Thus used to living in the public eye, the actors carry off their parts at weddings and other dramatic ceremonials, with more spirit than is easy to a townsman, who is naturally made
self-conscious by being suddenly called upon to fill for a day a public position for which he has had no training.
But he had grown very
self-conscious. The new-born child does not realise that his body is more a part of himself than surrounding objects, and will play with his toes without any feeling that they belong to him more than the rattle by his side; and it is only by degrees, through pain, that he understands the fact of the body.
(at sight of which Ilya Rostov blushed with
self-conscious pleasure), the footmen began popping corks and filling the champagne glasses.
Gouvernail was in no sense a diffident man, for he was not a
self-conscious one.
I never knew anyone who was less
self-conscious. But it is unfortunate that I can give no description of the arduous steps by which he reached such mastery over his art as he ever acquired; for if I could show him undaunted by failure, by an unceasing effort of courage holding despair at bay, doggedly persistent in the face of self-doubt, which is the artist's bitterest enemy, I might excite some sympathy for a personality which, I am all too conscious, must appear singularly devoid of charm.
Through increased experience men were certainly wiser and more sophisticated than before, but they were also more
self-conscious and sadder or more pensive.
Winsett himself had a savage abhorrence of social observances: Archer, who dressed in the evening because he thought it cleaner and more comfortable to do so, and who had never stopped to consider that cleanliness and comfort are two of the costliest items in a modest budget, regarded Winsett's attitude as part of the boring "Bohemian" pose that always made fashionable people, who changed their clothes without talking about it, and were not forever harping on the number of servants one kept, seem so much simpler and less
self-conscious than the others.
Nevertheless our old game with the haver of a thing, as she called it, was continued, with this difference, that it was now she who carried the book covertly upstairs, and I who replaced it on the shelf, and several times we caught each other in the act, but not a word said either of us; we were grown
self-conscious. Much of the play no doubt I forget, but one incident I remember clearly.
Hitherto the toys I had bought had always been for him, and as we durst not admit this to the saleswoman we were both horribly
self-conscious when in the shop.
Genius is said to be
self-conscious. I cannot tell whether Miss Ingram was a genius, but she was self-conscious--remarkably self- conscious indeed.
Much as my dear boy was, unhappily, too
self-conscious and self-satisfied (I'll draw no parallel between him and you in that respect) to love as he should have loved, or as any one in his place would have loved--must have loved!'
He caught a glimpse of that pathetic figure of him, so long ago, a
self-conscious savage, sprouting sweat at every pore in an agony of apprehension, puzzled by the bewildering minutiae of eating- implements, tortured by the ogre of a servant, striving at a leap to live at such dizzy social altitude, and deciding in the end to be frankly himself, pretending no knowledge and no polish he did not possess.