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Because he was only the brains of the great, widespread criminal organization. He remained in smug respectability, while others beneath his hand carried out his orders they were the servants, well-paid too, and he was the master.
Robots," Oliver said. "Smug. Bred to win from birth." "I got a hundred on them." Mark made money helping executives scale the job ladder. He was amused and ironic about it. They knocked themselves out; he got the dancers for a time. "Hey, Richard!" "Mark . . . Oliver . . . The boss let us out early."
The commissionaire at the Piccadilly entrance of the restaurant touched his hat ingratiatingly, with the smug confidence of a man who is accustomed to getting sixpence a time for doing it. "Taxi, Mr. Crocker?" "A worm," said Jimmy. "Beg pardon, sir?" "Always drinking," explained Jimmy, "and making a pest of himself." He passed on.
Beevor had work to do in the world: even if it chiefly consisted in profaning sylvan retreats by smug or pretentious villas, it was still work which entitled him to consideration and respect in the eyes of all right-minded persons.
He looked at the shabby, dog-eared sheet, and the folded enclosure that doubtless set forth the editor's smug regrets, then with an impatient gesture he flung the envelope and its contents into the scrap-basket, cursing himself and his conceit in thinking he could write, and editors and their conceit in thinking they could judge.
Of course the dutiful servant was not really to blame for following out his instructions to the letter, yet I felt that I hated his smug face and plastered head, and would have liked to frighten him with menaces and strange foreign oaths.
Gradually all the baseness of the world becomes clear to him. In a moment of jealousy he kills his mistress's lover, an old miser. Several months later he publicly confesses his crime, and, in order to escape from human justice, he commits suicide. In his first two dramas, "The Smug Citizen," and "A Night's Refuge," as in his short stories, Gorky shows us his usual characters.
The sight of the man, smug, cynical, shameless, sprawling luxuriously on the sofa, with his tunic unbuttoned, filled him with sudden fury: such fury as Oliver's insult had aroused, such as had impelled him during a vicious rag in the mess to clutch a man's hair and almost pull it out by the roots. "Yes, you may; and I'll tell you," he cried, starting to his feet.
The great quests and struggles going on and the million agonies and tumults beating in the veins of the world ripples. Yes, vague and vaguer ripples which surround the fact that one is going to buy a pair of suspenders; which circle the fact that one is invited out for dinner this evening. Ah, the smug and oblivious ones under umbrellas! It rains, but the umbrellas keep off the rain.
"I like civic pride," Martie, who was rambling on in her old inconsequential way, presently added, "but Rod is merely SMUG. I happened to mention some building in New York I didn't know what to talk to the man about! He immediately told me that the Mason building down town was reinforced concrete throughout.
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