The head-waiters had the correct clerical air, half complacent, half dignified.

His smile, indulgent as it hovered over Lady Bateson, descended to this protruded leg and became complacent, as it had a right to be.

Upon the cooperation of his fellowmen, man depends for the very means of life: yet he takes this cooperation for granted, with a complacent confidence and often with a naive unconsciousness, as he takes the rising of to-morrow's sun.

Still now is the once active, fertile, stimulating mind of the man who so effectively roused his generation from its complacent smugness and indifference in its appreciation of the beautiful, and with ardent boldness challenged established beliefs in art and defied the conventionality and authority of his time.

His professor happened to be a very jolly fellow, fond of jokes and of making the students laugh, complacent enough in that he almost always had his favorites recite the lessonsin fact, he was satisfied with anything.

From time to time, when some complacent professor appeared, one day in the year was set aside for visiting the mysterious laboratory and gazing from without at the puzzling apparatus arranged in glass cases.

Some instances of rashness have been noted by Walpole with unsparing vituperation; and some self-complacent or boasting sallies, have been pointed at by Croker with a sarcastic sneer.

To the self-complacent eighteenth century those doctrines came as “a salutary shock, dislocating the compact mass of one-sided opinion.”

"That was my idea," he said, in a complacent tone.

But all the women of the Jews were not so complacent, and in Zeinab, sister of Marhab, burned all the fierceness and lust for revenge of which the proud Hebrew spirit is capable.

But there are the complacent toddlers from the start.

He is none other than the Gallio of the Acts, the Proconsul of Achaia, whose name has passed current among Christians as a proverb of complacent indifference.

"So Sumach Junction had its place in the world, and, perhaps, it was a more important one than that of many a complacent and opulent suburb.

Marianne began to feel that all she had seen was an ordinary chapter in his life; yet in the mere crossing of that street he had lost his spurs on a bet; saved a youngster from death at the risk of his own head, battled with a monster and now rolled a cigarette cheerily complacent.

Sitting beside the tortured girl that night, hearing the heart-breaking little moans which as sleep finally drew near replaced the sobs, Katie Jones wondered whether many of the things people so serenely took for granted were as absurdand perhaps as tragically absurdas Captain Prescott's complacent conclusion that the "Don't You Care" girls were girls who didn't care.

Some "priest" or "Levite," "passing by on the other side," quite self-possessed and all complacent reads in reply from his bread phylactery, Paul sent back Onesimus to Philemon!

His heart may become corrupt, his principles immoral, and his disposition ferociousyet he shall still retain his equability of tone and complacent phraseology, and be "un homme bien aimable.

Hence republican writers, with self-complacent decision, always treat this war as the effect of ignorance, slavery, and superstition.

She stood off a moment, surveying them in pleased satisfactionthe round, blue bowls, with the faint tracery of light; the complacent gods above, red and green and crimson, so age-long, comfortably ensconced in their warm stove corner.

Mary tried to make me confess that we were coming home in a self- complacent fakir state of triumph in our headaches, much inferior to her humble revelling in cool sea, sky, and moonlight.

It was chiefly made by their own sewing machine, with the assistance of the Bourne Parva mantua-maker, superintended by Jane, 'to prevent her from making it foolish'; and the effect, I grieve to say, is ill-fitting dowdiness, which becomes grotesque from their self-complacent belief that it displays the only graceful and sensible fashion in the place.

When I saw him standing there so complacent and serene, I felt certain that a storm was brewing, or rather had brewed, and burst over my garden, and blighted its fair prospects.

He had been talking about Ruskin, and he said: "Do you remember in Praeterita how Ruskin, writing about his sheltered and complacent childhood, describes how entirely he lived in the pleasure of sight?

And how, pray, am I to listen with complacent congratulation to this boast?

The hostess sat nearly opposite, where she could easily overhear the young lady, whose voice was decidedly penetrating, so West made no serious attempt to be otherwise than complacent.

Professor Bliss Perry, being of this opinion, offered some time ago a statement that "Magazine writing about current books is for the most part bland, complaisant, pulpy....

Come forward, and be complaisant.

Far better to shut his eyes to this illicit traffic and assist these strange soldiers of fortune to get their ivory to the coast, and then enjoy the due reward of this complaisant attitude.

The Argentine Republic, since its financial troubles early in the decade, had been in a complaisant and conciliating mood toward all the world, and Corbett had little difficulty in his first stepthat of securing a concession for stringing wires in any designs which might suit him upon the vast pampas of the interior.

"If I can snare them without being too intrusive," assented Collins, who, since the success of his stratagem of the afternoon before, had been in an unusually complaisant mood.

" Lady Mary was probably more complaisant on paper than actually in her conduct of life.

Expect all that is complaisant and easy, but never what is fond, in me.

He had married her by inclination; his good-natured father had been so complaisant as to let him choose a wife for himself.

I wish you joy of it: and as I have never yet expected any highly complaisant thing from you, I make no scruple to begin first; but it is purely, I must tell you, in respect to my new cousin; whose accession into our family we most heartily congratulate and rejoice in.

Meanwhile, the Doctor, who sat ready to begin where he left off, turned to his complaisant listener and resumed an exposition of the Apocalypse.

I could never be complaisant and agreeable again.

The mother country, if not just, was still complaisant.

At first resignedly complaisant, as the hours drifted by Craig had grown cumulatively impatient at the inevitably dragging inventory.

Déjà un nombre considérable de tranches s'étaient succédé dans l'estomac complaisant de ce nouveau Gargantua, quand on vint lui annoncer que la cavalerie de Henri IV, emportée par sa folle audace, s'était engagée dans un taillis inextricable.

COMPLAISANT, E, qui a de l'obligeance.

In France, clothes are almost as durable as furniture, and the gaiety which twenty or thirty years ago we were complaisant enough to admire is far from being expensive.

Ah, your prison and guillotine are able financiers: they raise, feed, and clothe an army, in less time than you can procure a tardy vote from the most complaisant House of Commons!Your, &c. March 17, 1794.

The Convention, though it could not be insensible of this, was willing, with a complaisant prudence, to avoid the scandal of a public discussion, which must irritate the Jacobins, and expose its own weakness by a retrospect of the crimes it had applauded and supported.

[A sort of gingerbread.] to the favourite lap-dog, or attending, with great assiduity, the egresses and regresses of her angola, who paces slowly out of the room ten times in an hour, while the door is held open by the complaisant Frenchman with a most respectful gravity.

Livery-stable keepers, complaisant and cordial, were continually driving around the corner into my yard, with a tremendous flourish and style, chirking up old by-gones, drawing newly painted buggies, patched-up phaetons, two-seated second-hand "Democrats," high wagons, low chaises, just for me to try.

"Certainly, my dear madam, certainly!" replied the complaisant doctor; "see!

And after many arts are invented or imported, as among the Turks and Moorish nations, it is often a little complaisant to call them civilized.

Dave was large, lymphatic, and conceited; he "come frum Southern Eelinoy," as he expressed it, and he had a comfortable conviction that the fertile Illinois Egypt had produced nothing more creditable than his own slouching figure and self-complaisant soul.

It is not likely that her ladyship found much, difficulty in collecting around her a crowd of critics more docile than Thomson and quite as complaisant as Shenstone.

And so the complaisant but still considerate valet bowed himself out of a dilemma, that he found, as he muttered to himself, while retiring, 'tant soit peu ennuyant.'