"Sardonic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... made no reply. The assurance and delight of Berselius as these fancied memories came to him shocked the heart. There was a horrible and sardonic humour in the whole business, a bathos that ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... breeze freshens much," replied Rogers, with sardonic humor, "they'll be giving US a fine chance ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... when Valori met him again coming home from this Moravian Futility, was "FAROUCHE," fierce and dark; his laugh bitter, sardonic; harsh mockery, contempt and suppressed rage, looking through all he said. A proud young King, getting instructed in several things, by the stripes of experience. Look in that young Portrait by Pesne, the full cheeks, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... lean youth, sunburned and tough, with a face that looked sardonic. Ramona recognized him now as her father's new foreman, the man she had been introduced to a few days before. Hard on that memory came another. It was this same Jack Roberts who had taken her brother by surprise and beaten him so ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... with the violation of all poetic justice? From beginning to end it is the story of disillusion, for it sorts all humanity into two great classes, fools who are cheated and knaves who cheat. Some people think that Shakespeare wrote it in a gloomy, pessimistic mood, with the sardonic laughter of a disappointed, world-wearied man. Others, on rather doubtful grounds, believe it a covert satire on some of ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... curst Lazarist, who by undertaking to teach me Latin made me detest it. His hair was coarse, black and greasy, his face like those formed in gingerbread, he had the voice of a buffalo, the countenance of an owl, and the bristles of a boar in lieu of a beard; his smile was sardonic, and his limbs played like those of a puppet moved by wires. I have forgotten his odious name, but the remembrance of his frightful precise countenance remains with me, though hardly can I recollect it without trembling; ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... dynamic, and he emerges betimes, as if from Goya's tomb, and etches with sardonic finger Nada in dust. But this spirit of denial is not an abiding mood; Chopin throws a net of tone over souls wearied with rancors and revolts, bridges "salty, estranged seas" of misery and presently we are viewing ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... curved, and his thin, straight lips and square chin showed the stiffest determination. He looked fatigued, weary, and harassed; yet it did not appear that he complained of his lot; rather accepted it with sardonic humor. The cares of an opera season and of three other simultaneous managements weighed on him ponderously, but he supported ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... against the wall with an air of extreme relief. To Trench the words, the tone of satisfaction in which they were uttered, sounded like some sardonic piece of irony. A man who plumed himself upon indifference to pain and pleasure—who posed as a being of so much experience that joy and trouble could no longer stir a pulse or cause a frown, and who carried his pose to perfection—such ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... time dragged! What awful conceptions were formed in my fevered brain! What leering, sardonic faces pictured themselves against the black wall; what demon voices spoke and laughed in the void above! At times I stood in a cave thronged with jeering devils, some with the savage countenance of the heathen, some yet more satanic; yet ever in the midst of their maddest orgies, the cruel mockery ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... nothing serious, for there was no more disturbance above, only confused murmurings. Then a light showed in the stairs, and again the shuffling of feet came, as four strange men descended. They were lighted by the sardonic Bailey, and they dragged a sixth between them, bound and helpless. It was ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... with a carriage of the head which, for superciliousness, I never have seen equaled in man, woman, or beast. His war-cry was a tinny bleat: the cry of a soul bursting with sardonic merriment. It was like the Falstaffian laughter of the duck, without ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... Mr. Duffeld marched swiftly away; the tall Governor strode after him, and the prisoners filed in silence through the doorway back to their cells. What a commentary it was on "Our Father!" It was a ghastly mockery, a blasphemous farce, a satire on Christianity infinitely more sardonic and mordant than anything I ever wrote or published. Soon after returning to my cell I was glad of the substantial dinner and drowsy ale to deaden the bitter ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... and the French. I will give, however, a few specimens which I have not been able to find in modern collections, and which are probably of native invention. It will be noticed that they are all more remarkable for force and for a peculiar grim, sardonic humor than for delicacy of wit or grace of expression. Instead of neatly running a subject through with the keen flashing rapier of a witty analogy, as a Spaniard would do, the Caucasian mountaineer roughly knocks it down with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... the harbor without obtaining previous permission so to do. This letter was couched in the most dignified and courteous terms, though I have it from undoubted authority that his teeth were clinched, and he had a bitter sardonic grin upon his visage all the while he wrote. Having despatched his letter, the grim Peter stumped to and fro about the town, with a most war-betokening countenance, his hands thrust into his breeches pockets, and whistling a low Dutch psalm-tune, which bore no small resemblance to the music of ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... he glanced at her close-fitting dress, and a sardonic grin slightly twitched the corners of his mouth as he dryly answered, "It is thirty miles one way and twenty the other to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... Polka, not a bit more, and not a bit less sardonic—it was this imperturbability which made him so resistless to most people—than he was prior to the banishment of The Sidney Duck, the Sheriff of Manzaneta County waited patiently until the returning puppets of his will had had time to compose themselves. It took them merely ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... the sardonic smile that accompanied this encomium which set Hardy thinking. Creede must have been thinking too, for he rode past the kitchen without stopping, cocking his head up at the sun as if estimating the length ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... to cheat the sardonic gathered fates: to be deaf and blind to whatever, falsely, they seemed to offer; to get into bed heavy with weariness and rise hurried and absorbed. Over men so preoccupied, spent, Cytherea had no power. It was strange how her name had become ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... tears. sympatheticus. 2. Sternutatio a lumine. Sneezing from light. 3. Dolor dentium a Stridore. Tooth-edge from grating sounds. 4. Risus sardonicus. Sardonic smile. 5. Salivae fluxus cibo viso. Flux of saliva at sight of food. 6. Tensio mamularum viso puerulo. Tension of the nipples of lactescent women at sight of the child. 7. Tensio penis in hydrophobia. Tension of the penis in hydrophobia. 8. Tenesmus calculosus. Tenesmus from stone. ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... Mr. Root's rulings were strictly according to the precedents and directions of the Republican National Committee, and we may believe that even he saw the sardonic humor of his unvarying application of them at the expense of the Rooseveltians. Before the first day's session was over, the process was popularly called the "steam roller." Late in the week, a delegate rose to a point of order, and on being recognized by ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... knew. Conversation on trains makes short journeys. . . . I sat up stiffly in my seat. Diagonally across the aisle sat the very chap I had met in the curio-shop! He was quietly reading a popular magazine, and occasionally a smile lightened his sardonic mouth. Funny that I should run across him twice in the same evening! Men who are contemplating suicide never smile in that fashion. He was smoking a small, well-colored meerschaum pipe with evident relish. Somehow, when a man clenches his ...
