|
|
|
More "Complacent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... time they had made their rounds Sir Archibald had arrived at his most comfortable and complacent mood. He loved his niece. He loved her for the sake of his dead brother, and as she grew in years, he came to love her for herself. Her sturdy independent fearlessness, her sound sense, her honest heart, and chiefly, if it must be told, her whole-souled devotion to himself, made for her ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... dragged forth in abundance upon the rude bone and stone hooks, which served their purpose far better than when, in summer time, the line was longer and the fish escaped so often from the barbless implements. It was a great season in all that made a cave family's life something easy and complacent and vastly promotive of the social amenities and the advancement of art and literature—that is, they were not compelled to make any sudden raid on others to assure the means of subsistence, and there was time for the carving of bones and the telling of strange stories of ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... the labors of those babies," thought he. And then he wondered whether the wisest thing in life were not to beget two or three of these little creatures and watch them grow up with complacent curiosity. A longing for marriage breathed on his soul. A man is not so lost when he is not alone. At any rate, he hears some one stirring at his side in hours of trouble or of uncertainty; and it is something only to be able to speak on equal terms ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... thin, threadbare coat. One could see that he was so used to being out in all sorts of weather that he didn't mind the cold. The other was well fed and well dressed, and looked like a prosperous and self-complacent farmer. ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... as if she should run wild as she heard Mrs. Merrifield's complacent remarks on having always thought so, and being sure that a few weeks of good air and good management would make an immense difference. The need of not alarming or prejudicing the poor little victim was all that kept Angela in any restraint; and Mrs. Merrifield went on to say that she ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... cat was old now, and objected to the baby so strenuously that Dely regarded her as partly insane from age; and though she was kind to her of course, and fed her faithfully, still a cat that could growl at George's baby was not regarded with the same complacent kindness that had always blessed her before; and whenever the baby was asleep at milking-time, Pussy was locked into the closet,—a proceeding she resented. Biddy, on the contrary, seemed to admire the child,—she certainly did not object to her,—and necessarily obtained thereby a far higher ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... red and white English setter, a complacent dog with a waving tail of silver hair which flickered in the sunshine. As they started, the dog yelped, and leaped at the horses' heads, till Kennicott took him into the buggy, where he nuzzled Carol's knees and leaned out to sneer at ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... The man who, while he looked on the expensive machine, thanked his stars that he had more wisdom than to waste his money on such idle schemes, changed the expression of his features as the boat moved from the wharf and gained her speed, and his complacent expression gradually softened into one of wonder. The jeers of the ignorant, who had neither sense nor feeling to suppress their contemptuous ridicule and rude jokes, were silenced for a moment ...
— Scientific American magazine, Vol. 2 Issue 1 • Various
... they were, and that is all. Scarcely the fact seemed worth the mention, so shortly it is told in a passing paragraph. For them no Europe was agitated, no courts were ordered into mourning, no papal hearts trembled with indignation. At their deaths the world looked on complacent, indifferent, or exulting. Yet here, too, out of twenty-five common men and women were found fourteen who, by no terror of stake or torture, could be tempted to say that they believed what they ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... innocent,—are more or less inexperienced,—and who have fluttered hither to the snare of Lady Winsleigh's "at home," half expecting to be allowed to make love to their hostess, and so have something to boast of afterwards,—others are of the middle-aged complacent type, who, though infinitely bored, have condescended to "look in" for ten minutes or so, to see if there are any pretty women worth the honor of their criticism—others again (and these are the most unfortunate) are ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... more extensive library of Dr. Priestley was left unnoticed and unlamented by the orthodox poet, who probably felt a complacent satisfaction at the destruction of heterodox books, the owner ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... that state, and perhaps by those of other states. It was not an act of war against you and me merely, but against every loyal and patriotic citizen of this great republic. Up to that moment we had done nothing. This government had been more forbearing, more quiet, more complacent, under this series of offenses, than any government instituted since the ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... go further than this, Mr. Winkle,' continued Mr. Phunky, in a most smooth and complacent manner. 'Did you ever see anything in Mr. Pickwick's manner and conduct towards the opposite sex, to induce you to believe that he ever contemplated matrimony of ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... I thought I might help, you know," was the complacent remark of Charlie, who had improved his time, and, while keeping his "ears out," had been putting his legs into his pants as rapidly ...
— The Knights of the White Shield - Up-the-Ladder Club Series, Round One Play • Edward A. Rand
... moderation!" Mrs. Baldwin laughed from the depths of the complacent prosperity that irradiated her handsome white hair and active brown eyes, her pleasant rosiness, and even her compact stoutness, suggesting strength rather than weight. "But since Enid became engaged, that means Harry all the time—there's my library gone; ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... Rabelais complete, "Mlle. de Maupin," Burton's "Arabian Nights," and the "Decameron" being in constant demand. He could tell literally hundreds of dirty stories, always having a new one on tap, always looking when he told it like a complacent cherub. ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... or two, were released from durance and set on their legs; a rug was found and spread down before the fireplace; the colonel's sofa was got at, and unboxed, and brought into position; and finally a fire was made. Esther stood still to take a moment's complacent review of ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... here and there, no doubt, a beautiful tract now desolate, here and there a fruitful vale now filled with ashes,—but also, the same glorious bay breathing calmly in its bed, the same cloudless sky holding the green and peaceful earth in its complacent embrace." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... his loom, weaving and weaving, to set the landscape to words. This one peers about, as he goes, among the grasses; he waits by the canal to watch the dragon-flies; he leans on the gate of the pasture, and cannot look enough upon the complacent kine. And here comes another, talking, laughing, and gesticulating to himself. His face changes from time to time, as indignation flashes from his eyes or anger clouds his forehead. He is composing articles, delivering orations, and conducting ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Pierre was complacent; he admired her wild attacks. He smiled, and replied: "My dear, it was a whim of mine; but you need not tell him, all the same, when he wakes. You see this is your father's house, though the whim is mine. But look: he is waking-the pin is good. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... dismayed as I was, I could not help laughing. "Rutli and revenge!" Impossible! And to make it the more absurd, he was still smoking gently and regarding me with soft, complacent eyes. So unchanged was his face and manner that he might have told me he was going ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... in the discharge of duty to God and man, and she worked untiringly to reinstate them—in her good opinion. That was it, and it was no more! All such attempted salvation resolved itself into the mere effort to drag men up to the complacent ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... of Napoleon was confined to the Lower House, the Peers, from the nature of their composition, being complacent and passive enough. The vast majority of them were in fact mere shadows gathered round the solid persons of Joseph, Lucien, Louis, and Jerome Bonaparte, and Sieyes, Carnot, and the military men of the Revolution. As a political body Napoleon despised them himself, and yet he wanted the nation ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... season brings New change, to her, of everlasting youth; Still the green soil, with joyous living things, Swarms, the wide air is full of joyous wings, And myriads, still, are happy in the sleep Of ocean's azure gulfs, and where he flings The restless surge. Eternal Love doth keep, In his complacent arms, the ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... certain economies, or telling with a degree of pleasure of ten louis d'or won last evening at cards. She was at first a little afraid that he had become in some way embarrassed; but, as he assured her, with a complacent smile, that this was far from being the case, she soon learned to treat these little attempts at saving as an innocent whim, especially as they only extended to trifling details, the baron insisting as much as ever upon keeping up ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... precautions to make known the existence of a spy in the city, if not to secure his arrest, turned to the crowding business on his hands with a sense of ease and refreshment. He might not have felt quite so self-assured and complacent, had he seen the worthy Bernhoff smiling broadly to himself as he strolled along the street, with the air of one enjoying a ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... shaving-shelf. A new, unforeseen Clethera, whom she had never been obliged to deal with before, gave her a desperate, stony stare out of a haggard face. She was young, her skin had not a line. But it was as if she had changed places with her wrinkled grandmother, to whom the expression of complacent maidenhood ...
— The Mothers Of Honore - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... I, dead tired: you self-deceiving, self complacent thing. Ha!—aren't you just the same? You haven't altered one ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... monastic peace and storm had come and gone, sifting and penetrating his soul, washing out from it little by little the heats and passions with which he had plunged. As he looked back on himself he was astonished at his old complacent smallness. His figure appeared down that avenue of years, a tiny passionate thing, gesticulating, feverish, self-conscious. He remembered his serene certainty that he was right and Ralph wrong in every touch of friction between them, his own furious and theatrical outburst ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... Paragot, waving a complacent hand, as soon as Blanquette had retired to make the necessary purchases for the evening meal, "you perceive that she is perfectly happy. You were entirely wrong. All is for the best in this best ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... self-centred sage, whom Hokusai beheld with his own eyes in a devious corner of Yedo. A hermit he is, surely; one not more affable than Diogenes, yet wiser than he, being at peace with himself and finding (as it were) the honest man without emerging from his own tub; a complacent Diogenes; a Diogenes who has put on flesh. Looking at him, one is reminded of that over-swollen monster gourd which to young Nevil Beauchamp and his Marquise, as they saw it from their river-boat, 'hanging heavily down the bank on one greenish yellow cheek, ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... his sledge with an aggrieved manner which was, however, as complacent as his fatigue and discontent, "ez one of them nat'ral born finikin skunks ez I despise. I reckon he began to give p'ints to his parents when he was about knee-high to Richelieu there. He's on them confidential terms with hisself and the Almighty that he reckons he ken run ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... of curiosity in Jane's circles, she accepted a number of dances from Teddy—in fact the big fanciful "T" which Jane remembered so well in the spook letter, was scribbled all over her dancing card, while Judith accepted Ray Mann, a chum of Ted's, in complacent substitution. Ray was a capital fellow, with such a stock of chestnut hair he might have matched up pretty well with Bobbie, if her spare time had not been so filled in with Dave Jordan, ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... possible? None, absolutely none. That afternoon she was utterly powerless to shake by any act of hers the equanimity of those three complacent young persons. There was nothing belonging to them which she could smash, hide, or appropriate. There was nothing they had ever said or done which now, in her hour of need, she could use against them. They were in fact so impossibly, so hopelessly—no, not exactly virtuous, but proper, that ...
