life in England was truly the ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... better illustrated than in regard to what goes on in prisons, here and in other parts of the world. The conspiracy has been attacked sometimes, and more of late than usual, and once in a while we have caught a glimpse of what is occurring behind those smug, well-fitting doors. But they have been mere glimpses, incoherent, obscure, often imaginative, or guesswork based on scanty, incorrect, at any rate secondhand information; never yet conclusive and complete. In England, Charles Dickens and ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... "stirrings of the heart," at the beginning of the second quarter of the eighteenth century a cold, formal piety was frequently the covering of indifferent living and of a smug, complacent Christianity, wherein the letter killed and the spirit did not give life. This was true all over New England, and elsewhere. Nor was this deadness confined to the colonies alone, for the Wesleys ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... single community, with closely similar inheritance and environment, we find marked divergence in moral judgment. And when we compare widely different times and places we are apt to wonder if there is any common ground. It is only a very smug provincialism that can attribute the alien standards of other races and nations to a disregard of the light. Mohammedans and Buddhists have believed as firmly in, and fought as passionately for, their moral ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... upon these poems of the beginning of the War, he cannot resist a certain impatience. In the first place, there is a family likeness which makes it impossible to distinguish one writer from another, and there is a tendency to a smug approval of British prejudice, and to a horrible confidence in England's power of "muddling through," which look rather ghastly in the light of ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... "Smug it!" said Mercer, with a comical look, "when he knew. Look! see that open ground there with the clump of fir-trees and the long slope of sand going ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... a pathos in the words which the author may not have himself fully understood; whereas the similar expression of Tasso's Silvia quoted on a previous page is insufferable in its smug self-conceit. ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... most remarkable company that ever was seen proceeded down the Via Ripetta towards the Porta del Popolo. All eyes were turned upon them, and people asked each other if these were maskers left from the Carnival. Signor Pasquale Capuzzi, spruce and smug, all elegance and politeness, wearing his gay Spanish suit well brushed, parading a new yellow feather in his conical hat, and stepping along in shoes too little for him, as if he were walking amongst ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... of psycho-analysis, to explain how this thing happened. I concern myself only with facts. Suddenly the pretty veil of self-satisfaction was rent from top to bottom, and Dickson saw a figure of himself within, a smug leaden little figure which simpered and preened itself and was hollow as a rotten ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... eyes upon a less prepossessing man. To liken him to a vicious over-fed pug is more than charitable. Smug, purse-proud and evil, his bloated countenance was most suggestive. There was no pity about the coarse mouth, which he had twisted into a smile, two deep sneer lines cut into the unwholesome pallor of his cheeks, from under ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... amazingly at his ease with the Court, and on smiling terms with the President, who, full of worldly and unworldly knowledge, held the balance of justice with an unwavering firmness. The jury looked startlingly commonplace, smug and sleepy, despite the variety of type almost inevitably presented by twelve human beings. Not one of them looked a rascal; not one of them looked an actively good man. The intense Englishness of them hit one in the face ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... Labour men, the Syndicalists and the Communists, the Nationalists and the Internationalists. All those who work for freedom are learning breadth. If they ever find a leader, I think that this dear, smug country of yours may have to face the ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... critic once pointed out that Crane, in his search for striking effects, had been led into "frequent neglect of the time-hallowed rights of certain words," and that in his pursuit of color he "falls occasionally into almost ludicrous mishap." The smug pedantry of the quoted lines is sufficient answer to the charges, but in support of these assertions the critic quoted certain passages and phrases. He objected to cheeks "scarred" by tears, to "dauntless" statues, ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... wife for a similar amount. Time was, in the Ellices, when the undue complaisance of a married woman meant a sudden and inartistic compression of the jugular, or a swift blow from the heavy, ebony-wood club of the wronged man. Nowadays, since the smug-faced native teacher hath shown them the Right Way, such domestic troubles are condoned by—a dollar. That is, if it be a genuine American dollar or two British florins; for outraged honour would not accept the cast-iron Bolivian money or the poor silver of Chili and Peru. And for a dollar the native ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... fum! bubble and squeak! Blessedest Thursday's the fat of the week. Rumble and tumble, sleek and rough, Stinking and savory, smug and gruff, Take the church-road, for the bell's due chime Gives ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... countenance of the maid and the smug figure of Finkel, who apparently did not recognize her, and she ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... applied to mankind in the slang sense of an "outsider." It is used in University circles as equivalent to the Oxford "smug," a man who will not join in the life of ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... school at Beckenham. They're stinkers. Put on no end of side because some smug of theirs won a schol' at Uppingham last term. But ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... she said nothing. She wondered if he had always been quite so fatuous as this, quite so sublimely unhumorous. If he had, what under heaven had she been about? That she could have believed this smug cockscomb to have loved her—to have been capable of anything but hunger and thirst for her—incredible! It made her out precisely as fatuous as he. And yet she said nothing. With the likes of him nothing seemed worth doing ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... with it. You must have faith. You must just believe what you're told not think at all. Thinking is wickedness—unless you think what you hear preached." Feather was even a trifle delicately smug as she rattled off her orthodoxy—but she laughed after she had done with it. "But it MUST have been funny—a Turk or a Hindoo in a turban and a thing like a tea gown and Mrs. Muir in her Edinburgh looking clothes ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Mr. Hobson in person; Ledantec really, as Hyde immediately saw, in spite of the smug, smooth exterior, the British-cut whiskers, and the unmistakable ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... the bondage of her people, for some agonizing cry about her native land. In two poems she refers definitely to Africa as her home, but in each instance there seems to be under the sentiment of the lines a feeling of almost smug contentment at her own escape therefrom. In the poem, "On Being Brought from Africa to America," ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... loved sinners and welcomed them, without in the least condoning what was wrong. He looked upon the open and acknowledged sinner as a more hopeful person from the religious point of view than the person who was self-satisfied and smug. He said that He came to seek and to save those who knew ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... rugged; but the keen air, the relief from luxury, the novelty and the wonder, wrought upon my companion and renewed him, so that presently I was amused to note in him signs of a moral preening—some smug resumption of that arrogant air of superiority that is a tradition with ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... smug. "Now Elmer will be angry at you. Maybe he'll disintegrate you. Or paralalize you ...
