These two quotes from C.S. Lewis novels describe the sort of demeanor I would love to have. I don’t dare even say I try to have it, and Lord knows I’m too often a miserable person — but this is what I want to be like.

“How did other people — people like Denniston or Dimble — find it so easy to saunter through the world with all their muscles relaxed and a careless eye roving the horizon, bubbling over with fancy and humor, sensitive to beauty, not continually on their guard and not needing to be? What was the secret of that fine, easy laughter which he could not by any efforts imitate? Everything about them was different. They could not even fling themselves into chairs without suggesting by the very posture of their limbs a certain lordliness, a leonine indolence. There was elbow room in their lives, as there had never been in his. They were Hearts: he was only a Spade.”

—That Hideous Strength

“And instead of being grave and mysterious like most Calormenes, they walked with a swing and let their arms and shoulders go free, and chatted and laughed. One was whistling. You could see that they were ready to be friends with anyone who was friendly, and didn’t give a fig for anyone who wasn’t. Shasta thought he had never seen anything so lovely in his life.”

—The Horse and His Boy

(The first is from the perspective of Mark Studdock and the second from the perspective of Shasta.)