— Hearts and Masks • Harold MacGrath
... without seeming to see, the effect it had upon those whom she knew well in the house—saw Mrs. Wolfstein's eager delight in it, Lady Manby's broad amusement, Robin Pierce's carefully-controlled indignation, Mr. Bry's sardonic and always cold gratification, Lady Cardington's surprised, half-tragic wonder—she was oscillating between two courses, one a course of reserve, of stern self-control and abnegation, the other a ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... he said with a sardonic smile, while I felt his grasp tighten on my shoulder, "the villains have been balked of their prey, have they? We shall see, we shall see. Now, you whelp, look yonder." As he spoke, the pirate uttered a shrill whistle. In a second or two it was answered, and the pirate boat rowed round the point ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... pages flew past, turned assiduously by Agnes, who took a sardonic delight in these performances, and every countenance in the room seemed to take a look of sharpened anxiety as to how the duet was to end, and ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Briony Lodge was open, and an elderly woman stood upon the steps. She watched us with a sardonic eye as we stepped ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... voices of the four talkers; the echo of Tom's manly tread, and Mabel's lighter footfall, were all jocund music, befitting the brightness of the day and world. What was the spell by which this pettish girl who stood by him, her luminous eyes fixed in sardonic melancholy upon the promenaders, while she rubbed the dying leaves into atoms between her palms—had stamped scenes and sounds with immortality, yet thrilled him with the indefinite sense of unreality and dread one feels in scanning the lineaments of the beloved ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... welter of the Fronde there grew with surprising rapidity the conception of a central and united polity of France which has gone on advancing and developing, and, in spite of outrageous revolutionary earthquakes, persisting ever since. We find La Rochefoucauld, as a moral teacher, with his sardonic smile, actually escaping out of the senseless conflict, and starting, with the stigmata of the scuffle still on his body, a surprising new theory that the things of the soul alone matter, and that love of honour ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... mastery be proven in this other and more personal affair? He set his teeth and redoubled his efforts, intent on proving his own power to himself. Even as Napoleon believed in his star, Gard trusted in his luck, and it was with a smothered laugh of sardonic satisfaction that news of the first move in his campaign came ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... banker was sardonic. "I could overlook his display of importance when he neglected gentlemen in order to parade his tuppenny mayor's business. I paid no attention to his vaporings on the water question. I've heard plenty of ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... baffled and disappointed as Berrington was, all these feelings gave way to amazement as he looked around the room. Every sign of a body had disappeared, the room was empty save for Sartoris, who sat smoking a cigarette, with a sardonic smile on his face. All the others had gone, and the body was gone from the table; on the latter was a dark crimson cloth surmounted by a mass of flowers arranged tastefully around an electric stand. Sartoris laughed in an easy, ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... Wolf Larsen's mouth, I was inexpressibly shocked. The scorching torrent was enough to wither the face of the corpse. I should not have been surprised if the wet black beard had frizzled and curled and flared up in smoke and flame. But the dead man was unconcerned. He continued to grin with a sardonic humour, with a cynical mockery and defiance. He ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... thing about Liszt is his wonderful variety of expression and play of feature. One moment his face will look dreamy, shadowy, tragic; the next he will be insinuating, amiable, ironical, sardonic; but always the same captivating grace of manner. He is a perfect study. He is all spirit, but half the time, at least, a mocking spirit, I should say. All Weimar adores him, and people say that women still go perfectly crazy over him. When he walks out, he bows ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... chary of speech—no! O tempora, O mores! NO! But that he refused the subject in hand, that he eschewed expression upon it and resolutely drove the argument in other directions, that he achieved such superbly un-Arplike inconsistency; and with such rich material for his sardonic humors, not at arm's length, not even so far as his finger-tips, but beneath his very palms, he rejected it: this ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... answered Nino, calmly, "nothing could be further from my thoughts than to insult you, or to treat you in any way with disrespect. And I will not acknowledge that anything you can say can convey an insult to myself." Lira smiled in a sardonic fashion. "But," added Nino, "if it would give you any pleasure to fight, and if you have weapons, I shall be happy to oblige you. It is a quiet spot, as you say, and it shall never be said that an Italian artist refused to fight a ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... kind you are!" exclaimed the emperor, with a sardonic smile; "you are so obliging as to give me advice which I did not ask for. I thank you, Mr. Aulic Councillor, but I believe it will be better for me to follow my own understanding. As God Almighty has placed me at the head of Austria and made me emperor, He must confide in my ability to discharge ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... tiresome preliminaries, although he followed them with intense interest, the