Complacently

The executioner fondled his hatchet and smiled complacently. He felt he was a cut above the rest.

The detective seated himself in the arm-chair, and puffed complacently at his cigar.

Among the familiar things that he would encounter would be creatures recognizably human yet in his view grotesque. While he himself laboured under the weight of his own body, these giants would be easily striding. He would consider them very sturdy, often thick-set, folk, but he would be compelled to allow them grace of movement and even beauty of proportion. The longer he stayed with them the more beauty he would see in them, and the less complacently would he regard his own type. Some of these fantastic men and women he would find covered with fur, hirsute, or mole-velvet, revealing the underlying muscles. Others would display brown, yellow or ruddy skin, and yet others a translucent ash-green, warmed by the under-flowing blood. As a species, though we are all human, we are extremely variable in body and mind, so variable that superficially we seem to be not one species but many.

He smiled satirically round at the complacently nodding circle of gray heads and white heads.

At work Mr. Burns spies Homer munching complacently on a donut and hisses that each donut Homer shoves into his fat face brings him one donut closer to the poisoned donut Mr. Burns has ordered thrown into the mix as a form of culinary Russian Roulette, only to learn from Smithers that the plant’s lawyers ultimately nixed the poisoned donut plan because “they consider it murder.”