Word: sponger
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...When he made the deal to buy it, he had also seduced the widow who owned it, but if ever a man reformed for good, it was Clyde. He was not only a model husband but a shrewd businessman. Of course, stepson Bushrod turned out to be a caddish sponger, but stepdaughter Gary was the joy of Clyde's heart. Lucy was loving, but she could not give Clyde a child...
This wild burlesque of English literary life is the best thing in A Fearful Joy. Gary trots out a weird but wholly likable crew of eccentrics and fakes: the rich "angel" who is afraid of being taken in and afraid of being left out; the lazy sponger with an uncanny eye for the latest thing in letters who privately believes that modern writing is "so rotten that it may be good, in a rotten way"; the scraggly poet with "a thin virgin beard" who preaches that "the true decadent has no modesty...
...words and bruised feelings quickly soothed, like Argentina's when she walked out, miffed at having missed a vice presidency. There was the poor, estranged relative waiting in the vestibule-Austria, whose bid to come in was turned down "with a note of sympathy." There was an inevitable sponger, Russia, who couldn't come herself but sent word by two neighbors, Czechoslovakia and Poland, that she could use a share of the League's leftover funds. There were bustling busybodies, unable to get their minds off last-minute arrangements, like China with her demand that League mandates...
...Secretary of the Brooks House claimed knowledge of at least two men who have collected between $1.50 and $4 in three hours with their hard-luck stories. "One of these men is Albert Pike, who is known to several agencies in Boston and Cambridge as a steady and consistent sponger, whose story is invariably convincing," Dennett stated...
...Bernard Baxley (Melville Cooper), late of Singapore ("a man's life!''), has hooded eyes, a wolfish gait, greying hair and a small paunch. Constantly engaged in a verbal scrimmage with his dowdy wife, he eats bananas all day long, wears dirty golf clothes and is a sponger by habit. Mr. Baxley is known as "The Rajah" to his brother-in-law, Mr. Radfern (Edmund Gwenn). John Bull himself, Radfern has a face like the man in the moon, a way of smacking his lips over ham and cheese, an air of honest living. An established householder...