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They seem to expect that they will be made pets in the great day, because they made no pretension to saintship; and that they will be fondled by the Judge as they have been by their boon companions, because hypocrisy cannot be reckoned among their sins. It is a false hope.
These deputies, thus assembled, represented, by commission, the States; but they are not, in their own persons, the States; and no one of them had any such pretension.
For these reasons, Lucien and others admitted to their society felt at their ease in it. Wherever you find real talent, you will find frank good fellowship and sincerity, and no sort of pretension, the wit that caresses the intellect and never is aimed at self-love. When the first nervousness, caused by respect, wore off, it was unspeakably pleasant to make one of this elect company of youth.
Much as the girl had been addicted to dress, and favorable as had been her opportunities of seeing some little pretension in that way among the wives of the different commandants, and other ladies of the forts, never before had she beheld a tissue, or tints, to equal those that were now so unexpectedly placed before her eyes.
The following is one of those labored passages, of which the orator himself was perhaps most proud, but in which the effort to be eloquent is too visible, and the effect, accordingly, falls short of the pretension: "You see how Truth empowered by that will which gives a giant's nerve to an infant's arm has burst the monstrous mass of fraud that has endeavored to suppress it.
But as to that which you appear to reject as the most preposterous and incredible pretension of the mesmerists, and which you designate by the word 'clairvoyance, it is clear to me that you have never yourself witnessed even those very imperfect exhibitions which you decide at once to be imposture.
The best bribe which London offers to-day to the imagination is, that, in such a vast variety of people and conditions, one can believe there is room for persons of romantic character to exist, and that the poet, the mystic, and the hero may hope to confront their counterparts. I wish cities could teach their best lesson, of quiet manners. It is the foible especially of American youth, pretension.
The yellow-complexioned usher, seated nonchalantly in his armchair, was not without pretension; in spite of his black coat with the "take-me-out-of-pawn" air, polished his nails, and only opened his mouth at times to utter a reprimand or pronounce sentence of punishment. This was school, then!
He could claim the pretension that from giving it he hoped it would expiate him of the gross insensitivity of being affluent in this world of suffering and doing nothing about it, but really he wanted him to return, he wanted the paint ordered and delivered, he wanted an excuse to draw him and record his beauty and his nakedness, to shut out the world in bliss with him, to be in a ménage a trois with him and his sister in a euphoria of gluttonous devouring.
There is nothing noble or disinterested in this. The arrangement has no pretension to either of these qualities; nor, when we come to the great forces which influence the supply and demand of human wants, whether in the higher or the humbler departments, will we find these qualities in force, or indeed any other motive than common selfishness.
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