— The Hickory Limb • Parker Fillmore
... seated at a table in a restaurant. Dinner was over, and from all around them came the murmur of complacent and well-fed London. A string band of just sufficient strength gave forth a ragtime effort; a supreme being hovered near to ensure that the '65 brandy was all it should be. Of the men themselves little need ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... permit. Sometimes the reading is varied by mystical dances of a slow and solemn character, but all laughter, levity and exuberance are sedulously discountenanced, the aim of all present being to attain an attitude of serene and complacent ecstasy which enables them to invest utterances of the most perfect ineptitude with a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various
... a girl alive, certainly not an American girl, who is wholly lacking in some sort of ability. The parasite type (who is growing rare in these days, by the way, for it is now the fashion to "do things") either fastens herself upon complacent relatives or friends when deserted by fortune, or drifts naturally into the half-world, always abundantly recruited from ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... what is right, and a self-satisfied doing of it. There may be a painstaking attention to the forms of obedience, and a self-righteous content in doing the required things. Is this the underlying thought in Peter's self-complacent remark, "Lo, we have left all and followed Thee.[102] We're so much better than this rich young ruler who couldn't stand the test you put to him. We——"? Poor, self-confident Peter! When the fire test did come, and come so hot, how his ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... Mr. Perry's oily, complacent voice trickled on. He was in his element. Nothing suited him better than to lay down the law, patronize and exhort. He had no idea of stopping, and he did not stop. He stood before the fire, his feet planted firmly on the rug, ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... all depend on one thing," said he to Macleod, with a complacent wisdom in the round and jovial face. "Take my word for it. I hear of people studying the character, the compatibilities, and what not, of other people; but I never knew of a young man thinking of such things when ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... did that," said Mr. Hoopdriver simultaneously, and speaking with a certain complacent concern. "I ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... possess, & a spell fell upon that house. It was fine to see the faces light up with the pleased wonder & surprise of it. No one was indifferent any more; & when the singers finished the camp was theirs. It was a triumph. It reminded me of Lancelot riding in Sir Kay's armor, astonishing complacent knights who thought they had struck a soft thing. The jubilees sang a lot of pieces. Arduous & painstaking cultivation has not diminished or artificialized their music, but on the contrary—to my surprise—has mightily reinforced its eloquence and beauty. Away back in the beginning—to my mind—their ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... to a new and wider realm where the evolution of the soul proceeds. It would be difficult to say which is the greater misfortune—the delusions that make death the king of terrors, or the complacent belief that if death does not end all, it at least brings the soul to a judgment that ends all personal responsibility and settles one's fate forever. Death can no more lessen responsibility or transform the moral nature ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... excellent match for Theo," was Lady Throckmorton's complacent comment on the subject of the attache's visit, and the comment was made to Denis himself. "M. Maurien is the very man to take good care of her; and besides that, he is, of course, desirable. Girls like Theo ought to ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... curiosity to study the learned languages is not to have any vocation at all for literature: it is to be destitute of liberal curiosity and of enthusiasm; to mistake a self-sufficient and superficial dogmatism for philosophy, and that complacent indolence which is the bane of all improvement, for a proof of the highest degree ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... Russian officers and soldiers, who have shown nothing but kindness and delicacy of feeling since their entrance into the fortress. This consideration strikes me as being utterly wasted on the captured officers, who treat the situation superciliously and are quite complacent in their relations with ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... arrived, rubbing his hands and smiling in his usual complacent manner, and he entertained the guests for some time with anecdotes of western life, some of them very well told, but in most of which it was noticeable that he bore a very ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... out of it three or four times—halted her against a wall, and, with a furious forefinger, wagged all her misdeeds in her face; then, rating her up, down and round, he had prepared to march away complacent and refreshed like Justice taking leave of a sinner, only to find that if the jade wept he ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... Yankee stretched out his long limbs and smoked his pipe with the complacent aspect of a man who felt proud ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... embassies. Report came from the fleet—keeping pace with the land army along the coasts—that nowhere had the weak squadrons of the Greeks adventured a stand. Daily the smile of the Lord of the World grew more complacent, as his "table-companions" told him: "The rumour of your Eternity's advent stupefies the miserable Hellenes. Like Atar, the Angel of Fire, your splendour glitters afar. You will enter Athens and Sparta, and no sword leave its sheath, ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... gave a wringing motion of his hands, for the self-esteem of a complacent man is not torn away without agony. "Who else but you? I had thought myself brave enough to be silent, but still I must play the coward's part! That woman I told you of—that woman I loved—was you! Yes, you, you!" he cried, again and again, in a ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... Dr. Lacey arrived. Happy as a bird, Fanny sprang up the steps. Everything about her seemed homelike and cheerful. Kind, dusky faces peered at her from every corner, while Aunt Dilsey, with a complacent smile, stood ready to receive her. Fanny was prepared to like everything, but there was something peculiarly pleasing to her in Aunt Dilsey's broad, good-humored face. Going up to her she took both her hands, and said, ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... you given to ostentation and self-praise? Or have you given up the love of riches? Have you relinquished all strife? Are you content to take the lowest place, and to be passed by unnoticed? And have you ceased to talk about yourself and to regard yourself with self-complacent pride? If the former, even though you may imagine you worship God, the god of your heart is self. If the latter, even though you may withhold your lips from worship, you are dwelling with the ...
— The Way of Peace • James Allen
... I make myself think—and I hope I do not seem self-complacent in saying it, for you must have learned from the tone of my remarks, if from no other source, that self-complacency is not a Northern characteristic, especially in our feelings toward the South—but I make myself think, ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... left in doubt, for in another moment she returned with a flower-bedecked cap on her smooth gray head, that transformed her into a figure at once so complacent and so ridiculous that, had my nerves not been made of iron, I should certainly have betrayed my amusement. With it she had also put on her company manner, and what with the smiles she bestowed upon ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... of public worker—a mixture of the mystical and the practical—was the terror of the Vienna delegates. He put spokes in everybody's wheel, behaved as the autocrat of the Congress and felt as self-complacent as a saint. Countess von Thurheim wrote of him: "He mistrusted his environment and let himself be led by others. But he was thoroughly good and high-minded and sought after the weal, not merely of his own country, but of ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... day by seeing and hearing their wicked deeds;— [2:9]the Lord knows how to deliver the pious from trial, and to keep the wicked to the day of judgment to be punished, [2:10]but especially those who walk after the flesh, in corrupt desires, and despise government. Presumptuous, self-complacent, they fear not to revile glories, [2:11]where the angels who are greater in strength and power do not bring against them a reproachful judgment; [2:12]but these, like irrational animals, brutes made to be taken and destroyed, reviling things which they do not ...
— The New Testament • Various
... Dick,—and a look of contentment softened his features. Whatever storm had wrecked his life, he had now passed beyond its billows, and from the sure haven into which he had been blown he could gaze with complacent resignation, if not with happiness, at the dangers through which he had passed. I am sure that we were all delighted at the brightening appearance of our guest, and felt that, if the story he was to tell us was one which ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... fault of the individual Congressman's, except when he is complacent about it. The cleverest and most industrious representative cannot hope to understand a fraction of the bills on which he votes. The best he can do is to specialize on a few bills, and take somebody's word ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... looking into his correspondence with Count a Lasco and the emperors Adolphus and Maximilian; and pronouncing himself, with the most heartfelt complacency, the greatest genius of his age![332] In the midst of these self-complacent reveries, let us imagine we see his wife and little ones intruding; beseeching him to burn his books and instruments; and reminding him that there was neither a silver spoon, nor a loaf of bread, in the cupboard. Alas, poor ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... integrity! Think of it! And OUR JANE! The idea! The catty little snobs! The jealous little—cats! No, it wasn't Eugenia Frazer who said it, it was Eunice Brice—but I'm certain she was at the bottom of it, for she sat with her nice smug little painted face as sweet and complacent as an angel, all the time it was going on, and she seconded the motion! Just like that! With a SMILE, too! She said she fully agreed with what Miss Brice had said. Agreed! H'm! As if every one didn't ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... successful in his suit. You would be wrong to doubt it; and yet, if this assurance robbed you of the charming simplicity which sprang from uncertainty, I should blame you severely. I would have you neither bashful nor self-complacent; I would not have you in terror of losing my affection—that would be an insult—but neither would I have you wear your love lightly as a thing of course. Never should your heart be freer than mine. If you know nothing of the torture that ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... if they should see miracles of healing, for they would attribute them to the human mentality, to suggestion, hypnotism, hallucination, and the like. Even the mighty deeds of Christ were attributed to Beelzebub." The complacent Father settled back into his chair with an air of having disposed for all time of the mooted subject ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... prospects seem brighter than in the early days of 1306. Scotland was obedient; the French alliance was firmly cemented; the pope was complacent; the Archbishop of Canterbury was in exile and the Bishop of Durham in disgrace; the commons were grateful for the better order secured by the commissions of trailbaston, and the king had in the papal absolution a weapon ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... more than one thing about them that ain't commonplace," said the widow, with the complacent air of a person with a property right in a novelty ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... ain't it?" Uncle Boz used to say, as he pointed with a complacent air at his domicile. How Uncle Boz came to pick up that word unique, I do not know; had he been aware of its Gallic derivation, he would never have admitted it into his vocabulary—of that I am ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston
... with me! really you flatter me," said Major Harper, looking down and tapping his boot, with his own self-complacent, regretful smile. ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... the little Catholic priest, which was commonly complacent and even comic, had suddenly become knotted with a curious frown. It was not the blank curiosity of his first innocence. It was rather that creative curiosity which comes when a man has the beginnings of an idea. "Say it again, please," he said ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... vulgarity. The library alone had been subjected to peine forte et dure. Mrs. Temperley said that it had been purified by suffering. By dint of tearing down and dragging out offending objects ("such a pity!" cried the neighbours) its prosperous and complacent absurdity had been humbled. Mrs. Temperley retired to this refuge after her encounter with Sophia. That perennially aggrieved young person entered almost immediately afterwards and announced a visitor, with ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... pleasure quarter. Besides, their interviews took place in the darkness of night. In the daytime O'Naka usually was present, who, lacking other company, sought that of her daughter, and moreover was unwilling to be too complacent in the intrigue she saw going on. As soon as the sound of Densuke's steps was heard, O'Mino called him. There was a sharpness in her tone, a note of alarmed decision, that frightened and chilled him. Humbly he sought her ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... smoothed the wrinkles out of him, and stood him upright on his feet with the breath deeper in him than it ever had gone before. He felt that he never would be content to remain amongst the visible plentitude of that fat, complacent, finished land again. ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... critic sometimes to be a little more amiable than the truth, in order to encourage the beginner and the manager who has given him a chance, and also sometimes to insist disproportionately upon defects, so as to stir up a too complacent dramatist of reputation. Moreover, whilst the point is immaterial to the audience, the critic's expression of a judgment upon a particular piece must vary with the author, since, for instance, to censure ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... of the momentous marriage impending, until her complacent chatter was interrupted by the entrance of her half-sister, Mrs. Wynyard, and the ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... and Cesare. The pleasure-loving, careless woman of the Renaissance is very different from the Medea of Victor Hugo's romance; and what remains most revolting to the modern conscience in her conduct is complacent acquiescence in scenes of debauchery devised for her amusement.[2] Instead of viewing her with dread as a potent and malignant witch, we have to regard her with contempt as a feeble woman, soiled ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... the corn was a lighter task than planting the potatoes even though we did our own furrowing; and by the middle of May we were complacent over the fact that we had succeeded with our general spring work far better than we had hoped, remembering that we were novices who had to take so much counsel from books and from our kind, ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... the footlights, he stands a few moments amid the roars of the house, snorting with rage and choking with passion. Like Burleigh's nod, Handel's wig seemed to have been a sure guide to his temper. When things went well, it had a certain complacent vibration; but when he was out of humor, the wig indicated the fact in a very positive way. The Princess of Wales was wont to blame her ladies for talking instead of listening. "Hush, hush!" she would say. ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... circumstance—happen to be successful, "our joy is a vulgar glee, not unlike the snicker of any rogue at his success." The utter futility and evanescence of earthly goods, beauties, and achievements is sensed at least sometimes by normally complacent souls. And so patent and ubiquitous are the evidences of decay, disease, and death at our disposal, that they may easily be erected into a thoroughgoing ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... Triboulet for herself, and the princess, at the king's request, had taken the buffoon with her, and left the girl behind. The jestress' welcome to the household of the Queen of Navarre; a subsequent bewildering shower of gifts; the complacent, although respectful, attentions of the king. How she had endured these advances until no course remained save the one she had taken. No; she could not tell the duke's fool ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... A self-complacent smile curled her thin lips, as she quietly noted the effects of her somewhat lengthy speech. Like all efforts of an unexpected and startling nature it produced a decided sensation. The little lady in brocade ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... placing a red flag before him; we simply desire to accustom him to look upon a picture which his grand-children will not, because of the frequency of the occurrence, regard with anything more heart-rending than complacent indifference. The world moves forward; and the white man of the South could not stand still, if he so desired. Like the black man, he must work, or perish; like the black man, he must submit to the sharpest competition, and rise or fall, as the ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... Chancellor, a German student, a French subject, a French National Guard, an American citizen, a Bedouin Arab, a Carmelite monk, a Chinese mandarin, an Osmanli, a red Indian, a Scottish shepherd, and by the unmistakable nose and self-complacent smirk on his countenance, it is clear that in each and every character Henry Lord Brougham feels himself thoroughly at home. The Sleeping Beauty is a clever composition. "Beauty," by the way, is Lord ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... among men. He's honest and open hearted and human. There is not a mean hair in his head. And he stands a great deal nearer the top of his profession than I do to the top of mine. I have been a fool, Alice. I can see now what a complacent fool and a cad I must have been—when I could look at these men and see nothing but uncouthness. But, thank God, ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... the engineer echoed, with a complacent nod. "They've no minds of their own, you see. They'll do just as I ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... "The complacent egomania of man, his tyrannical indifferences, his little list of questions and answers which suffices for his wisdom, these are the chief phenomena or symptoms of his sanity. He alone has survived the ages by means of a series of ludicrous ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... have grinned at the delicious human interest, the subtle irony to pierce complacent humbugs, that lurked behind these Oriental situations. He made the most of his chance for a quaint parable, applicable to the courts, the church and science of Europe. As the story runs on, midst many and sudden adventures, the Babylonian reads causes ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... He paused a moment looking speculatively at Jack's complacent face. "It was a pity you were so damned offensive, but I suppose it's the way you're made. You were the sole cause of the whole thing, and if there's any decency in you, you'll go and tell ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... as the greatest noblemen present were offering their arms to aid him in walking, a man in the robe of a referendary advanced toward him, saluting him with a complacent and confident smile which astonished all the people there, accustomed to the great world, seeming to say: "We have secret affairs together; you shall see how agreeable he makes himself to me. I am at home in his ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... court's complacent misinterpretation ere he saw its smile; the facile theory that brooding so much over her fascinating picture had unhinged his brain. From that moment a hardness came over his heart. He shut his lips grimly. What was the use of talking? Whatever he said would be discredited ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... him, but he knew that Marchant, dreamer and incoherent poet, his heart aflame with zeal for humanity, was far nearer the truth of life than the smug complacent Pharisees that fattened from the toil of the helpless many who could do nothing but suffer in ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... grandfather, Stepan had been valet to a prince and officer of the Guards long since dead. She dressed neatly and was vain over her hands, which were certainly very beautiful. Dunyasha made a show of great disdain for all her admirers; she listened to their compliments with a self-complacent little smile and if she answered them at all it was usually some exclamation such as: "Yes! Likely! As though I should! What next!" These exclamations were always on her lips. Dunyasha had spent about three years being ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... the dusk enveloped Okar, Banker Maison closed the desk in his private office and lit a cigar. He leaned back in the big desk chair, slowly smoking, a complacent smile on his lips, his eyes glowing ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer
... the sons of Henry IV.—who was no more fortunate as a father than as a husband—younger brother of Louis XIII. and father of the great Mademoiselle, the most celebrated, most ambitious, most self-complacent and most unsuccessful fille a marier in French history, passed in enforced retirement at the castle of Blois the close of a life of clumsy intrigues against Cardinal Richelieu, in which his rashness was only equalled by his ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... around the fire that evening. "Sandie" in the middle, in front of the blaze; Christina on the other hand of him. She was in a glistening robe of dark blue silk, her fair hair knotted and wound gracefully about her head; a beautiful creature; looking at her lover with complacent looks of possession and smiles of welcome. Dolly never knew what sort of a figure the third was; she could not see herself, and she never thought about it. Yet she was a foil to the other two, and they were a foil to her, as she sat there at the corner of the hearth on a low cushion, in her ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... monotonous?" suggested 'Bias after a pause, during which he, too, puffed. Strange to say, he showed no vexation. His tone was complacent even. ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... from his morning newspaper; nor were they much more fatuously expressed. Twenty-four hours ago he might even have applauded them as noisily as anyone in the enraptured house. Now his gorge rose against the song, the complacent singer, the men and women who could be amused by such things. Could this be what they called the joy of living? Milly's eyes had begun to sparkle. He forgot that in this very contempt the theatre was providing what he had come to ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... precious rubies; the daisies kiss me in the eyes and lips; and the cyclamens shake their powder in my hair. On the wall, the roses are nodding, smiling; above me the orange blossoms surrender themselves to the wooing breeze; and on yonder rock the salamander sits, complacent and serene. I take a daisy, and, boy as boys go, question its petals: Married man or monk, I ask, plucking them off one by one, And the last petal says, Monk. I perfume my fingers with crumpled cyclamens, cover my face with the dark-eyed anemones, and fall asleep. And my burro sleeps beneath the ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... she is,' Mrs. Smith went on in a more complacent tone now that Stephen had been talked down; 'there's not a word to say against her, I'll own. I see her sometimes decked out like a horse going to fair, and I admire her for't. A perfect little lady. But people can't help their thoughts, and if she'd learnt to make ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... would not fail to impress upon the public mind the very decided difference that exists between the heraldic and the non-heraldic acceptation of the expression—"an escutcheon of pretence." Much real good would certainly result from the rude shock that would be given to many a complacent display of armorial insignia, by showing the proud blazonry to be abated with the baton sinister of heraldic untruth and unwarrantable assumption. And better still it would be to show to all who possess, or who desire to possess and to bear "Arms," that the "Pride of Heraldry" is a worthy and ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... my Uncle Peter, settling down in his chair before the open wood-fire, with that air of complacent obstinacy which spreads over him when he is about to confess and expound his philosophy of life,—"a day off is a day that a man ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... that Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson were born; here they grew to manhood; here they were inspired with those ideals of society so inimical alike to the imperial designs of the British Government and to the complacent pretensions of the ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... which she gave a little festa to her neighbours; and I ascertained she did remember them. She even hinted to one of her guests, in my hearing, that they had been intended for her originally; but "we cannot command the impulses of the heart, you know, cara mia," she added, with a very self-complacent sort of ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... at Mabel's side, carrying her wraps, while her mother and Jane trailed judiciously in the rear. He drove out with Mabel, Mabel's mother sitting opposite and smiling at him with an air of complacent proprietorship. He stood by the piano and turned the music while Mabel executed sonatas and other things for which he had not the least appreciation. He listened to solos from Lucia, which Mabel sang at Jane's ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... important sinner instead of a small and ridiculous one. In adolescence, the individual's growing demand for independence is often balked by the continued domination of his elders, and he rebelliously plans quite a career of crime for himself. He'll show them! They won't be so pig-headedly complacent when they know they have driven him to the bad. You can tell by the looks of {496} a person whose feelings are hurt that he is imagining something; usually he is imagining himself either a martyr or a desperado, ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... in itself was a masterstroke. It shrouded Chicago in mystery, and it suggested to the average Chicago reader that the Oligarchy did not dare give the local news. Hints that were untrue, of course, were given of insubordination all over the land, crudely disguised with complacent references to punitive measures to be taken. There were reports of numerous wireless stations that had been blown up, with heavy rewards offered for the detection of the perpetrators. Of course no wireless stations had been blown up. Many similar outrages, that dovetailed with the plot of the ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... Mrs. Dodge with the air of complacent satisfaction she had acquired since Fanny's marriage to the minister. "And I think ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... and grant him a few minutes more. He modestly laid all the blame on her beauty—lamented that he had not resolution enough to resist the charm of it. When did that commonplace compliment ever fail to produce its effect? Regina smiled with the weakly complacent good-nature, which was only saved from being contemptible by its association with her personal attractions. "Will you promise to behave?" she stipulated. And Amelius, not ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... secret places to proclaim as with a trumpet those demands of God which He has made known, those Laws which He has promulgated, and those rewards which He has promised? For how can she do otherwise who has looked on the all-glorious Face of God and then on the vacant and complacent faces of men—she who knows God's infinite capacity for satisfying men and men's all but infinite incapacity for seeking God—when she sees some poor soul shutting herself up indeed within the deadly and chilly walls of her own "temperament" and "individual ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... have been Miss Jeanette Peyton—a lady of fine accomplishments, with—hem—with something of the kind of step you speak of—a very complacent eye; and as to the bloom, I dare say offices of charity can summon as fine a color to her cheeks, as glows in the faces of her ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... justice, is a passage of what I can only call stupid brutality, disguised, alas, in the solemn and majestic robe of sonorous language. The angels timidly decline, and the Saviour volunteers, which saves the shameful situation. The character of God, as displayed by Milton, is that of a commercial, complacent, irritable Puritan. There is no largeness or graciousness about it, no wistful love. He keeps his purposes to himself, and when his arrangements break down, as indeed they deserve to do, some one has got to be punished. If the guilty ones cannot, so much ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... devoted nine harassed and anxious years, before it finally failed. That failure decided him, and he cast in his lot finally with the fortunes of literature. He was at that time thirty-five years of age—an age at which most men are settled in life, with an established profession, and a complacent readiness to drift ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... Early one morning, Mr. Barrett had been strolling along the road nearest the edge of the cliff when as if by chance, there had floated down upon his astonished ears, a high girlish voice singing the second theme of his Alan Breck Overture. For a moment, his lips had curled into a complacent little smile; the next minute, he had sucked in his breath sharply between his clenched teeth. In her excitement, Cicely had mistaken her distance; she had flatted by a full half-tone the final upper note, reducing ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... my speculations, I was astonished soon after to realize that the triangle had become a hexagon, so to speak. Whitson and Nanette Erickson seemed to be much in each other's company. But, unlike Burleigh, Erickson seemed to be either oblivious or complacent. ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... often blushed at the story that had made her laugh; at the scandalous tale that supplied the details, on the strength of which she analyzed the love that she had never known, and marked the subtle distinctions of modern passion, not with comment on the part of complacent hypocrites. For women know how to say everything among themselves, and more of them are ruined by each ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... clings to wonted home, If aught that's kindred cheer the welcome hearth; He that is lonely, hither let him roam, And gaze complacent on congenial earth. Greece is no lightsome land of social mirth; But he whom Sadness sootheth may abide, And scarce regret the region of his birth, When wandering slow by Delphi's sacred side, Or gazing o'er the plains where Greek and ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... little better, though, after getting rid of this touch of spite, and he smiled with satisfaction, too, for the lead had descended some distance off in the water, and with a self-complacent smile Arthur Temple sat down on the edge of the boat and waited for ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... if in nothing else, he resembled the immortal Shakespeare; and his bosom was broad and snowy as the swan's; and his pumps were glossy as the raven's wing; and he was going dinnerward, with a winsome damsel on his arm and a complacent smile of self-conceit upon his countenance, when the smooth soles of these new and shining shoes suddenly performed a rapid evolution, as though they were skates upon ice; and there was a little shriek from the ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... so much ashamed of myself.' The fluttering white dress, by the way, had given place to one of the soft leaf-brown silks in which she delighted. Perhaps Rollo's eyes liked it too; for they took a complacent view and came back to her face with ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... business of cotton-picking? He had a strong element of cheerful fidelity in his nature. The first day he worked steadily and as rapidly as he was able at the unfamiliar employment. When night came he reckoned he had done well. With a complacent feeling he stood waiting his turn as the great baskets, one after another, were swung on the steelyard and the weights announced. He found himself pitying some of the pickers as light weights were called, wondering if they had fallen behind last year's figures. When his basket ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... Majesty had said, was really furious, so furious that during eight days he absented himself from the king's gaming table. This did not prevent the king from being as complacent to him as possible whenever he met him, or from asking in the kindest tone, "Well, Monsieur Cardinal, how fares it with that poor Jussac and that poor Bernajoux ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... rapidly. I remembered the story of a conceited fellow, who, in fine clothes, was wont to lounge about the village once, giving advice to workmen. Venturing one day to substitute deeds for words, he turned up his cuffs, seized a plasterer's board, and having loaded his trowel without mishap, with a complacent look toward the lathing overhead, made a bold gesture thitherward; and straightway, to his complete discomfiture, received the whole contents in his ruffled bosom. I admired anew the economy and convenience of plastering, which so effectually shuts out the cold and ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... philosophers—all are talked about, eulogized, or dismissed with a sarcasm. The wit of Mme. du Deffand is feared, but it fascinates. She delights in clever repartees and sparkling epigrams. A shaft of wit silences the most complacent of monologues. "What tiresome book are you reading?" she said one day to a friend who talked too earnestly and too long—saving herself from the charge of rudeness by an easy refuge in ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... never quite got rid of its predecessor's fixed idea that certain degrees of culture were appropriate to certain stations of life. With what gentle persistence it prevails, for example, in Jane Austen's novels; with what complacent rhetoric in Tennyson (and in spite of Lady Clara Vere de Vere)! Let me remind you that by allowing an idea to take hold of our animosity we may be as truly 'possessed' by it as though it claimed our allegiance. The notion that culture may ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... and of the circumstances of it. The Pope, however, was not at all alarmed. Explaining his son's absence in the manner so obviously suggested by Giovanni's parting words to Cesare on the previous night, he assumed that the gay young Duke was on a visit to some complacent lady and that ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... was characteristic of their different nations. The Indian brought me hers, when I was alone, looked bashfully down when she gave it, and made an almost sentimental little speech. The Dutch girl brought hers in public, and, bridling her short chin with a self-complacent air, observed she had bought it for me. But the feeling of affectionate regard was the same in the ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... at intervals glanced through the woods, and were again unseen. Julia seemed the magic queen of the place. Her heart dilated with pleasure, and diffused over her features an expression of pure and complacent delight. A generous, frank, and exalted sentiment sparkled in her eyes, and animated her manner. Her bosom glowed with benevolent affections; and she seemed anxious to impart to all around her, a ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... certainty, and without apparent emotion, with all the calmness of despair. What she had never guessed before had come clearly and fully upon her now, and without apparent novelty, or, perhaps, there had been misgivings in the midst of her complacent self-satisfaction. She did not even seem to perceive how dreadfully she was shocking her father, whose sole comfort was in believing her language the effect of exaggerated self- reproach. His profession had rendered ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... and of great evil. Life in its collective form will be abundant, because that is its most fundamental craving. It may be terribly and destructively abundant, or benignly, but progress, as history seems to show us—if reason and psychology do not—can never be orderly and complacent. Order and convention must break down to introduce new spirit and new desires which are continually being created in the inner life. These forces may be old instincts which are continually upsetting civilized ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... stay in the kitchen, but when he found Jedediah there he was more complacent. The ex-gold seeker and his tales of adventure had a ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Ismay was already half way up the stairs and we followed. Straight to the garret we rushed. There sat Fatima, sleek and complacent, sunning ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Argensola, the young Spaniard whom he sometimes called "my secretary" or "my valet" because it was difficult to define exactly the relationship between them. In reality, he was a mixture of friend and parasite, the poor comrade, complacent and capable in his companionship with a rich youth on bad terms with his family, sharing with him the ups and downs of fortune, picking up the crumbs of prosperous days, or inventing expedients to keep up appearances in ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... once for all," he said. "If you go out of this door you go out for good. I don't care for the role of complacent husband." ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... there was no other company at Mrs. Evelyn's, Mr. Stackpole was entertaining himself with a long dissertation upon the affairs of America, past, present, and future. It was a favourite subject; Mr. Stackpole always seemed to have more complacent enjoyment of his easy chair when he could succeed in making every American in the room sit uncomfortably. And this time, without any one to thwart him, he went on to his heart's content, disposing of the subject as one would strip a rose of its petals, with as much seeming ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... that day he told his sad and troubled story, and Eugenie wept: and from that day he came daily; and two weeks—happy, dreamlike, intoxicating to both—passed by; and as their last sun set, he was kneeling at her feet, and breathing to one to whom the homage of wit, and genius, and complacent wealth had hitherto been vainly proffered, the impetuous, agitated, delicious secrets of the First Love. He spoke, and rose to depart for ever—when the ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... complacent assumption of the future is too confident. We think, because things have been easy for mankind as a whole for a generation or so, we are going on to perfect comfort and security in the future. We think that we shall always go to work at ten and leave off at four, and have dinner at seven for ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... conspiracy against him—also a complacent conviction of the mental instability of others. Yet, at intervals he remained clever and ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... said to herself, with a complacent sigh, as she handed this to the waiting messenger. "Now if John acts promptly, he may catch those crazy boys before they have the chance to start off on any other absurd expedition. I only hope to goodness that he'll have the sense to bring them home, and let that ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... examine the dishes standing ready to be served, to correct some fault of service. It seemed to me, as I watched him, that he did a hundred things before he returned. Yet in a very few moments he was standing once more before my table, examining with a complacent air the service of ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... he had hoped to provoke an answer, it was in vain; the King deigned him no further notice. Resuming his seat, Edmund continued to talk quietly with the Earl, a half-smile playing about his complacent chin. ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... personage nine chances out of ten—and grudges the tenth to the wisest man in existence. Look where you will, in every high place there sits an Ass, settled beyond the reach of all the greatest intellects in this world to pull him down. Over our whole social system, complacent Imbecility rules supreme—snuffs out the searching light of Intelligence with total impunity—and hoots, owl-like, in answer to every form of protest, See how well we all do in the dark! One of these days that audacious assertion will ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... course, self-complacent human beings who cannot realize that past literature has in this domain anything to teach them. They imagine that the world was born when they were born. These persons we must perhaps leave to the error of their ways. In earnest truth, there is no real literature too foreign or ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... reached Ainepo in a regular Scotch mist. The ranchman seemed rather grumpy at our successful ascent, which involved the failure of all their prophecies, and, indeed, we were thoroughly unsatisfactory travellers, arriving fresh and complacent, with neither adventures nor disasters to gladden people's hearts. We started for this ranch seven miles further, soon after dark, and arrived before nine, after the most successful ascent of Mauna ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... tone in which she addressed the maid, revealed the fact that she wished she'd started half an hour earlier. Even her husband discovered it. He brought in a cigarette, left the door open behind him and stood smiling down at her with the peculiarly complacent look that characterizes a married man of forty when he finds himself dressed beyond cavil in the complete evening harness of civilization, ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... sons of their grandfather by the common name of father. But this was not the case with Tembinok'. Now the ice was broken the word uncle was perpetually in his mouth; he who had been so ready to confound was now careful to distinguish; and the father sank gradually into a self-complacent ordinary man, while the uncle rose to his true stature as the hero and founder of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... haughty, but withal courteous, and no one to be admitted without a ticket signed by the Lord Chief Justice. And I thought it was a good job my wife was not with me. She had a great longing to see a sensation action (as the journals have it), and she being of a fiery disposition and not complacent when refused, might have made an uproar, which would have vexed me to the heart. But in truth I found no trouble. It did seem to me that they did not see me as I entered in. And plenty of room and no crowding, at which I was greatly contented, as I love not crushing. Pretty to see the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, 13 June 1891 • Various
... Manager rode on at a foot-pace, with the easy air of one who had performed all the business of the day in a satisfactory manner, and got it comfortably off his mind. Complacent and affable as man could be, Mr Carker picked his way along the streets and hummed a soft tune as he went He seemed to purr, ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... thousands of his countrymen, boxed up with that something in the national character which had always been to him revolting, something which he knew to be extremely natural and yet which seemed to him inexplicable—their intense belief in contracts and vested rights, their complacent sense of virtue in the exaction of those rights. Here beside him in the cab was the very embodiment, the corporeal sum as it were, of the possessive instinct—his own kinsman, too! It was uncanny and intolerable! ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... ironical; and when I looked back from the street, and she was laughing all to herself about something or other, I said to myself with withering sarcasm, "Oh, certainly; you know how to put on kid gloves, don't you? A self-complacent ass, ready to be flattered out of your senses by every petticoat that chooses to take ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Marmaduke," Dame Harrison was saying to her host, as she cast a complacent eye on her nephew, who had just succeeded in overthrowing three nine-pins at one stroke: "Sir Timothy hath every aptitude for outdoor pursuits, and though my Lord Protector deems all such recreations ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... life, if no very thrilling one. Mark was handsome, devoted, he was making money, he would be faithful to his wife and adore his children. Julia would have no social position, of course. She sighed. She would be a comfortable little complacent wife among a thousand others. She would have her silk gowns, her cut glass; she could afford an outing at Pacific Grove with the children; some day she and Mark ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... a passer-by upon whose complacent features prosperity had set its smug hall-mark—"there, but for the grace of God, goes Nat Duncan!" He rolled the paraphrase upon his tongue and found it bitter—not, however, with a tonic bitterness. "Lord, what a worthless critter I am! No good to myself—nor to anybody ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... paces in front of him, in the forest of La Goulotte; and as the mid-day sun glances through the boughs above you, you see its rays rest upon a cross at a little distance; it was, you think, placed there for the rude worshippers of the province, and you contemplate it with complacent reverence, till Pierre comes up with you. "'Tis La Croix Chavannes, Monsieur, la croix sinistre. See! in the narrow pass between the two mountains, its black and moss-covered arms extended; at the end of each is a large knob, resembling ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... want you to think I'm keeping anything away from you that a sister ought to know. As my sister and as Lana's good friend, I'm sure you'll be glad to know that I love her with all my heart and I hope I haven't misunderstood her feelings in regard to me. I don't want to be too complacent, but I think she's still girl enough to welcome my kind of love and to take me for ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... desire for martyrdom is as nothing; it is not to that I owe the boundless confidence that fills my heart. Such desires might be described as spiritual riches, which are the unjust mammon,[5] when one is complacent in them as in something great. . . . These aspirations are a consolation Jesus sometimes grants to weak souls like mine—and there are many such! But when He withholds this consolation, it is a special grace. Remember ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... formed themselves into groups, which at intervals glanced through the woods, and were again unseen. Julia seemed the magic queen of the place. Her heart dilated with pleasure, and diffused over her features an expression of pure and complacent delight. A generous, frank, and exalted sentiment sparkled in her eyes, and animated her manner. Her bosom glowed with benevolent affections; and she seemed anxious to impart to all around her, a happiness as unmixed as that she experienced. ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... ascribed it to that affection for 'pets' which a human female at every age shares with a human child. I now became painfully aware that the feeling with which Zee deigned to regard me was different from that which I had inspired in Taee. But this conviction gave me none of that complacent gratification which the vanity of man ordinarily conceives from a flattering appreciation of his personal merits on the part of the fair sex; on the contrary, it inspired me with fear. Yet of all the Gy-ei in the community, if Zee were ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... were listening to the thin notary, Ser Cioni, who had just paused on his way to the Duomo. His biting words could get only a contemptuous reception two years and a half before in the Mercato, but now he spoke with the more complacent humour of a man whose party is uppermost, and who is conscious of some ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... immense frame was thin and angular; his arms were inordinately long; hands, feet and eyebrows were large; skin swarthy; hair coarse, black and generally unkempt. Only the amazing, dreamful eyes, and a fineness in the texture of the skin, redeemed the face and gave it distinction.(3) Why did precise, complacent Miss Todd pick out so strange a man for her mate? The story that she married him for ambition, divining what he was to be—like Jane Welsh in the conventional story of Carlyle—argues too much of the gift of prophecy. Whatever her motive, it is more than likely that she was what the commercialism ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... great evil. Life in its collective form will be abundant, because that is its most fundamental craving. It may be terribly and destructively abundant, or benignly, but progress, as history seems to show us—if reason and psychology do not—can never be orderly and complacent. Order and convention must break down to introduce new spirit and new desires which are continually being created in the inner life. These forces may be old instincts which are continually upsetting civilized ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... been most satisfactory, and when once the principle is accepted in your centres, don't you know, it is bound to spread, and these important—ah—people of yours would learn it like the rest. I see no difficulty at all," and the smooth lips closed with the complacent snap habitual to Pagett, M.P., the "man of cheerful ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... may be an incomparable instrument in the hands of a poet-philosopher who wishes to make people think, to awaken them from an ethical lethargy, to shock them into asking questions for which the complacent morality of the moment can provide no adequate answer. In the final decades of the nineteenth century,—when the novel was despotic in its overwhelming triumph over all the other forms of literary expression, and when arrogant writers of fiction like Edmond de Goncourt did not hesitate to ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... the timid yet triumphant, the half-appealing yet complacent, conviction of the girl's utterance. A moment before, Paul would have believed it impossible for him to have kept his gravity and his respect for his companion under this egregious illusion. But he kept both. For a sudden conviction that she suspected ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... to Martin and Flossie, who felt privately annoyed with 'the native cousin' for putting her nose out of joint. Defrauded of her due importance, she told her complacent lover they must 'save up the news till to-morrow.' Meantime, they rode, very much at leisure, behind the barouche;—and no one troubled about them ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... a complacent sip. "It stayed with you, did it?" And the light of triumph, flushing for an instant his rugged features, showed when it waned how pale and drawn they were by the feverish tension of his long ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... to loathe its own past grossness. "London may yet be the spiritual capital of the world, while Asia—rich in all that gold can buy and guns can give, lord of lands and bodies, builder of railways and promulgator of police regulations, glorious in all material glories—postures, complacent and obtuse, before a Europe content in the possession of all that matters,"[146] Certainly, we are not there yet, but the old Earth has seen many stranger and more revolutionary changes than this. England, as this writer reminds us, was ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... experienced the horror of a somnambulist who wakes up from a complacent dream of activity to find himself walking on a quagmire. A profound disgust of the ground on which he was making his way overcame him. Even the image of the charming girl was swept from his view in the flood of moral distress. Everything he had ever been or hoped to be would taste of bitter ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... house for the night, and we'll have Betty over to breakfast. Then she and Genevieve and you and I will see if we can't restore the ante-bellum modus vivendi! Come on! Emelene and Alys always breakfast in bed, anyway, and it will be no trouble to get Betty over." The two men rode home in complacent silence. It was long past midnight. They sat on the veranda to finish their cigars before going into ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... them, and I suppose I must have looked supremely foolish, for Viola began to laugh and Jevons went on twinkling, not in the least as if he saw a joke, but with a thoughtful and complacent air, as if he were turning over the result of some private speculation that had come off ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... bias of her mind, And asks of Fortune the severe decree T' enrich the happy Skew,[17] to ruin me. The fickle Goddess heard one-half the prayer, The rest was melted into empty air; For while she smiled complacent on the Skew,[18] On me she shed some trifling favours too. Sure Granville's luck exceeds all other men's Led through a sad variety of tens;[19] The rest have sometimes eights and nines, but he Is always followed by 'the jolly three;'[20] ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... flying, and, rushing bareheaded to the footlights, he stands a few moments amid the roars of the house, snorting with rage and choking with passion. Like Burleigh's nod, Handel's wig seemed to have been a sure guide to his temper. When things went well, it had a certain complacent vibration; but when he was out of humor, the wig indicated the fact in a very positive way. The Princess of Wales was wont to blame her ladies for talking instead of listening. "Hush, hush!" she would say. "Don't ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... flare of indecorous humor. It was one of the secret troubles of her mind, this grotesque twist her ideas would sometimes take, as though they rebelled and rioted. After all, she found herself reflecting, behind her aunt's complacent visage there was a past as lurid as any one's—not, of course, her aunt's own personal past, which was apparently just that curate and almost incredibly jejune, but an ancestral past with all sorts of scandalous ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... This complacent individual had his prototype during the very period which we are considering. He was an artistic gentleman named Crawley, the happy manager of a puppet show which used to bring joy into the hearts of the merry people thronging the famous Bartholomew ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... might have been called out by the enthusiastic praise that followed the lawyer's confession. But he was painfully conscious of what now seemed to him a monstrous situation! Here was, he believed, the actual accomplice of the road agents calmly receiving the complacent and puerile confessions of the men who were seeking to outwit them. Could he, in ordinary justice to them, to himself, or the mission he conceived he was pursuing, refrain from exposing her, or warning them privately? But was he certain? ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... Durham in a very complacent mood, and he entered with him fully into the subject of Canada and their quarrels. With respect to Turton's affairs, Durham denies he ever said, or authorised anybody else to say, that the appointment had Melbourne's consent, and he admits that Melbourne ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... said, with a complacent look of benignant condescension, "I hope soon to know how you approve of our dinner. It is my constant study to make you happy, and my efforts are unceasing to afford you every gratification in ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... had sensed the second coming of McGurk, Pierre would not have ridden so jauntily through the hills this day, or whistled so carelessly, or swept the hills with such a complacent, lordly eye. A man of mark cannot bear himself too modestly, and Pierre, from boots to high-peaked, broad-brimmed sombrero, was the last word in elegance for a ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... be brought into a complacent frame of mind as regards our project to-day, and before the English proposals are laid before him, I think we shall not need the methods of the Count,' Elmur answered. 'Count Simon has undertaken to help us on the Frontier. Major ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... "but you have the thing to a nicety. That's the man's notion, for a guinea, for I have been in his case myself, and the thud of horses was a sound that filled the world. Sit down, sit down!" he went on sharply, as if he had of a sudden found something to reproach himself with in any complacent recognition of this child's images. "You are not canny; how old ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... foolish things he said and of his mistakes in grammar. He knew that Walker held him in small esteem, and he found a bitter satisfaction in his chief's opinion of him; it increased his own contempt for the narrow, complacent old man. And it gave him a singular pleasure to know that Walker was entirely unconscious of the hatred he felt for him. He was a fool who liked popularity, and he blandly fancied that everyone admired him. Once Mackintosh had overheard Walker ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... fresh embassies. Report came from the fleet—keeping pace with the land army along the coasts—that nowhere had the weak squadrons of the Greeks adventured a stand. Daily the smile of the Lord of the World grew more complacent, as his "table-companions" told him: "The rumour of your Eternity's advent stupefies the miserable Hellenes. Like Atar, the Angel of Fire, your splendour glitters afar. You will enter Athens and Sparta, and no sword leave its sheath, no ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... before, gave her a desperate, stony stare out of a haggard face. She was young, her skin had not a line. But it was as if she had changed places with her wrinkled grandmother, to whom the expression of complacent maidenhood ...
— The Mothers Of Honore - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... old gentleman had waked time enough to hear the last part of this discourse; at least (whether from that cause, or that he too was a physiognomist) he wore a look remarkably complacent to Harley, who, on his part, shewed a particular observance of him. Indeed, they had soon a better opportunity of making their acquaintance, as the coach arrived that night at the town where the officer's regiment lay, and the places of destination ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... begin to yield. I know of nothing that makes one feel more complacent, in these July days, than to have his vegetables from his own garden. What an effect it has on the market-man and the butcher! It is a kind of declaration of independence. The market-man shows me his peas and beets and tomatoes, and supposes he shall send me out some ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... leaned over the sleeping child, a rosy child with thick blonde curls. A keen sense of the emptiness of her own arms stirred in her an envy of the complacent young matron standing at the foot of the little white bed. Perhaps Fred would've been different if they'd had ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... disguised, alas, in the solemn and majestic robe of sonorous language. The angels timidly decline, and the Saviour volunteers, which saves the shameful situation. The character of God, as displayed by Milton, is that of a commercial, complacent, irritable Puritan. There is no largeness or graciousness about it, no wistful love. He keeps his purposes to himself, and when his arrangements break down, as indeed they deserve to do, some one has got to be punished. If the guilty ones cannot, so much the worse; an innocent victim will do, ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... condition, made him seem more like some wild animal or half-savage monomaniac than an ordinary young man under five-and-twenty. He had, moreover, at this moment, when all the energies of his nature suddenly burst out, a power of deliberate, complacent, and pitiless moral self-vivisection, a power of performing upon his character such cutting and ripping-open operations as he thought beneficial to himself, which makes one think of the abnormal faculty of enduring pain, the abnormal and almost cruel satisfaction in examining ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... arms in his chair, and looked as complacent as though he had just informed me that he was the governor of the State. He evidently believed it was no use to say anything more, ...
— Down South - or, Yacht Adventure in Florida • Oliver Optic
... queen. These home-made characters were really charming. Mrs. Fordyce had done several of them, and she drew beautifully. A little manipulation contrived that the exquisite Oberon and Titania should fall to Martyn and Anne, for whom crowns and robes had been prepared, worn by her majesty with complacent dignity, but barely tolerated by him! The others took their chance. Parson Frank was Tom Thumb, and convulsed us all the evening by acting as if no bigger than that worthy, keeping us so merry that even Clarence laughed as I had never seen ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sight of that cadaverous ambition and self-complacent meanness, which showed itself in Paley's yellow face, and twinkled in his narrow eyes, or it may have been a natural appetite for pleasure and joviality, of which it must be confessed Mr. Pen was exceedingly fond, which deterred that ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... expansion, however, was to create great corporations which began to get control of things. The same spirit of combination entered into politics and we had machines and bosses which lent their hand to, and furnished a complacent instrument for, corporations. Time was when they ordered delegates in a convention with the same degree of certainty that the order would be supplied, as they did steel rails or any other commodity. That time has passed and why? Because the danger ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... this and borrow'd two guineas of his bookseller (to whom he imparted in confidence that he should leave a great many loose papers behind him which would only want methodizing and arranging to prove very lucrative to any bookseller after his death), he laid himself down on my bed in a mood of complacent resignation. By the aid of meat and drink put into him (for I all along suspected a vacuum) he was enabled to sit up in the evening, but he had not got the better of his intolerable fear of dying; he expressed such philosophic indifference in his speech and such frightened ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... The complacent consciousness of producing a fine effect in evening-clothes had given to Mr. Stormont Thorpe habitually now a mildness of manner, after the dressing hour, which was lacking to his deportment in the day-time. ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... dispensing with his parliament, and thus depriving liberty of its organ. An innate horror at the sight of a naked sword averted him from the most just of wars; while his favourite Buckingham practised on his weakness, and his own complacent vanity rendered him an easy dupe of Spanish artifice. While his son-in-law was ruined, and the inheritance of his grandson given to others, this weak prince was imbibing, with satisfaction, the incense which was offered to him by Austria and ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... carrying this, he took the underground train to High Street, Kensington. When he arrived there he drove in another cab to his old hotel, "The Guelph," opposite the Park. When alone in his bedroom Giles smoked a complacent pipe. "If any one did try to follow me," he said to himself, "he must have missed me when I took the ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... was perfectly true. Ralph Bingham was leaning on his bicycle in the roadway, smoking a cigarette. Even at this distance one could detect the man's disgustingly complacent expression. Rupert Bailey was sitting with his back against the door of the Woodfield Garage, looking rather used up. He was a man who liked to keep himself clean and tidy, and it was plain that the cross-country trip had done him no good. He seemed to be scraping mud off his face. I ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... all different, yet all alike; different in their degrees of beefiness, stolidity, and self-sufficiency, but plainly of the same parentage—British to the backbone; British of the wrong kind, with a sprinkling of Welshmen, Irishmen, and Jews. Not a Scotsman discoverable in that whole mob of complacent office-jacks. My countrymen were conspicuous by their absence; they were otherwise engaged, in the field, the colonies, the engine-room. I can only remember one single exception to this rule, this type; it was the head of the ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... was fast approaching the western horizon, and despite the combined skill of Suzel and Frantz, there had not been a bite. The barbels had not shown themselves complacent, and seemed to scoff at the two young people, who were too just ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... mystery of their tiny slits of eyes, drawn back and up so far that the tight-drawn lids can scarcely open; the mystery of their expression, which seems to denote inner thoughts of a silly, vague, complacent absurdity, a world of ideas absolutely closed to ourselves. And I think as I gaze at them: "How far we are from this Japanese people! how utterly dissimilar are ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... It was indeed too solemn a thing for words, this watching from the darkness while an invisible death, let loose by our own hands, stole down upon our complacent enemies. ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... with a smile as complacent as that which usually denotes the consciousness of intellectual superiority. "One who is a little practised, can ascertain a fact as well by means of negatives as affirmatives. It ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... "scientific palate" of his brother artiste "to tell which was which." "The meat," says M. Soyer, "I consider of no more value than the other ingredients, but to give a flavour by properly blending the gelatine and the osmazome, for," he adds with complacent self-reliance, "in compounding the richest soup, the balance of ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... was something that is supposed to be the prerogative of royalty in the lift of it. Her smile was complacent ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... she said, with nonchalant self-possession. "It makes me look dreadfully wicked, I know." And she threw a complacent glance at a mirror near, which showed her a gleam of white shoulders in a setting ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... steps and skimmed undauntedly up them. She did indeed look angry and disturbed. Without any preliminary greeting she burst out into a tirade that simply took away her complacent foe's breath. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Times recorded the event, December 29, but with no comment save that Southern prospects were less rosy than had been supposed. Then ensued a long silence, for this time there was no possibility of that editorial wiggling about the circle from excuses for misinterpretation to a complacent ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... painted with the royal arms was then erected, for it bore the date 1698, and the initials "W. M." for William and Mary. There it was, on a beam, above the chancel arch, and the lion and unicorn on either side, the first with a huge tongue hanging out at the corner of his mouth, looking very complacent, as though he were displaying the royal arms, the unicorn slim and dapper with a chain hanging from ...
— Old Times at Otterbourne • Charlotte M. Yonge
... drizzling fog below, and we reached Ainepo in a regular Scotch mist. The ranchman seemed rather grumpy at our successful ascent, which involved the failure of all their prophecies, and, indeed, we were thoroughly unsatisfactory travellers, arriving fresh and complacent, with neither adventures nor disasters to gladden people's hearts. We started for this ranch seven miles further, soon after dark, and arrived before nine, after the most successful ascent of Mauna ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... latter related, caused him intense delight. "Very good!—well done," he exclaimed every other minute. "I could not have done better myself. You shall be abundantly rewarded, Victor, if this affair is successful." And at this thought his satisfaction overflowed in a complacent monologue: "Why shouldn't it succeed?" he asked himself. "Could anything be more simple and certain? I can make any demand I please—one, two, three hundred thousand francs. Ah, it was a good thing that the Count de Chalusse died! Now, I can forgive Valorsay. Let him keep my forty thousand ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... it was the wont in earlier days When some fair volume from a valued pen, Long looked for, came at last, that grateful men Hailed its forthcoming in complacent lays: As if the Muse would gladly haste to praise That which her mother, Memory, long should keep Among her treasures. Shall such usage sleep With us, who feel too slight the common phrase For our pleased thoughts of you, when thus we find That dark to you seems bright, ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... when surfeited with the company of those around us if we couldn't creep away and pass for a little while into the company of those immortals? What does it matter how tiresome and complacent people are when I am Orsino inviting the Clown to sing words the utter beauty of which bring the tears ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... the great exploit of our voyage, take it all in all. It was the farthest piece of travel accomplished. Indeed, it lies so far from beaten paths of language, that I despair of getting the reader into sympathy with the smiling, complacent idiocy of my condition; when ideas came and went like motes in a sunbeam; when trees and church spires along the bank surged up, from time to time into my notice, like solid objects through a rolling cloudland; when the rhythmical swish of boat ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cashmere wrapper, the dark-blue ground of which was enlivened by a Grecian pattern of gold and scarlet; her unbound hair draped her shoulders, and framed her arch face, as she threaded the bronze ripples with her fingers. She looked contented, restful, complacent in herself and her belongings—one whom Time had touched lovingly as he swept by, and whom ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... after staying a little longer, Laptev said good-bye to the doctor and went home. When a man is dissatisfied and feels unhappy, how trivial seem to him the shapes of the lime-trees, the shadows, the clouds, all the beauties of nature, so complacent, so indifferent! By now the moon was high up in the sky, and the clouds were scudding quickly below. "But how naive and provincial the moon is, how threadbare and paltry the clouds!" thought Laptev. He felt ashamed of the way he had talked just now about ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... of English music, and it was known that the Duke of Edinburgh (son of the Prince Consort and Queen Victoria) was an amateur fiddler, quite capable of leading the band at a London smoking concert. A complacent German lexicographer had even admitted Ernest II into the fellowship of Beethoven, but that fact was not widely known, and after "Diana von Solange" had been produced the most cogent argument in explanation ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... you—your real wife, I mean. You've betrayed yourself by insisting on paying her by telegraphic money orders. We heard of these mysterious payments but suspected nothing beyond a vulgar love affair. Then one night, whilst your placid and complacent wife was in a cinema, one of my people searched her box and came upon the certificate of marriage. Would ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... the greatest unbeliever must have been converted. The man who, while he looked on the expensive machine, thanked his stars that he had more wisdom than to waste his money on such idle schemes, changed the expression of his features as the boat moved from the wharf and gained her speed, and his complacent expression gradually softened into one of wonder. The jeers of the ignorant, who had neither sense nor feeling to suppress their contemptuous ridicule and rude jokes, were silenced for a moment by a vulgar astonishment, which deprived them of the power of utterance, till the triumph of genius ...
— Scientific American magazine, Vol. 2 Issue 1 • Various
... towards the subject of murder. It was so easy to kill, he felt no pride in having been able to accomplish that much. But it was not everybody who could escape the consequences of his crime. It required an acute brain to plan after events so that shrewd detectives would be baffled. There was a complacent conceit about Melville Hardlock, which was as much a part of him as his intense selfishness, and this conceit led him to believe that the future path he had outlined for himself would not be ...
— In a Steamer Chair And Other Stories • Robert Barr
... readily to-day," he added easily, "even if they should see miracles of healing, for they would attribute them to the human mentality, to suggestion, hypnotism, hallucination, and the like. Even the mighty deeds of Christ were attributed to Beelzebub." The complacent Father settled back into his chair with an air of having disposed for all time of the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... with enlightenment as to three of our private possessions. One of these is the Dog Fo, a little white Chinese monstrosity. We have been familiar from childhood with two of him, seated in unspeakable but complacent hideousness at the opposite ends of the chimney-piece. No. 2 is a gallon pitcher, sacred to the gingerbread of two generations, and ornamented with a ship under full sail on one side and a coat-of-arms on ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... to come, Ismail, during the two decades subsequent to his accession, always had a supply of ready money with which to dazzle European guests. During his entire reign Egypt swarmed with financiers and schemers of every description, to whom the complacent Ismail lent an ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... sir, it is painful for me to discuss it, but if the money is not paid on the 14th, there certainly will be no marriage on the 18th." His insufferable smile was more complacent ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... some of the worshipers at this shrine was conspicuous. The future to them seemed cloudless. It was not so with me. I had a secret not at all complacent, for it seemed anxious to get out, and while unhappy from its presence, I thought it wise to ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... they began that work, an education for the suffrage. They are not the ignorant voters nor are wives of workingmen; at least, they know in part what they need to safeguard themselves and their homes. The ignorant vote is the complacent, blind vote of men and of the feminine 'influence' that moves them, which disregards the real problems of setting safe and wholesome standards of life and labor and education and spends its strength in looking backward, insisting upon precedents without seeing that, good and enduring as ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... formed. A military plan of the place was sent to the Imperial authorities and a defence force was also organized. This, however, had in 1899 ceased to exist owing chiefly to the action of Mr. Schreiner, at that time the Premier of the Cape Colony, who in June refused, with complacent optimism, to furnish it with arms, saying that, "there is no reason for apprehending that Kimberley is in danger of attack," and that "the fears of the citizens are groundless and their anticipations without foundation." A battery of artillery was, however, surreptitiously ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... Mr. Jeorling," he would reply with complacent assurance, "will surely come into port to-day, or, if not ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... concession to which Henry would not consent; and while the Queen persisted in not permitting the services of Madame de Richelieu, her royal bridegroom as pertinaciously negatived the appointment of parvenue lady of honour. The high-born countess bore the affront thus offered to her with the complacent dignity befitting her proud station; but such was far from being the case with the ambitious and mortified Leonora, who had not been a week at the French Court ere she became aware that all the Italian followers of the ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... Fifth Street, in a small cafe, Upstairs (our tables were adjacent), I saw you lunching yesterday, And felt a secret thrill complacent. ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... game and scant! The Season's show Of Birds, in bunches big, adjacent, Will hardly take JOHN's eye, although The Poulterer appears complacent, Seeing, good easy man, quite clearly That rival shops show yet ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 23, 1890. • Various
... eyes flashed. Hammersmith, who had watched this scene with intense interest, saw, or believed that he saw, in this flash the natural indignation of a candid mind face to face with arrant knavery. But when he forced himself to consider the complacent Quimby he did not know what to think. His aspect of self-confidence equalled hers. Indeed, he showed the greater poise. Yet her tones rang true as ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... in the merriment as heartily as any one, and seemed to consider his reverse of fortune an excellent joke. Captain Bonneville, however, thought proper to check his good-humor, and demanded, with some degree of sternness, the cause of his altered condition. He replied in the most natural and self-complacent style imaginable, "that he had been among his cousins, who were very poor; they had been delighted to see him; still more delighted with his good fortune; they had taken him to their arms; admired his equipments; one had begged for ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... became British subjects, a humiliating step indeed for a people who had once thought themselves the most important in all the world. By 1703 the butchery on the frontier was in full operation. The Jesuit historian Charlevoix, with complacent exaggeration, says that in that year alone three hundred men were killed on the New England frontier by the Abenaki Indians incited by the French. The numbers slain were in fact fewer and the slain were not ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong
... kiss me in the eyes and lips; and the cyclamens shake their powder in my hair. On the wall, the roses are nodding, smiling; above me the orange blossoms surrender themselves to the wooing breeze; and on yonder rock the salamander sits, complacent and serene. I take a daisy, and, boy as boys go, question its petals: Married man or monk, I ask, plucking them off one by one, And the last petal says, Monk. I perfume my fingers with crumpled cyclamens, cover my ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... and Josephine were loud in their admiration of the way she had translated for Miss Langton in Latin class. Altogether, as Judith rolled over on to her elbows and found the place in her book, she was feeling happy and a bit too complacent. Only a page or two had been turned when a shadow blotted out the flickering tracings of the beech leaves, and a ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... grown of an extraordinary pallor, his lips twitched as he spoke and his fingers worked in a nervous uneasy manner upon the table-cloth. Captain Plessy was in far too complacent a mood to notice such trifles. His vanity was satisfied, the world was a rosy mist with a sparkle of champagne, and he answered lightly as he unfastened another button ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... alone had been subjected to peine forte et dure. Mrs. Temperley said that it had been purified by suffering. By dint of tearing down and dragging out offending objects ("such a pity!" cried the neighbours) its prosperous and complacent absurdity had been humbled. Mrs. Temperley retired to this refuge after her encounter with Sophia. That perennially aggrieved young person entered almost immediately afterwards and announced a visitor, with an air that implied—"She'll stay to lunch; see if she ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... rather a fair complexion, prominent features, and a high, capacious forehead. His aspect was severe and forbidding; his voice clear and powerful; his action dignified, but neither graceful nor engaging; his tone and manners, although urbane and complacent in society, were lofty, and even arrogant, in the senate. On entering the house, it was his custom to stalk sternly to his place, without honouring even his most favoured adherents with a word, a nod, or even a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 558, July 21, 1832 • Various
... righteous reign seems to be sane and sweet, after all," she said. "Even my father is complacent and purring this morning. Which has he eaten, do you know—the raven of contention ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... of the cells used during the last two hundred years for the storage of fire-wood. The droll things were called the "Little Ease," and seemingly, were intended to create merriment. One of the officers was complacent enough to assume them, and caused great diversion by his eccentric gestures. My levee was not quite so successful, as is generally the case, as that tedious old gossip, GUIDO FAUX, obtained admission. As usual he had a grievance. It appears that a report has got ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, Sept. 27, 1890 • Various
... These are shaped like fern-fronds, growing fan-wise from a point, and set at various angles, so that the moonlight takes them with capricious touch. They flash, and are quenched, and flash again, light darting to light along the level surface, while the sailing planets and the stars look down complacent at this mimicry of heaven. Everything above, around, beneath, is very beautiful—the slumbrous woods, the snowy fells, and the far distance painted in faint blue upon the tender background of the sky. Everything is placid and beautiful; and yet the place is terrible. For, as we walk, the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... estimation, there may seem to be a knowledge of what is right, and a self-satisfied doing of it. There may be a painstaking attention to the forms of obedience, and a self-righteous content in doing the required things. Is this the underlying thought in Peter's self-complacent remark, "Lo, we have left all and followed Thee.[102] We're so much better than this rich young ruler who couldn't stand the test you put to him. We——"? Poor, self-confident Peter! When the fire test did come, and come so hot, how ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... startled gaze. The shadow took her faded dress into shelter but fell revengefully into the little cup behind her collar-bone. The noise of the hall became more audible. The first tenor and the baritone arrived together. They were both well dressed, stout and complacent and they brought a breath ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... pilgrimage of existence knows the importance of husbanding even morsels and moments of enjoyment. "Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn?" thought I, as I gave the fire a stir, lolled back in my elbow-chair, and cast a complacent look about the little parlor of the Red Horse ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... with him, but he knew that Marchant, dreamer and incoherent poet, his heart aflame with zeal for humanity, was far nearer the truth of life than the smug complacent Pharisees that fattened from the toil of the helpless many who could do nothing but suffer ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... shareholders. The governor was the appointee of the corporation, and his powers were large and under conditions almost absolute. The liberties of the emigrants themselves were not specifically enlarged, but they were at least emancipated from the paternal solicitude of the stingy and self-complacent pettifogger who graced the ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... time Natty had discovered the lank person of Hiram, drawn up under the cover of a high stump; and all that was complacent in his manner instantly gave way to marked distrust and dissatisfaction. He placed his head within the door of his hut, and said a few words in an undertone, when he ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... was eminently practical. It came within the scope of the senator's understanding. After all, he was not to be cast into outer darkness. His smile was complacent. He answered airily: ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... I was astonished soon after to realize that the triangle had become a hexagon, so to speak. Whitson and Nanette Erickson seemed to be much in each other's company. But, unlike Burleigh, Erickson seemed to be either oblivious or complacent. ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... have felt the unconvincing ring of his tone, lacking the full and complacent self-assurance usual to it, for as if groping for something to make good the lack he sought backward through his memories and unfolded bit by bit the tale of his experiences. Scotch born of drunken parents, ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... were more mature. And yet he had come to Germany, despite Rebner's eulogiums of the Germans, with the complacent idea that, as he was the respectable American average, he could look the other youth of the world in the face ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com
|
|
|
