"There'll be another one along next year," he observes, smiling faintly.
He talked of the long tradition of eroticism in Hindu painting, and observed, smiling, how "at least the show opened, and if you want to see the work now it is on the internet".
"I find our obsession with class to be absurd," he told me now, then observed, smiling, "I have a right to these feelings, because I have pretended to be a gentleman for so long".
"It's just black folks being black folks," he observes, smiling.
"Trees are also good for carbon neutral," Fan observes, smiling.
I've observed smiling employees become people wearing furrowed brows and sad expressions.
"Funnily enough, even though that film is more than 50 years old, it was shot in Los Angeles and the students always find it to be very familiar," she observes smiling, delighted to find the concentric circles of reference continuing to ripple outward.
This exercise is designed to help to explore human non-verbal communication by observing smiles in a variety of contexts and by using one's observations to analyze the role that these signals may play in human interaction.
The author does this by becoming an invisible daily witness, standing at the subject's elbow, listening to the subject's conversations, observing smiles and frowns, then using the advantage of hindsight to judge harshly when disapproving, indulgently when understanding.
For some while now Ronnie has been observing this, smiling a sanctimonious little smile to himself that says, If that's the way you want it, old son, that's the way it's got to be.