while a sardonic irritation arose in him. Chancing to meet Mayor ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... come away, while you receive Lou's cheery "See you again," and the sardonic, sweet smile of Nancy that seems, somehow, to miss you and go fluttering like a white moth up over the housetops ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... whatever way would most annoy the Government. Argyll opened by proposing, as did the Queen's Message, the instant discussion of the Union (July 3). The House preferred to deliberate on anything else, and the leader of the Jacobites or Cavaliers, Lockhart of Carnwath, a very able sardonic man, saw that this was, for Jacobite ends, a tactical error. The more time was expended the more chance had Queensberry to win votes for the Union. Fletcher of Saltoun, an independent and eloquent patriot and republican, wasted time by impossible ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... you'd better—right away. They'll be terribly distressed—thinking we're drowned." She turned her back to him, without nonsense or embarrassment, and he started to dress. She didn't see the slow smile, half-sardonic, that was on ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... was swollen and discolored. Bella clicked her tongue. "He is a brute, you know!" She laughed shortly. Since Garth's departure she had become almost a human being. The deaf-mute look had melted from her, and a sardonic humor emerged; her eyes cleared; she could even smile. "Why do we care so much for him, ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... growing pale and she could feel her heart pounding at her side, but she managed to rise, and, turning, faced a blond young man near at hand, who had protruding teeth and grinned at her like a sardonic rabbit. ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... attached you were to the place. He added that you had been kind to him. He was rather gruff and ashamed about his weakness, but I could see that he had been touched to receive kindness from utter strangers. He was amused in a sardonic way that you had thought him a poor man and had yet been kind to him; he had an unhappy notion that in this world kindness is always bought.... He had no heir, and I think I explained to you in my letter that he had made up his mind to leave his whole fortune to the first person who did anything ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... Castro's query as to why Madame Villefort had married her husband, contained an element of truth, and yet there were numbers of Parisian-Americans, more especially the young, well-looking, and masculine, who at the time the marriage had taken place had been ready enough with sardonic explanations. ...
— "Le Monsieur De La Petite Dame" • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... main road a quarter of a mile ahead of them, about at the point where it entered the wood. Kenneth now made out an unfenced wagon-road through the field, evidently a short-cut from Rachel Carter's farm to the highway. He permitted himself a faint, sardonic smile. This, then, was to be her means of reaching the highway rather than to use the lane that ran past his house and no doubt crossed ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... on he ran, and on. His slobbering lips could only cry, "Christine! My Dearest Love! My Wife! Where are you gone? What future is our past? What saturnine, Sardonic devil's jest has bid us live Two years together in a puff of smoke? It was no dream, I swear it! In some star, Or still imprisoned in Time's egg, you give Me love. I feel it. Dearest Dear, this stroke Shall never part us, I will reach to ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... Cal, even at a time when other interests pressed so close and absorbingly, to indulge himself in a grim and sardonic humour. The man who had "hired him killed" and whom in turn he meant to kill stood in the room where he himself lay too weak to rise from his bed, and toward that ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... the time, with new energies. Our thoughts take wings rapid as our steed. We feel as if his fleetness and boundless impulses were for the moment our own. We laugh; we exult; we shout for very joy. We cry out with Mephistopheles, but in anything but a sardonic mood, "What I enjoy with spirit, is it the less my own on that account? If I can pay for six horses, are not their powers mine! I drive along, and am a proper man, as if I had four-and-twenty legs!" These were Turpin's sentiments precisely. Give him four legs and a wide ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... constituents," whom he did all his wit could do to make ridiculous, that the Senate laughed, and even Roscoe Conkling, who never condescends to sneer at a woman in public, turned and listened and smiled his most sardonic smile. Then Thurman blew his loudest regulation blast—sure portent of approaching battle—and rose and moved that the petition be referred to the committee on public lands, of which Oglesby is chairman. At this proposition—intended ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... get her a rouge-pot and a French governess, and send her home by the next ship; eh, Buckley?" said the Captain, with his most sardonic smile. "She would be the better for a little polishing; wouldn't she, eh? Too hoydenish and forward, I am afraid; too fond of speaking the truth. Let's have her taught to amble, and mince, and—— Bah, ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... As he let himself slowly down to his heels there was a sardonic grin on his brown face. In outguessing Tighe he had slipped one little mental cog, after all, and the chances were that he would pay high for his error. A man had been lying in the mesquite close to the creek watching him all the ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... enough now to give the pilot a sardonic smile. "She's a wonderful girl, Diana. A ...