— The Aggravation of Elmer • Robert Andrew Arthur
... girl checked herself, aware of something almost ludicrously pitiful in the smug tearful countenance and stumpy would-be fashionable figure. Hit a man your own size, or bigger, by all means if you are game to take the consequences. But to smite a creature conspicuously your inferior in fortune—past, present, and prospective—is unchivalrous, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... when escape is impossible, turns traitor, and after deserving the cart and pillory a dozen times for his last and most utter baseness, is rewarded by full pardon, and the honour of addressing the audience at the play's end in the most smug and self-satisfied tone, and of 'putting himself on you that are my country,' not doubting, it seems, that there were among them a fair majority who would think him a very smart ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... aspect he had never once contemplated before Sir Isaac died. He could on his honour, and after searching his heart, say that. Yet in Pall Mall one afternoon, suddenly, he caught himself with a thought in his head so gross, so smug, that he uttered a faint cry and ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... occurs twice; more justly, perhaps, as no thought ever occurs at all, there was a physical impossibility that the same thought should recur. It is long since I saw and read these inscriptions, but I remember the impression was of a smug usher at his desk in the intervals of instruction, levelling his pen. Of death, as it consists of dust and worms, and mourners and uncertainty, he had never thought; but the word 'death' he had often seen separate and conjunct ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... enough. I can't bear mice. But, to change the subject, I saw you chatting with Kruse, plainly, also your familiar actions, and in fact I think you were going to paint a moustache on his lip. That I call pretty far advanced. A little later you will be jilted. You are still a smug person and have your charms. But beware, that is all I have to say to you. Just what was your experience the first time? Was it such that you can tell me ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... that paints the sky, And every splendid noontide high, All know the Glugs so well, so well. 'Tis an easy matter, and plain to tell. For, lacking wit, with a candour smug, A Glug will boast that he is a Glug. And they climb the trees, if it shines or rains, To settle the squirming in their brains, And the darting pains That are caused by rushing ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... kind must have happened. I suspect the custom-house officers that the authorities have insisted on keeping aboard us all the time that we have been in harbour; but of course I have not said a word to them about it. I have, however, watched them continually, and by their smug looks of satisfaction I am inclined to believe that they know something about it. And ever since then I have been on the prowl everywhere to see if I could find any trace of the boat, but ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... far, lest he himself act fantastically, and now he simultaneously begins battle against commonplace reality. He opposes everything which we are accustomed to understand under the name Philistinism—musty pedantry, provincialism, petty etiquette, narrow criticism, false prudery, smug complacency, arrogant dignity, and whatever names may be applied to all these unclean spirits, whose ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... certainly possessed no other claim upon the confidence of his fellow-creatures, sick or well. Yet even before the Dop Doctor brought his great unhealed sorrow and his quenchless thirst to Gueldersdorp, the smug, plump, grey-haired, pink-faced, neatly-dressed little humbug possessed an ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... over. But promotion breeds conceit only in base natures. The greyhound is a gentleman, respectful and self-respecting, and it shows that by the very carriage of its tail. Only a snob at heart, petted and pampered for many generations, could have produced that perfect incarnation of smug self-satisfaction, the pug. Let us take the lesson home. The thoughts on which we let our minds dwell, and the sentiments that we harbour in our hearts, are the chisels with which we are carving out our faces and those of our ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... setting him on fire. And the fire was burning away the smug complacency which had come to him during his long ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... back with a certain smug satisfaction upon a hilarious evening beginning with a dinner at the club, which some of the older adherents of St. John had given him in gratitude for the part he had taken in the campaign. He remembered that he had not given ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... pearl-buyers, planters, and lesser bureaucrats, idlers or retired adventurers living in Tahiti, and tourists made the club for a few hours a day a polyglot exchange of current topics between man and man, a place of initiation and of judgment of business deals, a precious refuge against smug bores and a sanctuary for refreshment of body and soul with cooling drinks. Naturally, every one played cards, dominoes, or dice for the honor of signing the chits, and it goes without saying that one might roar out an oath against the Government and go unscathed. Even in the Bougainville ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... along the shore. It was because of this that his aunt could not get him to go to church—which was a horror to her orthodox soul. He told her he would like to go to church if it were empty but he could not bear it when it was full—full of smug, ugly people. Most people, he thought, were ugly—though not so ugly as he was—and ugliness made him sick with repulsion. Now and then he saw a pretty girl at whom he liked to look but he never saw one that ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... mentioned the most essential desideratum of a hat, and that was that it should be too small. Whether it began by being too small, or became in time too small, depended upon the wearer; but there was something smug and cowardly about a hat that fitted. It ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 18, 1919 • Various
