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A smug, placid, contemptible optimism is creeping like a blight over the face of society, and suppressing all the grander aspirations of more energetic times. But in proportion to Fitzjames's general agreement upon the nature of the evil was the vehemence of his dissent from the suggested remedy. He thought that, so far from meeting the evil, it tended directly to increase it.
But this period of smug selfcongratulation was soon succeeded by a strange nostalgia which took the form of romanticizing the lost land. American books were reprinted in vast quantities in the Englishspeaking nations and translated anew in other countries. American movies were revived and imitated.
Patricia was unutterably happy now, because she, and not John Charteris, had been in the wrong. "Poor Rudolph! he has such a smug horror of the divorce-court that he would even go so far as to pretend to be in love with his own wife in order to keep out of it. Really, Jack, both our better-halves are horribly commonplace and they will be much better off without us."
They both began to laugh. "That's where I differ from you. Men lie about their positions and prospects, but not about a thing of that sort." He shook his head. "Miss Schlegel, excuse me, but I know the type." "I said before he isn't a type. He cares about adventures rightly. He 's certain that our smug existence isn't all. He's vulgar and hysterical and bookish, but don't think that sums him up.
The smug look was gone, chased away by one of blank amazement, which did not, however, seem the sort of horrified surprise that might have been expected to follow on my startling announcement. "I'm sure you must be entirely mistaken, sir," he said. "There is no fire, I'm quite certain of that. There there may have been a cry, for as it happens there's just been an accident in the kitchen."
'Carl, wake up that imagination factory of yours and tell me, or make a guess at least, why we don't run upon Greenback Bob, Delbras, or even Smug, to say nothing of that invisible pedestal-climber of yours, any more? 'Easy enough, I replied wearily. 'They're sticking close to business, and they don't show, at least by day, in the grounds any more.
Know that, of the two men, the man you affect to scorn is infinitely less a villain than this smug hypocrite. Go!" She made no reply, but went, choking with misery and a smarting sense of injustice. No longer was it easy to hug herself into the delusion that this was all a horrid dream. Her father stood on the brink of ruin, and she could not help him.
His smug look told me plainer than words that he thought my grandfather still ignorant of my Whig sentiments. "I often wish that this deplorable practice of duelling might be legislated against," he remarked. "Was there no one at the Coffee House with character enough to stop the lads?" Here was my chance. "Mr. Allen was there," I said.
Rachael, sitting there in Florence's garden, looking down at the white roofs of the village and the smooth sheet of blue that was Belvedere Bay, felt a burning resentment enter her heart. How calm and smug and sure of themselves they were, these bishops and Florences and old lady Gregorys!
I could go in with a lot of these silk-stocking fellows around here, but I don't want to. You'd better decide right now, and let's get to work." Old Laughlin was pleased beyond measure that young Cowperwood should want to go in with him. He had become aware of late that all of the young, smug newcomers on 'change considered him an old fogy.
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