— Heart • Henry Slesar
... allowed, about these wonderful Roses of Sharon and this Song of Songs. Lies, all lies, every word of it! Yet, in spite of himself, from time to time, he liked to reread it. He fancied this was because of the sardonic pleasure its superlative phrases gave him, but the truth was it held him. He despised sentiment, tenderness, and, by the strangeness of the human mind, he went, by way of paradox, to the tenderest, most sublime spot in a book supreme ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... improvements or discoveries could never exist. Here the Aristotelian made his stand; and at length, gently hooking Glanvill between the horns of a dilemma, the entrapped virtuoso threw himself into an unguarded affirmation; at which the Vicar of Great Chew, shouting in triumph, with a sardonic grin, declared that Glanvill and his Royal Society had now avowed themselves to be atheistical! This made an end of the interview, and a beginning of ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... and gave the company to understand he took this as a polite acknowledgment of respect. But his gesture was accompanied with a disconcerted leer of smothered malice, which I could not misinterpret. It was sardonic; and, to me, who knew what was passing in his heart, ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... the beggar as his guest, and gives warning that nobody insult the poor stranger, "lest there be trouble." A number of Suitors show their ill feeling; one of them, named Ktesippus, flings a bullock's foot at Ulysses "for a hospitable present," at which the latter "smiled in sardonic fashion," but said nothing. Telemachus, however, reproves the agressor with great spirit, and asserts himself anew against all deeds of violence. One of the more reasonable Suitors, Agelaus, makes a speech, which commends Telemachus but insists upon ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... superstitious about it, to think of her in a ridiculous nervous manner as an evil design on his peace and security. She seemed unnatural with her shrunken face bowed opposite him at the table. His feeling for her shifted subconsciously to hatred. It broke out publicly in sardonic or angry periods under which she would shrink away, incredibly timid, from his scorn. This quality of utter helplessness gave the menace he divined in her its illusive air of unreality. She seemed—she was—entirely helpless; ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Mr. Livingston's countenance; a more sardonic smile I have never seen—a smile which said as plainly as words, "You are lying." He spoke with ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... the story the narrator had become transfigured. The comic, or rather, the sardonic element was all out of him, and as he painted that strange scene it was with difficulty that I kept my composure. And this consummate actor had somehow so managed me that the sympathy due to his dramatis persone was given to himself. I stepped forward to grasp his hand, ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... — N. rejoicing, exultation, triumph, jubilation, heyday, flush, revelling; merrymaking &c (amusement) 840; jubilee &c (celebration) 883; paean, Te Deum &c (thanksgiving) 990 [Lat.]; congratulation &c 896. smile, simper, smirk, grin; broad grin, sardonic grin. laughter (amusement) 840. risibility; derision &c 856. Momus; Democritus the Abderite^; rollicker^. V. rejoice, thank one's stars, bless one's stars; congratulate oneself, hug oneself; rub one's hands, clap one's hands; smack the lips, fling up one's cap; dance, skip; sing, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... a Punch and Judy if I'm near it," said Telford. "I enjoy the sardonic humor with which Punch hustles off his victims. His light-heartedness when doing bloody deeds is the ...
— An Unpardonable Liar • Gilbert Parker
... that pithy anathema with which it was defaced. And having read it, he repeated it aloud, and Lenny actually saw him smile,—such a smile! so disagreeable and sinister! Lenny had never before seen the smile sardonic. ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... like the odor of battle. He was in great boots stained with the red shale, for the roads outside Banbridge were heavy from a recent rain. He was collarless, his greasy coat hung loosely over his dingy flannel shirt. He was unshaven, and his face was at once grim and sardonic, bitter and raging. It was the face of an impotent revolutionist, who cursed his impotence, his lack of weapons, his wrong environments for his fierce spirit. He belonged in a country at war. He had the misfortune to be in a country at peace. He belonged in a field ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... was to deliver your letter of recommendation to our cousin, who was himself in little better circumstances than I. My first scheme, you know, Sir, was to be usher at an academy, and I asked his advice on the affair. Our cousin received the proposal with a true Sardonic grin. Aye, cried he, this is indeed a very pretty career, that has been chalked out for you. I have been an usher at a boarding school myself; and may I die by an anodyne necklace, but I had rather be an under turnkey ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith
... The grim, sardonic humour of the situation appealed strongly to Doctor Dexter. "To think," he said to himself, "that only last night, that identical cat was observed as a fresh and promising specimen, providentially sent to me in the hour of need. And if I hadn't wanted Ralph to help me, Araminta's pet would at ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... lot for you than that to which fate handed you over. I fancy there need have been no deceit in your fond simple little heart, could it but have been given into other keeping. But you were consigned to a master, whose scorn and cruelty terrified you; under whose sardonic glances your scared eyes were afraid to look up, and before whose gloomy coldness you dared not be happy. Suppose a little plant, very frail and delicate from the first, but that might have bloomed sweetly and borne fair flowers, had it received ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... bohemians in the group that has since come to be called the "Chicago Renaissance." Anderson soon adopted the posture of a free, liberated spirit, and like many writers of the time, he presented himself as a sardonic critic of American provincialism and materialism. It was in the freedom of the city, in its readiness to put up with deviant styles of life, that Anderson found the strength to settle accounts with—but also ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... of him, till, the two ships closing, he lost all confidence in himself, and retreating to the chartroom, pulled the door to with a crash. There, his brows knitted, his mouth drawn on one side in sardonic meditation, he sat through many still hours—a sort of Prometheus in the bonds of unholy desire, having his very vitals torn by the beak and claws ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... on his books, he cares little for what he hears. There was always present to him a feeling of black care seated behind the horseman,—and would have been equally so had there been no real care present to him. A sardonic melancholy was the characteristic most common to him,—which, however, was relieved by an always present capacity for instant frolic. It was these attributes combined which made him of all satirists the most humorous, and of all humorists the most satirical. ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... Hartmann spoke a few quick words to them in their own language and they ranged themselves on either side of the cab door. Then the doctor threw it open, and released the detective's wrist. "Get out, if you please, Mr. Brooks," he said, with a sardonic smile. ...