... of smug selfcongratulation was soon succeeded by a strange nostalgia which took the form of romanticizing the lost land. American books were reprinted in vast quantities in the Englishspeaking nations and translated anew in other countries. American ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... herself to meet action. Now she seemed to count for little more than a bundle, of more or less value, that, having been secured, could wait its time for utility. Yet, before she had telescoped her vision to extend through and beyond Plimsoll, she had seen devils looking from his eyes, smug devils, but none the less menacing, risen from the man's own ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... out his hands in a gesture of hopelessness. "I knew you wouldn't believe it when I started. You couldn't. It would be a kind of blasphemy against the sacred institution of pavements. You're too damn smug, Ridgeway. I can't shake you. You haven't sat two days and two nights, keeping your eyes open by sheer teeth-gritting, until they got used to it and wouldn't shut any more. When I tell you I found that yellow thing snooping around the davits, and three bights ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... threefold trade explain, Who shaved, drew teeth, and breathed a vein. The goat he welcomes with an air, And seats him in his wooden chair: 30 Mouth, nose, and cheek the lather hides: Light, smooth, and swift the razor glides. 'I hope your custom, sir,' says pug. 'Sure never face was half so smug.' The goat, impatient for applause, Swift to the neighbouring hill withdraws: The shaggy people grinned and stared. 'Heyday! what's here? without a beard! Say, brother, whence the dire disgrace? What ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... cordial in comparison with the cold bow which the two colleagues exchanged at the Chamber, an "I was expecting you" in which perhaps an intention showed itself, the lawyer pointed the Nabob into a seat near his desk, told the smug domestic in black not to come till he was summoned, arranged a few papers, after which, sinking into his arm-chair with the attitude of a man ready to listen, who becomes all ears, his legs crossed, he rested his chin on his ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... sound a little—smug?" Canby asked timidly. "The way we've got him now, Roderick seems to me to be always seeing himself as a splendid man and sort of pointing it ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... laughter. Taranne fired a volley of peas, which rattled harmlessly against the long boots of Passepoil. Navailles consulted his oracle, and declared that he liked the big one best. Oriol, with a flourish of his trumpet, announced that he preferred the smug fellow. Peyrolles, with a look of horror on his face, rushed forward and attempted to intercept the new-comers, but he was too late. Cocardasse was already in front of Gonzague, and had made him a tremendous obeisance. "We have the honor ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Falloden wrathfully. "He is an impossible person. He wears a frilled shirt, scents himself, and recites his own poems when he hasn't been asked. And he curries favour—abominably—with the dons. He is a smug—of the first water. There is a movement going on in college to suppress him. I warn you I may not be able ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... show you no mercy," he answered quietly, "for I have sworn to show no mercy to your race, and you are the last of it. But listen, that for a few moments before you die you may shake off your smug complacency and learn what this wealth is, and what kind of brood you Trenoweths are. Dog! The treasure that lies by Dead Man's Rock is treasure weighted with dead men's curses and stained with dead men's blood—wealth ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... we were building our smug little house of Social Security, the whole world was crashing around us. Instead of achieving local security we find ourselves now in the midst of world-wide insecurity. Far from having eliminated the economic causes of fear, we now find these causes multiplied many times. To the fear of ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... prizes, certificates of merit, and everything else which could be obtained in Muirtown Seminary by a lad who played no games and swatted all evening at next day's work. The town was weary of seeing Thomas John and his brother—each wearing the same smug expression, and each in faultlessly neat attire—processing up in turn to receive their honours from the hands of the Lord Provost, and the town would cheer with enthusiasm when Duncan Robertson made an occasional appearance, being glad to escape from the oppression of the Dowbiggin ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... suppose, as hideous as human half-wittedness could invent or endure. But they are different. They are complete; they are, in their way, compact; rounded and finished with an effect that may be prim or smug, but is not raw. The surroundings of them are neat, if it be in a niggling fashion. But American ugliness is not complete even as ugliness. It is broken off short; it is ragged at the edges; even its worthy objects have around them a sort of halo ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... p. 22 et seq., stretches this as far as possible to save the reputation of the Church in the Galileo matter. As to the various branches of the Protestant Church in England and the United States, it is a matter of notoriety that the smug, well-to-do laymen, whether elders, deacons, or vestrymen, are, as a rule, far more prone to heresy-hunting than are their better educated pastors. As to the cases of Messrs. Winchell, Woodrow, Toy, and all the professors at Beyrout, with details, see the chapter in this series on The ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... reception, or was going out of town, or coming back. Those who ran their husbands in debt to get into society always looked to see what Mrs. Haldene had been doing the past week. The society reporters, very often smug young women of aristocratic but impoverished families, called her up by telephone every day in the week. Mrs. Haldene pretended to demur, but the reporters found her an inexhaustible mine of tittle-tattle. Sometimes they omitted some news which she considered important; ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... good-natured-looking great cat whose "I-have-eaten-the-canary" expression and smug whiskers had suggested his name, but a jungle tiger who had "gone bad," as the animal trainers call it, and who stood for a moment in the doorway, wrathfully surveying his frantic companions and selecting a victim. Froth was dripping from his snarling ...
— Side Show Studies • Francis Metcalfe
... Betty Vivian, Fanny was rather a favorite at Haddo Court. She was certainly not the least bit original. She was prim and smug and self-satisfied to the last degree, but she always did the right thing in the right way. She always looked pretty, and no one ever detected any fault in her. Her mistresses trusted her, and some of the girls thought it worth their while ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... one of the cheapest things in all the world. The price of war never can be paid in gold. Not in national treasuries can you see the payment of that price, where smug, well-groomed politicians sign bonds and bills of credit. If you would see the payment of that price of war, you must go to the place of war. With all your senses open, step upon the battlefield. Smell the smoke of burning powder, the reek of charging horses, ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... loved and honored. It was bad enough to have to flatter Clayton's opponent, to picture him as a noble, disinterested character, ready to sacrifice himself for the public weal. Into his pictures of this man, attired in the long black coat of conventional respectability, with the smug face of pharisaism, he could get nothing but cant and hypocrisy; but in his caricatures of Clayton there was that which pained him worse—disloyalty, untruth, and now and then, to the discerning few who knew the tragedy of Kittrell's soul, there was pity. And thus his work ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... for me—not for a dime—but for real money. Well, he fell for it. And for all that morning he looked just the way I wanted him to look. But the next morning, having had the spending of certain moneys, he looked too tidy and well fed for Satan. And this morning he was hopeless. He looked smug and fatuous and disgustingly self-satisfied. So I gave him quite a lot of money, not wishing to hurt the creature's feelings, and told him to go away." She looked up, laughing at herself. "Do you know, I really believed I'd dreamed out a golden ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... Hughie warmly. Miss Maggie flashed her dazzling teeth; Teeters reached out and smote him with his fist between the shoulder blades; Mrs. Taylor laid her hand upon his arm with her large smug air of patronizing friendliness, and, stooping, ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... was a page out of a fashion book, and there were pictures on it of horrid little smug-faced boys in sky-blue suits bowling hoops in a way no real little boy ever bowled a hoop in his life, and simpering little girls in lace frocks holding dolls ...
