like a small-time gangster with a painful gum-boil

‘How did he look?’ she asked, all eagerness.

It was a little difficult to answer this, because he had looked like a small-time gangster with a painful gum-boil, but I threw together a tactful word or two which, as Jeeves would say, gave satisfaction, and she buzzed off.

—PG Wodehouse, Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen