To the small crowd, however, this was the extreme of brutal curtness.

To deny my request was simply one of his ill-advised whims, and his refusal was given with customary curtness and contempt.

Indeed, I am often comparing his rather touchingly inflated naïveté as of a small young person walking on tiptoe while he is talking of elevated things, at the time when he felt himself the author of that unwritten romance, with his present epigrammatic curtness and affectation of power kept strictly in reserve.

" It was not the insulting curtness of one who wishes to be left in peace, but simply a statement of bald fact.

Its dryness and negative curtness were provoking.

There is an occasional curtness about Cambridge men that is hard but not impossible to reconcile with good feeling.

She told him, with peculiar curtness, how she had seen him from her window, and how she wished to ask him an important question.