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Updated: May 7, 2025
The phrase acted like a spur. He obeyed a foolish impulse. "If you like " he said. "What?" "He needn't do this. The Impot., I mean. I'll let him off." "Really?" "I can." "It's awfully kind of you." "I don't mind," he said. "It's nothing much. If you really think ..." He was full of self-applause for this scandalous sacrifice of justice. "It's awfully kind of you," she said.
That impertinent, and almost universal propensity of men, to over-value themselves, has given us such a prejudice against self-applause, that we are apt to condemn it, by a general rule, wherever we meet with it; and it is with some difficulty we give a privilege to men of sense, even in their most secret thoughts.
Wilder smiled, and pulled up a dirty apology for a collar with an air of self-applause. 'But what I want to advise is this, sir, said the officer genially: 'Say nothing, and it's five bob and costs, and there's an end of it; make a song about it, and it's forty shillings or a month, and it gets into all the papers. For this is a shop, sir, where the more you say the more you pay.
The little superfluous flesh still remaining on his face hung about it like an ill-fitting garment; his tones had become lachrymose; the oratorical gestures, with which he was wont to embellish profusely his former speeches, were all abandoned; nothing remained of the original man but the bombast of his language and the impudent complacency of his self-applause, which now appeared in contemptible contrast to his crestfallen demeanour and his disheartening narrative of degradation and defeat.
The satisfaction arising from conscious rectitude, will not calm an injured heart, when tenderness is ever finding excuses; and self-applause is a cold solitary feeling, that cannot supply the place of disappointed affection, without throwing a gloom over every prospect, which, banishing pleasure, does not exclude pain.
Pale, motionless, silent, with his face bending over his bosom and hands clasped tightly upon his knees, Wolfe sat in his dungeon, and collected his spirit against the approaching consummation of his turbulent and stormy fate. His bitterest punishment had been already past; mysterious Chance, or rather the Power above chance, had denied to him the haughty triumph of self-applause.
Doctor Colligan, also, was in trouble from his connection with the Lynches: not that he had any dissatisfaction at the recovery of his patient, for he rejoiced at it, both on her account and his own. He had strongly that feeling of self-applause, which must always be enjoyed by a doctor who brings a patient safely through a dangerous illness.
I can see before me now some gray-haired old gentleman, very money-getting, very correct, very cleanly, who reads the morning paper with unction, and his Bible with determination, who listens to dull sermons with patience, and who prays with quiet self-applause; and yet there are moments belonging to his life, when his curdled affections yearn for something that they have not, when his avarice oversteps all the commandments, when his pride builds castles full of splendor; and yet put this before his eye, and he reads with the most careless air in the world, and condemns as arrant fiction, what cannot be proved to the elders.
What place is this, and why have you come with men as heartless as yourself, stealing me from my home to bring me hither, and cast me into this den?" and her bosom filled as she ended; but her hearer, knowing no compunction, only answered with a sneer: "To clip your wings, madam," then gave a low laugh, as if of self-applause at his quickness of repartee, or the prospect of her humiliation, and added: "Pray, miss, retire; you have not been abed to-night, and watching is not good for English ladies' eyes."
Self-applause is a more subtle thing even than self-pity, because, if one rejects the sense of credit, one is apt to congratulate oneself on being the kind of person who does reject it, whereas we ought to avoid it as instinctively as we avoid a bad smell.
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