— Piccaninnies • Isabel Maud Peacocke
... too. But Captain Douglas says they seemed pretty smug. They may try it again. By the way, Jerry says the film will be ready at five tomorrow night. I'll send him into New York early tomorrow and he can do a few errands for me, then pick up the film on his ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine
... beseechingly. Now, as she saw the smug mockery on her captor's face, she fell silent. The futility of any pleading was too plain. Her eyes shifted to the ground again. But the first wild fear was past, and she began to think with some clearness. At once, it occurred to her that she must guard ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... comparison of results—are practically identical. They are virtually in complete agreement. Now, the strange thing is this: their conclusions are wrong in every instance" (here I nearly laughed aloud, for, as I glanced at the two experts, the expression of smug satisfaction on their countenances changed with lightning rapidity to a ludicrous spasm of consternation); "not sometimes wrong and sometimes right, as would have been the case if they had made mere guesses, but wrong every time. When they are quite certain, ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... smug face, and I was within an ace of striking him. Then I controlled myself, and my will ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... however, those three smug hypocrites retired, and, by good luck, transferred their suffocating epergne to the sideboard; so then father and son looked at one another with that conscious air which naturally precedes a topic of interest; and Wardlaw senior invited his son to try a certain ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... for me. He waited at the bottom of the steps with that smug financial face of his—a mask through which, in that moment, the warmth of suffering and love seemed struggling to escape. He was plucking, from his thin crop, gray hairs that he could ill ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... suppose everyone laughed, but I did not laugh. The tears came into my eyes. I was so happy I wanted to shout. Perhaps you understand what I mean. In the office that day when I read the letter my fiancee had written I had said to myself, 'I will take care of the dear little woman.' There was something smug, you see, about that. In her house when she cried out in that way, and when everyone laughed, what I said to myself was something like this: 'We will take care of ourselves.' I whispered something ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... but he got no rejoinder to that. He looked at the company, and his small, smug, fatuous face, which was somewhat pale and haggard, frowned with astonishment. Again he looked for information into Carroll's unanswering face. He looked at an empty chair near him; then he looked at Carroll ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... are out of it for good and all. So did we think. We were as smug as you are when France went down in '71.... Yours is only one further degree of insularity. You think this vacuous aloofness of yours is some sort of moral superiority. So did ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... Ransom's, so much bitterness as she saw lurking beneath his exaggerations, his misrepresentations. She knew he was an intense conservative, but she didn't know that being a conservative could make a person so aggressive and unmerciful. She thought conservatives were only smug and stubborn and self-complacent, satisfied with what actually existed; but Mr. Ransom didn't seem any more satisfied with what existed than with what she wanted to exist, and he was ready to say worse things about some of those whom she would have supposed to ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... exactly what he wanted. A return to the Church, for example, was out of the question. His sympathies had outgrown the ideals of that establishment; a wave of pantheistic benevolence had drowned its smug little teachings. The Church of England! What was it still good for? A stepping-stone, possibly towards something more respectable and humane; a warning to all concerned of the folly of idolizing dead men and their ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... South of Ireland—to help his widie. That's got it. Good idee. Very good idee. Charity and business—what they like. Micky Mahon, his name was. Died o'—I must have it all pat on the tongue. What did he die of, Brand? You're an artful little feller, settin' there so smug and secret like a hen ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... and I did not dispute the mandate, although I would rather have remained with her, and got to know something of the nature that lay behind those gray passionless features, than turn to the society of that smug-looking young gentleman who waited so respectfully, like a machine whose ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... in the same cemetery back home. Yes, sir! And nearly all of 'em have the same epitaph—'Lost at Sea'—and—you idiot, Skinner! What do you mean, sir, by standing there with your infernal little smile on your smug face? Out of my office, you jackanapes, and call the dogs off this boy Matt. Why, there was never one of his breed that wasn't a man and a seaman, ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... sitting back suddenly and nursing his left knee with clasped hands. "I can't control other people's actions, you know. What I insist on to-night is that you shall envisage this affair in its proper light. We have a long way to travel before counsel rises with his smug 'May it please you, me lud, and gentlemen of the jury.' But, having persuaded you to agree that, willy nilly, Miss Doris is the hub of our little universe for the hour, I now swear you and this fire-eater in as assistants. There must be no more speeches, no punching of heads, ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... being moved from the Earth freighters, and Duke swore again. Five billion Earthmen would read of their "generosity" to Meloa, and any guilt they felt for their desertion would vanish in a smug satisfaction at their charity. Smugness was easy in a world without dust or carrion smell or craters that had ...
— Victory • Lester del Rey
... network over the country, they could have held their own; but cooped up in their Faubourg, with their backs against the Chateau, or spread at full length over the Budget, a single blow cut the thread of a fast-expiring life, and a petty, smug-faced lawyer came forward with the axe. In spite of M. Royer-Collard's admirable discourse, the hereditary peerage and law of entail fell before the lampoons of a man who made it a boast that he had adroitly argued some few heads out of the executioner's clutches, and now forsooth must clumsily ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... secure in its social and political alliances; and he was bent on shaming people into severer notions. "We will have a vocabularium apostolicum, and I will start it with four words: 'pampered aristocrats,' 'resident gentlemen,' 'smug parsons,' and 'pauperes Christi'. I shall use the first on all occasions; it seems to me just to hit the thing." "I think of putting the view forward (about new monasteries), under the title of a 'Project for Reviving Religion in Great Towns.' Certainly colleges of unmarried priests (who might, ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... "Respect is the very last feeling he excites in me; he has too little solidity and composure of character or mind for that. He is brilliantly clever, of course, and he is honest enough, but he is passionate, and in no way great, I think." In Religion—obscurantism, resistance to the light, the smug endeavour to make the best of both worlds, offended Arnold as much on the one hand, as insolence, violence, ignorant negation, "lightly running amuck at august