— The Ivory Snuff Box • Arnold Fredericks
... retired a few steps on Godolphin's arrival, and had watched with a sardonic yet indifferent smile the proof of his friend's weakness. He ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fight he took a sardonic delight in shocking those pillars of society who to him were symbols of the existing order of things. Fiercely he smashed away at idols, however highly placed, however much revered. At all times and in all circumstances he was regardless of ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... bounded over the paving-stones and stopped at my hotel. The driver lifted his hat obsequiously. I, with sardonic smile, entered the hotel, where I was not unknown. No doubt was made as to the character ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... whatsoever menial here he will. So saying, he from a basket near at hand Heav'd an ox-foot, and with a vig'rous arm 360 Hurl'd it. Ulysses gently bow'd his head, Shunning the blow, but gratified his just Resentment with a broad sardonic smile[94] Of dread significance. He smote the wall. Then thus Telemachus rebuked the deed. Ctesippus, thou art fortunate; the bone Struck not the stranger, for he shunn'd the blow; Else, I had surely thrust my glitt'ring lance Right through thee; then, no hymenaeal ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... kind, Monsieur Gaubert," said he, and his manner now was one of frozen calm—a manner that betrayed none of the frenzy of seething passion underneath. "I think, sir," said he to the stranger, adopting something of that gentleman's sardonic manner, "that it will be a more peaceful world without you. It is that consideration restrains me from apologizing. And yet, if monsieur will express regret for having sought, and with such lack of manners, to ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... sister, is a St. Bernard a legitimate pet in the proper sense of the word? As to the bull-dog, I say little. He at least is a good water-dog, and, when he is taught, he will retrieve birds through the heaviest sea as long as his master cares to shoot. But his appearance is sardonic, to say the least of it; he puts me in mind of a prize-fighter coming up for the tenth round when he has got matters all his own way. Happily he is not often kept as a pet; he is usually taken out by fast young men in riverside places, for his company is believed to give an air of dash ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... a bitter, sardonic laugh which he had acquired of late years. "Oh, well, she will get used to it," he replied. "Don't you worry, Maria. She will get used to it. The smell of the poor is the smell of the world. Heaven itself must ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the stewardess' voice authorized the action. With sardonic docility he unfastened his safety-belt and stepped out into the spiral, descending aisle. It seemed strange to have weight again, even as little as this. Cochrane weighed, on the moon, just one-sixth of what he would weigh on Earth. Here he would ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... for that!"—and Lysia smiled darkly, while the great eye on her breast flashed forth a sardonic lustre— "Strong as ye all are, and young, ye lack the bravery of the weak old man who, mad as he may be, has at least the courage of his opinions! Who is there here that believes in the Sun as a god, or in Nagaya as a mediator? Not ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Positivist emulators of the achievements of George Eliot. Some romances of this school are vivid and highly finished pictures of human misery, unredeemed by hope, and hardly brightened by occasional gleams of humour, of the sardonic sort which may stir a mirthless smile, but never a laugh. Herein they are far inferior to their model, whose melancholy philosophy is half hidden from her readers by the delightful freshness and truth of her "Dutch painter's" portraying of every-day humanity, by her delicately ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... people's; but to me, who have only this one pair, which I have put on in honour of the Abbot here, no apology can compensate for such carelessness; besides, the expense of washing.' He had the same sort of droll sardonic way about every thing. A wild Irishman, named F——, one evening beginning to say something at a large supper at Cambridge, Matthews roared out 'Silence!' and then, pointing to F——, cried out, in the words of the oracle, 'Orson is endowed with reason.' You may easily suppose that ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... finger tips. Yet he was conscious that, in spite of the man's graceful ease and friendly smile, he did not like Flatray. He would not ask for a better man beside him in a tight pinch; but he could not deny that something sinister which breathed from his sardonic, devil-may-care face. ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... A sardonic glimmer in eyes half visible under heavy lids alone betrayed relish of the situation, the homage commanded and the sensation created by this inopportune and unheralded arrival: deliberately Number One mounted the ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... Indeed, I have a distinct recollection of being told that the child's father had painted in the extraordinary features and had himself decorated the original flaxen locks with singular stripes of red and white and blue, a sardonic tribute to the home ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... of moonshine when fusel oil abounds, as it does invariably in new whisky distilled by furtive amateurs working in secret and with neither the facilities nor the knowledge for its scientific manufacture. There is grim significance in the sardonic humor of the man who first named it White Mule. The kick is certain and terrific; frequently it is fatal as well. The worst of it is, you never know what the effect will be until you have drunk the stuff; and after you have drunk it, you are in no condition to resist the ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... throne, a magnificent, but a sardonic figure for all that. As he rose, soft, weird music came from an angle where a screen of palm-ferns was placed. Though mechanical, the music was ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... his words with painful deliberation, and pointing his reference to "the young gentlemen" with one sardonic side-look at them, Mr. John Jago performed the duties of hospitality on his side. I excused myself from accepting the cigar. With studied politeness, the man of the glittering brown eyes wished me a goodnight's ...
— The Dead Alive • Wilkie Collins
... Garden comedy! Surely, if the old gods have any laughter left, and if they take any notice of what is done in the literary world here below, there must have rumbled through the courts of Olympus a guffaw of sardonic laughter, when that solemn criticism was ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... beauty and it is told with an easy confidence. As for Blood himself, he is a superman, compounded of a sardonic humor, cold nerves, and hot temper. Both the story and the man are masterpieces. A great figure, a great epoch, ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... attached to a strong, heavy parachute. He put it on, tested all its parts, and made his way unobserved to one of the doors in the lower part of the vessel. Thus, when the chance for escape came, he was ready for it. As the Skylark paused over the Isthmus, his lips parted in a sardonic smile. He opened the door and stepped out into the air, closing the door behind him as he fell. The neutral color of the parachute was lost in the gathering twilight a few seconds after he ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... class of anti-slavery men who were inspired by humane sympathy with the slave and righteous abhorrence of slavery, but also by hatred of the slaveholder. What he himself seemed to enjoy most in his talk was his sardonic humor, which he made play upon men and things like lurid freaks of lightning. He shot out such sallies with a fearfully serious mien, or at least he accompanied them with a grim smile which was not at all like Abraham Lincoln's hearty ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... the British Constitution, and British cant. In these poems of Byron, and in his dramatic experiments, Manfred and Cain, there is a single figure—the figure of Byron under various masks—and one pervading mood, a restless and sardonic gloom, a weariness of life, a love of solitude, and a melancholy exaltation in the presence of the wilderness and the sea. Byron's hero is always represented as a man originally noble, whom some great wrong, by others, or some mysterious crime of his own, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... of the camp—what it was I did not know; and a man who lay beside me suddenly sat up and called to them. He was chief of the tribe, a man with narrow forehead and narrow-slitted eyes, whose thin lips and twisted sardonic features explained why the two boys jumped and tensed like startled deer at the sound of his voice. The alertness of fear was in their faces, and they turned, in a panic, to run. He called to them to come back, and one boy lagged behind reluctantly, his ...
— The Road • Jack London
... holds, Yet one fear presses on my mind, That death should on me helpless play A satire of the bitter kind. For much I fear that o'er my corpse The scalding tears of friends shall flow, And that, too late, they should with zeal Fresh flowers upon my body throw. That fate sardonic should recall The ones I loved to my cold side, And make me lying in the ground, The object of love once denied. That all my aching heart's desires, So vainly sought for from my birth, Should crowd unbidden, smiling kind Above my ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... anything but hide in his clouds of ink. Sir Sidney Colvin thinks that Keats revealed himself in his letters, but I cannot agree with him. Keats is one of the best letter-writers we have; he can be merry, fanciful, witty, thoughtful, even profound. He has a sardonic turn of language hardly to be equalled outside Shakespeare. "Were it in my device, I would reject a Petrarchal coronation—on account of my dying day, and because women have cancers?" Where will you match that but from Hamlet? But Keats knew himself. "It is a wretched ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... the universe" is reported to have been a favorite utterance of our New England transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller; and when some one repeated this phrase to Thomas Carlyle, his sardonic comment is said to have been: "Gad! she'd better!" At bottom the whole concern of both morality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe. Do we accept it only in part and grudgingly, or heartily and altogether? Shall our protests against certain ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... at his daughter steadily, and Flora Schuyler looked at all of them, and remembered the picture—Torrance sitting lean and sardonic with the lamplight on his face, Clavering watching the girl with a curious little smile, and Hetty standing very slim and straight, with something in the poise of her shapely head that had its meaning to Miss Schuyler. Then with a "Good-night" to Torrance, and a half-ironical bend of the head ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... MARTELLUS [with a short sardonic cachinnation] Ha! My beard was three and a half feet long when I was born; and a flash of lightning burnt it off and killed the ancient who was delivering me. Without a hair on my chin I became the greatest sculptor in ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... at the world as through a glass. Yet not altogether darkly be it said. That is, I trust I am no cynic like that fellow Diogenes who set the fashion centuries ago of turning up the nose at everything. I have a natural sunniness of disposition which would, I believe, be proof against the sardonic fumes of contemplation even though I were ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... sparks which might at any instant break into flame. Sheila was wearing one of her flimsy little black frocks, recovered from the wrinkles of its journey, and she had decorated her square-cut neck with some yellow flowers. On these Miss Blake's eyes rested every now and then with a sardonic gleam. ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... I beg of you!" she cried, catching me by the sleeve, with a sardonic laugh; low, whispering, full of direful meaning, it stealthily echoed through the saloon. "Don't disturb the good man. He sleeps so soundly after his well-spent days! He doesn't have any bad dreams, I fancy,—rid of such a troublesome, vicious wife,—a wife who harassed her husband to death, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... kingliness, that every one succumbed and rested gladly on so firm a precedent. Mr. St. George in this brief time had accepted much hospitality, had won a thousand friends, and by Christmas had made himself, through his genial strength to-day and his sardonic sarcasm to-morrow, as thoroughly the autocrat of all the region as ever Mr. Erne had been. For all that men want is a master; give them somebody that will lead, and glad enough are they to follow. But ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... He has little delicacy, little finesse of spirit. In listening to these works with their clumsy blocks of tone, their eternal sunless complaining, their lack of humor where they would be humorous, their lack of passion where they would be profound, their sardonic and monotonous bourdon, one is perforce reminded of the photograph of Reger which his publishers place on the cover of their catalogue of his works, the photograph that shows