March felt all the grotesqueness, the hopeless absurdity of Dryfoos's endeavor at atonement in these vain obsequies to the man for whom he believed his son to have died; but the effort had its magnanimity, its pathos, and there was a poetry that appealed to him in the reconciliation through death of men, of ideas, of conditions, that could only have gone warring on in life.
"A Hazard of New Fortunes, Part Fifth"
William Dean Howells
Her features were of jetty black, of that intense ugliness rarely seen in youth, at all events but in the negro race; and although she was scarcely more than three feet high, her head was as large as that of a full-grown person, with round shining eyes, a good-natured, contented smile ever playing round her full ruddy lips, which disclosed a full proportion of immense pearly teeth, the grotesqueness of her features increased, evidently by design, by a costly costume of every hue: her hair, too, according to the fashion, being dressed in a high peak, was decorated also with ribbons of the most glaring colours.
"The Prime Minister"
W.H.G. Kingston
He sometimes thought, with a sense of the grotesqueness of human affairs, how strange it was that things had not arranged themselves so that Jack had not been Jacqueline's victim, and himself Judith's.
"Throckmorton"
Molly Elliot Seawell