things," offended him on the other. He loved a "free handling, ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... smug reasonings the bare facts were these: East St. Louis, a great industrial center, lost 5,000 laborers,—good, honest, hard-working laborers. It was not the criminals, either black or white, who were driven from East St. Louis. They are still there. They will ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... pain in her breast that was not of thwarted desires nor of rancour toward this smug, insolent brother who had come upon the scene. It hurt her to think that up to this night she had known so little, ay, almost nothing, about her own mother's life. For the first time, she heard of Salem, ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... capacity for life. I could be considered foolish— Today I am not going to the restaurant. I am after all this time weary of the waiters, Who scornfully bring us, with their smug grimaces, Dark beer and make us so confused That we cannot find our home And we must Use the foolish street lights To prop ourselves up with weak hands. Today I have bigger things in mind— Ah, I shall find out the meaning of existence. And in ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... a devil of a time! There's a smug chap in a bowler hat who is supposed to be my valet. When I went to bed last night, I found I had a decent room enough, opening out of the sitting-room. I was obviously expected to turn in there, asking no questions; so I turned in. But the valet person slept in a room communicating ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... epitome of respectable and respected mediocrity, save when, with a profound irony, the recurring blast of insanity transformed the personality of the stolid monarch, and shattered the complacency of the smug little Court. Within its shelter hovered the bevy of amiable Princesses, whose minutest word and glance yet lives for us in the searchlight of Fanny Burney's adoring scrutiny. Afar, the sons pursued their ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... most unpleasant addition to sepulchral sentiment is here the fashion: photographs of the departed set into the stone. You see an elegant and genteel marble cross: there on the pedestal above the name is the photo:—a smug man with bourgeois whiskers,—a militiaman with waxed mustaches well turned up,—a woman well attired and conscious of it: you cannot think how indecent looked the pretension of such types to the ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... gust of wind that has first fanned it to its very brightest? If you are not a flame you cannot, of course, be blown out. Gusts no longer shake you. Tempests pass you by untouched. And if besides you have the additional advantage of being extremely smug, extremely thick-skinned, you shall go on living till ninety, and not during the whole of that time be stirred by so ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... ambitions appeared even worse. For the first time, he perceived his own consummate selfishness set over against the shining renunciations of his mother. Then, step by step, he followed his career in Brookville: his smug satisfaction in his own good looks; his shallow pride and vanity over the vapid insincerities he had perpetrated Sunday after Sunday in the shabby pulpit of the Brookville church; his Pharisaical relations with his people; his utter misunderstanding ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... personality which shone forth from those sharp black eyes now, than the smug, quasi-religious man ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... story of le Garou, as he was called by some, although I speak of these things as locally familiar, it is very sure that to many citizens of the town they were quite unknown. The smug shopkeeper on the main street had scarcely heard of him until the day after the final scene at the slaughter-house, when his great carcass was carried to Hine's taxidermist shop and there mounted, to be exhibited later at the Chicago World's ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... clergymen in the room; one, rather fat, with a smug look and a smartly dressed wife, Jean decided must have married an heiress; another, with very prominent teeth and kind eyes, was accompanied by an extremely aged ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... passionately). The truth—Oh, God! what do you know about the truth? Your business is crawling up into a little power, that you may use it by tantalizing, morally and physically, people a thousand times better than you.... You sit there in your smug authority ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... from Paris. My family scampered out and away and we followed leisurely after. Fontainebleau is quite smug. There is a fashionable hotel near the station, before which a fine tall fellow in uniform parades. He looked at our basket with contempt, and we looked at him in pity. Just beyond the hotel are smart shops with windows filled with many-colored trifles ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... a lesson, if anything could, to the bumptious and "efficient" and smug. Time after time I have watched him serving some furred and jewelled customer who was not fit to exchange words with him; I have seen him jostled in a crowded aisle by some parvenu ignoramus who knew not that this quiet little man was one of the immortal spirits ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... out of their way to insult Him, hath ever been a mystery to me. My father in a rough stern voice bade him speak with more reverence of sacred things, on which the pair of them gave tongue together, swearing tenfold worse than before, and calling my father a canting rogue and a smug-faced Presbytery Jack. What more they might have said I know not, for my father picked up the great roller wherewith he smoothed the leather, and dashing at them he brought it down on the side of one of their ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Because one great poet dispensed with 'pontificals,' and yet brought the fire from heaven, henceforward 'pontificals' are humbug, and the wearer thereof but charlatan, despite—'the master yonder in the isle.' Pegasus must pack in favour of a British hunter, and even the poet at last wear the smug regimentals of mediocrity and mammon. Ye younger choir especially have a care, for, though you sing with the tongues of men and angels, and wear not a silk hat, it shall avail you nothing. Neither Time, which is Mudie, nor Eternity, which is Fame, will know you, and your verses remain till ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... surely. He was really very attentive. The chartered rascals packed in the hall took this for irresolution, and howled at him to their hearts' content. Once more Prosper held to his motto—bided the time. The time came with the coming of Master Porges —that smug and solemn man—into the assembly. The seneschal looked round him with a benignant air, as who should say, "My children all!" The listening man in the ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... and the Lieutenant-Governor adjoined. Each had its ante-room, in which a private secretary wrote eternally at a roll-top desk, an excessively plain-featured stenographer rattled the keys of his typewriter, and a smug-faced page yawned over a newspaper, or scanned the cards of visitors with the air of an official censor. At intervals, an electric bell whirred once, twice, or three times; and, according to the signal, one of the trio disappeared into the presence ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... have another bad match: a bankrupt, a prodigal, who dare scarce show his head on the Rialto; a beggar, that used to come so smug upon the mart.—Let him look to his bond: he was wont to call me usurer;—let him look to his bond: he was wont to lend money for a Christian courtesy;—let him ...
