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"And they don't learn a blessed thing, Washington Hawkins, not a single blessed thing but showy rubbish and un-american pretentiousness. But send for the Lady Gwendolen do; for I reckon the peerage regulations require that she must come home and let on to go into seclusion and mourn for those Arkansas blatherskites she's lost." "My darling! Blatherskites? Remember noblesse oblige."
In this book and The Paying Guest he seemed to take a savage delight in depicting the small, stiff, isolated, costly, unsatisfied pretentiousness and plentiful lack of imagination which cripples suburbia so cruelly. The heroine tries to escape, but is drawn back again and again, and nearly submerges her whole environment by her wild clutches.
There are probably as many in Great Britain as in the United States who speak the French which is not spoken by the French themselves. Affectation and pretentiousness and the desire to show off are abundant in all countries. They manifest themselves even in Paris, where I once discovered on a bill of fare at the Grand Hotel Irisch-stew
Personal and sometimes corrupt interests, petty ideas, ignoble quarrels, a flavour of pretentiousness which came from the misapplication of British terms, and a lack of political good-manners in such guise did party present itself to the British politician on his arrival in British North America.
The pretentiousness of the so-called cultured set was a vulgarism in the eyes of this woman who could be rude with the air of a princess, and could give a snub as some people offer a compliment. Inferior persons sometimes wondered how she had a friend left. To be popular, they argued, one had to be civil, whereas Mrs. Ogilvie was often daringly disagreeable.
The recoil was even stronger from the shallowness and pretentiousness and self-display of what was popularly accepted as earnest religion; morally the preacher was revolted at its unctuous boasts and pitiful performance, and intellectually by its narrowness and meanness of thought and its thinness of colour in all its pictures of the spiritual life.
We are going to write about business and finance and politics and precedence and pretentiousness and decorum and indecorum, until a thousand pretences and ten thousand impostures shrivel in the cold, clear air of our elucidations. We are going to write of wasted opportunities and latent beauties until a thousand new ways of living open to men and women.
The too open and illicit invitation of its confectionery-like halls, the insipidly emphatic pretentiousness of the Casino itself Durkin could never quite decide whether it reminded him of a hurriedly finished exposition building or of a child's birthday cake duly iced and bedecked the tinsel glory, the hackneyed magnificence, of its legitimatized and ever-orderly gaming dens, the eternal claws of greed beneath the voluptuous velvet of indolence it all combined to fill his soul with a sense of hot revolt, as had so often before happened during the past long and lonely days, when he had looked up at the soft green of olive and eucalyptus and then down at the intense turquoise curve of the harbor fringed with white foam.
The shy person has learnt a certain wisdom; he becomes aware how easily he detects pretentiousness in other people, and realises that there is nothing to be gained by claiming a width of experience which he does not possess, and that the being unmasked is even more painful than feeling deficient and ill-equipped.
The other man additionally assisted by looking on and moving aside. Cassy went into a hall where a young person who did not resemble the Belle Chocolatière but whose costume suggested her, diligently approached. "Would madame care to go upstairs?" No, madame would not. But Cassy, instinctively insolent to pretentiousness, was very simple with the simple. "Thank you. Will you mind taking my wrap?
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