who's-afraid

Updated: June 18, 2025

He followed her up the crooked little staircase with a who's-afraid kind of swagger, but he took his hat off on entering the room. He glanced round, and seemed to take stock of the signs of poverty so familiar to his class and then directed his gaze to where the body lay on the sofa with its pauper coffin already by its side.

Henry Lawson - While the Billy Boils

There were many classes of people here, from the labouring man in his fustian jacket, to the broken-down spendthrift in his shawl dressing-gown, most appropriately out at elbows; but there was the same air about them all a kind of listless, jail-bird, careless swagger, a vagabondish who's-afraid sort of bearing, which is wholly indescribable in words, but which any man can understand in one moment if he wish, by setting foot in the nearest debtors' prison, and looking at the very first group of people he sees there, with the same interest as Mr.

Charles Dickens - The Pickwick Papers