— The Merchant of Venice [liberally edited by Charles Kean] • William Shakespeare
... a perusal of the late Lord Castlereagh's speeches! We should here have Parliamentary eloquence under a most fantastic yet captivating phase. Who, for instance, but the artist to PUNCH could paint CASTLEREAGH'S figure of a smug, contented, selfish traitor, the "crocodile with his hand in his breeches' pocket?" Again, does not the reader recollect that extraordinary person who, according to the North Cray Demosthenes, "turned his back upon himself?" There would be a portrait!—one, too, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 23, 1841 • Various
... his profile was exceedingly handsome. But in the full view Andy saw nothing except a grisly, purple scar that twisted down beneath the right eye of the man. It drew down the lower lid of that eye, and it pulled the mouth of the man a bit awry, so that he seemed to be smiling in a smug, half-apologetic manner. In spite of his youth he was unquestionably the dominant spirit here. Once or twice the others lifted their voices in argument, and a single word from him cut them short. And when he raised his head, now and again, to look at Andy, it gave the latter a feeling that ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... to the following passage: 'And the Swiss call themselves free! These smug bourgeois shut up in their little towns, these poor devils on their precipices and rocks, call themselves free! Is there any limit at all to what one can make people believe and cherish, provided that one preserves the old fable of "Freedom" in spirits of wine ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... James, "and we will roast the Crichton on a spit and hang that smug traitor, Tutor Livingston, over the walls of David's Tower, a bonny ferlie for ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... and admiring their room, Cap'n Bill went to the Peony Room to see what it was like and found his quarters were very cozy and interesting. There were pictures on the wall, portraits of grave-looking porpoises, bashful seals, and smug and smiling walruses. Some of the wall panels were formed of mirrors and reflected clearly the interior of the room. Around the ceiling was a frieze of imitation peonies in silver, and the furniture was peony-shaped, the broad leaves being bent to form seats and couches. Beside a pretty dressing ...
— The Sea Fairies • L. Frank Baum
... exceedingly busy in calculating the chances of a huge fight—indeed they spend a good part of each year in that pleasing employment. Smug diplomatists talk glibly about "war clearing the air;" and the crowd—the rank and file—chatter as though war were a pageant quite divorced from wounds and death, or a mere harmless hurly-burly where certain battalions ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... I say so? Really I think it was apt enough; now I remember them. Lady Wrinkle—oh, that smug old woman! there is no enduring her affectation of youth; but I plague her; I always ask whether her daughter in Wiltshire has a grandchild yet or not. Lady Worth—I can't bear her company; [aside] she has so much of that virtue in ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... hunted their way through untrodden woods and prairies, who had thought as much about the chances of swimming over swollen fords as of their cases, who had passed their nights—a half-dozen together—on the floors of wayside hostelries, could never be precisely the same sort of practitioners as the smug barristers of a more conventional age and place. But they were not deficient in ability, in learning, or in that most valuable faculty which enables really intelligent men to get their bearings and sustain themselves in every sphere of life to which they may be called. ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... "Honest thought! Yes! Where? In your study. That's where you theorists do your mischief. You can't make laws for the people in your study. You can't tell the status of the workingman from the figures you read in your study. You're like half the smug people in the world who discuss this question in the railway carriages and in their clubs. I've heard 'em till I'd like to shove their self-opinionated arguments down their throats, strip their clothes off their backs, and send them down to live with my pals, ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... listen to the organ-sustained voices, but the transepts he never penetrated because of the charge for admission. The music and the long vista of the fretted roof filled him with a vague and mystical happiness that he had no words, even mispronounceable words, to express. But some of the smug monuments in the aisles got a wreath of epithets: "Metrorious urnfuls," "funererial claims," "dejected angelosity," for example. He wandered about the precincts and speculated about the people who lived in the ripe and cosy houses of grey stone that cluster there so comfortably. Through green ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... unearned glory upon every department of her social organisation, it required both courage and discernment to raise the warning voice and to apply the wet blanket. But Nietzsche did both, and with spirit, because his worst fears were aroused. Smug content (erbrmliches Behagen) was threatening to thwart his one purpose—the elevation of man; smug content personified in the German scholar was giving itself airs of omniscience, omnipotence, and ubiquity, and all the while it was a mere cover ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... was best in their author, of his frank, ebullient, sensuous nature, lighted up here at least by a genuine if scarcely delicate humor. Of direct suggestion of vice Balzac was, naturally, as incapable as he was of smug puritanism; but it must be confessed that as a raconteur his proper audience, now that the monastic orders have passed away, would be a ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... irony of events turns our sternest resolves to ridicule. On the next street-corner was a hair-dresser's shop, its genial little proprietor, plump and smug, rubbing his hands and smiling in the doorway. Beholding the commanding figure of the yellow-bearded young aristocrat, afar