'A great, hulking,
ruffianly sort of fellow glaring in at the window,' said Mr Pickering.
He had shown himself wild, dissipated, addicted to low pleasures, little short of
ruffianly in his propensities, and recklessly expensive, with no other resources than the bounty of his uncle.
This daring miscreant detailed, with all the embellishments and flourishes suggested by his base mind and his
ruffianly imagination, the attempts which he pretended Cornelius de Witt had made to corrupt him; the sums of money which were promised, and all the diabolical stratagems planned beforehand to smooth for him, Tyckelaer, all the difficulties in the path of murder.
There will be a siring of carts and mules on a certain part of the coast, and a most
ruffianly lot of men, men you understand, men with wives and children and sweethearts, who from the very moment they start on a trip risk a bullet in the head at any moment, but who have a perfect conviction that I will never fail them.
I had pictured him as a more robust and
ruffianly person."
The cruelty of which he had been an unwilling witness, the coarse and
ruffianly behaviour of Squeers even in his best moods, the filthy place, the sights and sounds about him, all contributed to this state of feeling; but when he recollected that, being there as an assistant, he actually seemed--no matter what unhappy train of circumstances had brought him to that pass--to be the aider and abettor of a system which filled him with honest disgust and indignation, he loathed himself, and felt, for the moment, as though the mere consciousness of his present situation must, through all time to come, prevent his raising his head again.
The
ruffianly side of him must have been uppermost, I suppose, when he got my letter, for he wrote back, refusing me in such abominably insolent language, that I lost all command over myself, and abused him, in my daughter's presence, as "a low impostor whom I could ruin for life if I chose to open my lips and let out his Secret." I said no more about him than that, being brought to my senses as soon as those words had escaped me by the sight of my daughter's face looking eagerly and curiously at mine.
Only the baby --Nicholas--looked on with a cold,
ruffianly leer, as if he had belonged to another tribe altogether.
ruffianly - violent and lawless; "the more ruffianly element"; "tough street gangs"