something that is like a swollen, myopic beetle with thick lips and sullen expression crouching on an ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... Manhattan, Dorn felt peacefully out of place. His thought had become: "I want to get back to where I was." In the midst of the mechanical carnival of Broadway he caught a memory of himself walking to work with a stream of faces—of a sardonic Erik Dorn to whom the street was a pattern; to whom the mysteries tugging at heels that scratched the pavements were the ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... touched glasses, wondering how to say what he had to say. Damn it, he couldn't sit here just talking or necking, he'd come to listen but.... A sardonic montage of all the detective shows he had ever seen winked through his mind. The amateur who rushes in and solves the case, heigh-ho. He had never appreciated all the detail ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... twenty years to recognise. They forgot, too, that compassion is precisely the quality in which they were most lacking. Gavarni had killed the sentiment of pity in them, and had communicated to them his own mocking, sardonic spirit of inhumanity, his sinister delight in every manifestation of cruelty, baseness, and pain. In their most candid moods they confessed that they were all brain and no heart, that they were without real affections; and their writings naturally suffer ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... private room of WILHELM of Prussia. He himself, standing with his back to the roaring log fire in the deep grate, was too like the cartoons in the English papers to be mistaken. The iron-grey hair and upturned moustache, the cold eyes and sardonic mouth were all there "as per invoice." He was even wearing an aggressively Prussian uniform, and kept his spiked helmet on his head and his sword hanging ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 5, 1917 • Various
... at it, and then at me, as if uncertain of her surroundings, and the shrewd, sardonic look came back ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... the factory, where an explanation is made to the men. Mr. Brent receives a check for a month's wages in advance, and a vacation. Mr. Wilmarth looks on with a sardonic suavity, saying little, and betraying surprise rather than ill-humor, but he hates Floyd Grandon to the last thread. The man has come between him and all his plans. No mere money can ever make up to him for ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... signed by Herresford!" cried Swinton, hotly. "This is some sardonic jest, in keeping with his donation of a thousand dollars to the Mission Hall, given with one hand and taken away with the other. It nearly landed me ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... flight from Henrietta, not forgetting the generosity of the cashier in the dairy lunch-room. She listened in silence, and when I had finished I thought I saw the repression of a smile, which may or may not have been of the sardonic order. Then she motioned me to follow her through the long, gloomy hall to the rear of the house, where, turning an angle, we came to a staircase down which a flood of sunlight streamed from the big window ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... not utter a syllable. He stared wildly at those about him, his friends of yesterday, at those seated on the mock judgment bench who, crouching forward, were observing him with sardonic smiles. ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... spent itself fruitlessly against the blackness, which the closed window draperies rendered absolute but for those dull, sardonic eyes of ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... exterior there dwelt a very seraph. Then, again, he is so sly, and still so imperturbably saturnine; shows such indifference, malign coolness, towards all that men strive after; and ever with some half-visible wrinkle of a bitter, sardonic humor, if indeed it be not mere stolid callousness,—that you look on him almost with a shudder, as on some incarnate Mephistopheles, to whom this great terrestrial and celestial Round, after all, were but some huge foolish whirligig, where kings ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... his little black moustache was carefully waxed. His forehead was low and broad, and his aquiline nose, like his jet-black, almond-shaped eyes, betrayed an Indian ancestor. His face betokened intelligence, conceit, and a keen sense of sardonic humour; still, there was nothing in it positively forbidding. To those whom he took a fancy to, he was doubtless loyal and kind, albeit his temperament was of a fiery and volatile nature. In this he showed the Gallic side of his origin. It was very evident that, despite his ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... a sigh of content as I broke the seal of the packet and brought out the enclosure. Somewhere in the garden a little sardonic laugh was clipt to silence. It came from groom or maid, no doubt; yet it thrilled me with an odd feeling of uncanniness, and I ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... credited her with an honest scorn for sentimentality; she would make no effort to glorify him for an act that was so obviously a part of their unsentimental compact. There would be no gushing over this sardonic tribute to her avarice. She would have herself too ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... But it was as an intellectual and moral expression that her bray was perfect. As far beyond her size as were her aspirations, it was a free and running commentary of scorn at all created things extant, with ironical and sardonic additions that were terrible. It reviled all human endeavor, it quenched all sentiment, it suspended frivolity, it scattered reverie, it paralyzed action. It was omnipotent. More wonderful and characteristic ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... injuria—to drive an abstract right to excess is to commit injustice.... Extreme anarchy and extreme despotism lead to one another. Pride comes before a fall. Too much wit outwits itself. Joy brings tears, melancholy a sardonic smile.'[5] To which one well might add that most human institutions, by the purely technical and professional manner in which they come to be administered, end by becoming obstacles to the very purposes which ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... and his party approached, the eyes of the ambassador and of Lady Tynemouth were directed towards Ian Stafford. The glance of the former was ironical and a little sardonic. He had lately been deeply engaged in checkmating the singularly skilful and cleverly devised negotiations by which England was to gain a powerful advantage in Europe, the full significance of which even he had not yet pierced. This he knew, but what he apprehended with the instinct ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... bowed with stately courtesy, but not before had his smile been so sardonic. "As you say, every one should be satisfied with such an arrangement and, let me say, it is one that would greatly please me, but as I told you before, Mr. Hanson, it cannot be. My daughter must keep her contract ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... hand-breadth between him and wealth such as he had never dared to dream of, with the menacing figure of the merchant directly above him, prepared to strike at the least indication of suspicion of the jacket and its priceless contents, the pair presented a striking tableau of the sardonic jest in which fate sometimes indulges in providing such nearness of opportunity and such a threat to ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... Mirabeau, called Barrel Mirabeau, on account of his rotundity, and the quantity of strong liquor he contains. Among the clergy is the Abbe Maury, who does not want for audacity, and the Cure Gregoire who shall be a bishop, and Talleyrand-Pericord, his reverence of Autun, with sardonic grimness, a man living in falsehood, and on falsehood, yet not wholly ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... surprised by Don Pedro's recognition of Captain Hervey as the Swedish sailor Vasa to move or speak. But the Professor did not seem to be greatly astonished, and the sole sound which broke the stillness was his sardonic chuckle. Perhaps the little man had progressed beyond the point of being surprised at anything, or, like, Moliere's hero, was only surprised at finding virtue in ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... mantelpiece among cigar-cases and toilet bottles; but these traces of his passage had made no mark on the featureless dulness of the room, its look of being the makeshift setting of innumerable transient collocations. There was something sardonic, almost sinister, in its appearance of having deliberately "made up" for its anonymous part, all in noncommittal drabs and browns, with a carpet and paper that nobody would remember, and chairs and tables as impersonal ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... his tombstone," Emile began, with a sardonic laugh, "the stonemason will carve 'Passer-by, accord a tear, in memory of one that's here!' Oh," he continued, "I would cheerfully pay a hundred sous to any mathematician who would prove the existence of hell to ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... resounded with five-finger improvisations and with vocalists who had little but their voices left. They howled, "Keep your head down, Fritzie boy," or, "We gave them hell at Neuve Chapelle, and here we are and here we are again," or moaned love-songs with a sardonic irony. ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... stood looking down at her with sardonic contempt, a cowed, self-conscious look on his thick, pale face. The blood began ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... catch. Yetta's rich fellow. Wait until she gets through with him—poor devil." These broken phrases made him shiver, especially as Yetta's expression, at first enigmatic, was now openly sardonic. What did she mean? Was she only tormenting him? Was this to be his test, his trial? His head was almost splitting, for the heat was great and the air bad. Again he ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... saw on the dark sardonic face, as the red gleams lighted it, made her start convulsively, as if she would go to him; then controlling herself, she stood silent. He had not seen the movement,—or, if he saw, did not heed it. He did not care to tame her now. The firelight flashed and darkened, the crackling ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... the senior scientist of the Platform's crew. Joe had seen him often enough on the television screen in the Communications Room at the Shed. Now Sanford looked nerve-racked, but his eyes were bright and his expression sardonic. ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... to announce that the car was ready, and they went out. Farbish watched them with a smile that had in it a trace of the sardonic. ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... swung, the church bell rang. Riding beneath the squat tower, all our people pouring forth from our poor houses upon the returned and his captive, the latter had eyes, it seemed to me, but for that bell. A curious, sardonic look of recognition, appraisal, relinquishment, sat in the Indian's face. From wrist to wrist of Caonabo went a bright, short chain. The sun glittered upon the bracelets and the links. I do not know—there was for a moment—something ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... carrying his nose with that aforesaid appearance of 'sniff,' as though despising an egg which he knew he could not digest. Behind him his cousin, the tall George, son of the fifth Forsyte, Roger, had a Quilpish look on his fleshy face, pondering one of his sardonic jests. Something inherent to the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... it was hardly closed when shouts arose. The lift had shot up, like a balloon with its rope cut. A sardonic laugh rang out. ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... asked if he would give me some advice about my painting, remembering Turner's kindly invitation and manner when I saw him. This proposition was met by the same decided negative, accompanied by the fixed and sardonic stare which the girl had put on at the coming of the new influence. This disconcerted me, and I then explained to my brother what had been going on, as, the questions being mental, he had no clue to the pantomime. I said that as an influence which ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... superstition, the ring did not seem to bring him nor the camp any luck. Daily the "clean up" brought the same scant rewards to their labors, and deepened the sardonic gravity of Blazing Star. But, if Cass found no material result from his treasure, it stimulated his lazy imagination, and, albeit a dangerous and seductive stimulant, at least lifted him out of the monotonous grooves of his half-careless, half-slovenly, ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... one of his cheeks and a big lump on his forehead. He was glad to stand still a moment, for he had been shoveling gravel for several hours, and that is an occupation that conduces to an unpleasant stiffness about the waist. He was, however, somewhat puzzled by the red-haired Cassidy's sardonic grin. ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... of neuralgia, and hence this was an evening upon which he might fairly have expected to see sympathy charmingly attired in the porch. It is true that the neuralgia had completely gone. "Still," he said to himself with justifiable sardonic gloom, "how does she know my ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... Austro-Hungarian Government—playing the role of the wicked partner of the combination—"in full appreciation of our mediatory activity" (so says the German White Paper with sardonic humor), replied to this proposition that, coming after the opening of hostilities, "it was ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... railroad shops. The Sunday before it was called, Saxon and Billy had dinner at Bert's house. Saxon's brother came, though he had found it impossible to bring Sarah, who refused to budge from her household rut. Bert was blackly pessimistic, and they found him singing with sardonic glee: ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London |