off, his professional mouth watered over him. What a harvest for shears and razor was here! Dare he ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... the platform. The United States Senator, smug and now satisfied that he had chosen aright for his personal interests, sat in the chairman's central seat, and studied his people from under eyelids half lowered while the ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... My smug notebook states that all this was an admission that "the saints but embodied fine action," and it proceeds at some length to set forth my hope for a "cathedral of humanity," which should be "capacious enough to house a fellowship ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... Mac-pherson's house, and every trader and trading skipper detested this teacher above all others. Macpherson liked him and said he was "earnest," the other white men called him and believed him to be, a smug-faced ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... children. Yet, all the time, he had a feeling that, since he alone knew all the circumstances of his case, he alone was entitled to blame or to excuse himself. The glib judgments that moralists would pass upon his conduct could be nothing but the imbecilities of smug and pharisaic fools—of those not under this drugging spell—of such as had not blood enough, perhaps, ever ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of the smug, cotton-wooled member of society, whose soul has never strayed to the red hells. Why do they put the black cap over the head and the face of the victim ere they drop him through the trap? Please remember that in a short ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... hospitality he paid his guinea a day,—his front proud and defying. He felt yet that he had fortune and power, that a movement of his hand could raise and strike down, that at the verge of the tomb he was armed, to punish or reward, with the balance and the sword. Tripped in the smug waiter, and ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... brown Englishmen bear the stamp of the Public Schools upon them and have made England what she is. Smug-faced missionaries grow fat on the spoils they have collected from smug-faced church-and-chapel-goers at home. Labour Members are in the pay of Germany and frequent infamous flats in the West-End. Liberal Cabinet ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... with smug self-satisfaction as he spoke, and he repeated softly, "Yes, yes; that ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... table, and visited the shops of Salon in the interests of the Maison Hieropath. The day's work over, he returned to inquire for his supposititious offspring. The landlady, all smiles, presented him with a transmogrified Jean, cleansed and powdered, arrayed in the smug panoply of bourgeois babyhood. Shoes with a pompon adorned his feet, and a rakish cap decorated with white satin ribbons crowned his head. He also wore an embroidered frock and a pelisse trimmed with rabbit-fur. Jean grinned and dribbled self-consciously, and showed his two little teeth to the proudest ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... an interval of disorder. But surely we are not going to let the meeting end in this way. The chairman calls for the next speaker, and he stands forth in the person of a rather smug little shopkeeper, who declares that he knows of no single particular in which the working class needs correction. The speech undeniably falls fiat. Will no one restore ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... has been of immense importance both for Germany and Europe. He is typical of the change that begins to appear about the middle of the century. Reacting from the optimism of the idealists (which seemed to him both smug and false), Nietzsche welcomed Schopenhauer's more Spartan view with a kind of fierce delight. But his criticism of Schopenhauer was fierce too, and he gave a strangely different turn to such parts of the doctrine as he did accept. To ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... would not work. These were either of the industrial class, or of that petite bourgeoisie whose husbands, called to the colors, had been small clerks and had made just enough to keep their usually childless wives in a certain smug comfort. ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... soft, whispering creak of saddle leather, the faint clank of spur chains, and the whir of a horse mouthing the "cricket" in his bit. Even in her anger, she was conscious of an answering tingle of blood, because this was life in the raw—life such as she had dreamed of in the tight swaddlings of a smug civilization, and had ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... world with a conscience clear from guilt; and now he has wakened up to bear the burden for another day. It is written in his face what he thinks. You see the deep down-drawn lines in the lower part of the face, the furrows upon the forehead, and the look almost of terror in the eyes. But a smug-faced flunkey offers him a cup of tea with buttered toast, and he must come back to the pretence of that tragi-comedy, the life ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... grim and ghostly revelations might pass between this dead scion of the Dorntons lying on the trestles before them and the obscure, nameless ticket of leave man awaiting his entrance in the vault below! The incongruity of this thought, with the smug complacency of the worldly minded congregation sitting around him, and the probable smiling carelessness of the reckless rover—the cause of all—even now idly pacing the deck on the distant sea, touched ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... found in town bound to go to English sermon whether they knew the language or not, a form which it would be difficult nowadays to defend. And it was, in a way, laughable to see the big Gaels driven to chapel like boys by the smug light burghers they could have crushed with a hand. But time told; there was sown in the landward mind by the blessing of God (and some fear of the Marquis, no doubt) a respect for Christian ordinance, and by the time I write of there ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro |
