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Imagine yourself in the dock, on whatever charge it may be, and imagine this and that friend coming forward to speak to you. What can they say? What do they know? They know that you are a bore or not a bore, a grouser or not a grouser, generous or mean, sentimental or cynical, an optimist or a pessimist, and that you have or have not a sense of humour. None of these is a criminal offence.
Union Mills, who had been for some time sitting placidly on the threshold with one leg exposed to the rain, from a sheer indolent inability to change his position, finally withdrew that weather-beaten member, and stood up. The movement more or less deranged the attitudes of the other partners, and was received with cynical disfavor.
A somewhat cynical observer a certain Nolte, whom Jackson had just forced to his own terms in a settlement for war supplies records his impression as follows: "After supper we were treated to a most delicious pas de deux by the conqueror and his spouse.
A cynical Frenchman has defined life as the collection of recollections for the time when you shall have no memory. Just as there are many persons of whose existence you are unaware till you read their obituaries, so there are many of whose celebrity you are ignorant till you see the advertisement of their biographies. On all sides we are flooded with big books about little people.
Doubtless, however, in his civic robes he would remind one that he was a grocer, for it was the note of Edinburgh, of all lowland Scotland, to rise out of ordinary life to a more than ordinary magnificence, and then to qualify that magnificence by some cynical allusion to ordinary life.
I must inform you that when the tragi-comedy I have given you an account of was over, the Queen my mother turned round to the Chevalier de Seurre, whom she recommended to my brother to sleep in his bedchamber, and in whose conversation she sometimes took delight because he was a man of some humour, but rather inclined to be cynical. "Well," said she, "M. de Seurre, what do you think of all this?"
The Queen-Regent was tossed hither and thither at the sport of the winds and waves which shifted every hour in that tempestuous court. No man pretended to think of the State. Every man thought only of himself. The royal exchequer was plundered with a celerity and cynical recklessness such as have been rarely seen in any age or country.
They broke up into groups and knots, scattered through the length of the handsome, brilliantly lighted room, but a curious restlessness was apparent; no one settled down to cards or music. Even the "odd" individual moved about and dropped cynical remarks along the route of his progress, instead of sitting down to backgammon as was his wont.
It has served to keep its soul free from that cynical distrust of the people which is evident in the writings of the anarchists and of the syndicalists in Bakounin, Nechayeff, Sorel, Berth, and Pouget. It has also served to keep it from those emotional reactions which have led nearly every great leader of the direct-actionists in the last century to become in the end an apostate.
Perhaps you will say that I am cynical; but actresses are accustomed to find the friendships they make outside the sphere of their own profession of a singularly temporary character. We are praised and flattered to-day, and forgotten to-morrow. I don't complain. It is only natural.
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