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More "Stolidity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The two children amused themselves very well talking to Alphonse, the steersman, and Adolphe, the engineer, thick-set, thick-witted men, who combined the picturesqueness of organ-grinders with the stolidity of agriculturalists; Nature had plainly intended them for the plough, and Circumstance had ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... insolence in his tone. He had gone out, with his heavy German stolidity of mien unchanged, and had closed the door behind ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... hers, so infinitely far, that he seldom even entered her thought. Yet as she looked at him curiously he seemed quite commonplace and usual. He was a tall, dark workingman of the better class, with a sensitive face trained to stolidity and a poor man's clothes and hands. His face was soft and slow and his manner at once cold and nervous, like fires long banked, but ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... glorious it would be to see her taking it!' whispered Bertha into Phoebe's ear, unheard by Augusta, who, in her satisfied stolidity, was declaring, 'No, I could not undertake that. I am the worst person in the ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... his native province in China might have been an aggressively, sensitively genial person; but in Samburan he had clothed himself in a mysterious stolidity and did not seem to resent not being spoken to except in single words, at a rate which did not average half a dozen per day. And he gave no more than he got. It is to be presumed that if he suffered he made up for it with the Alfuro woman. He always went back to her at ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... eye. He seemed, indeed, steady of hearing to the verge of stolidity, yet in a few seconds he had noted and drawn rapid conclusions from the environment. The cheerlessness of the house had struck him and the somber room, decorated, if one calls it decoration, with faded steel engravings of ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... own woes and losses with much of the stoicism for which his Indian foes were famed. He accepted the fate of his son with a kind of grim stolidity; and did not let it interfere with his efforts to bring about a peace. Writing to his friend General Martin, he said: "On my return home [from the North Carolina Legislature to which he was a delegate] I found distressing times in the country. A number of persons have been killed since; among those ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... walked up the mountain with her. No idle day passed that he did not visit the cabin, and it was not long before he found himself strangely interested. Her beauty and fearlessness had drawn him at first; her indifference and stolidity had piqued him; and now the shyness that displaced these was inconsistent and puzzling. This he set himself deliberately at work to remove, and the conscious effort gave a peculiar piquancy to their intercourse. He ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.
... jasper-tinted tropical soil is beautiful, climbs through the glorious woods to the chief Sanatorium of the Malay Peninsula. A free fight among the coolies before starting demands a lengthy exercise of that stolidity with which the Western pilgrim must invest himself, as the invulnerable armour needed by the conflict of daily life. As a mere matter of personal convenience, this quality bears scant resemblance to the weapons enumerated by ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... of the temperament, character, sentiments, passions, opinions, prejudices and customs of the nation to which he belongs, moderation of heart and mind, judgment, impartiality, coolness, nay even a measure of stolidity, these are the attributes of the ideal legislator. Rather they are the necessary qualifications of every man who purposes to frame a good law; they are, indeed, the ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... that for five years he had heard every day. Perhaps she was a little pale—but a healthy pallor had always been for him one of her chief attractions. Perhaps her face was rigidly set—but that marmoreal impassiveness, that magnificent stolidity, as of a wonderful statue by some great sculptor working under the curse of the gods; that imposing, unthinking stillness of her features, had till then mirrored for him the tranquil dignity of a soul of which ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... Force was now confronted with the bulk of the Boer commandoes, whose strength was vastly superior to its own, and whose courage was generally acknowledged to be splendid. The Dutch have ever a stoical stolidity which serves them in the hour of need as does the bulldog tenacity of the Briton, and therefore "those who knew" were not without apprehension in regard to the upshot of hostilities. It was plain to all who were in any way familiar ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... information from Richmond not only of all movements of our army, but of the intentions of the government. They say Lynchburg and East Tennessee now occupy the mind of Gen. Lee; and they know every disposition of our forces from day to day sooner than our own people! What imbecile stolidity! Will we thus blunder ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... of disappointments for Harmony. Wherever she turned she faced a wall of indifference or, what was worse, an interest that frightened her. Like a bird in a cage she beat helplessly against barriers of language, of strange customs, of stolidity that were not far from ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... quite plain now," he answered seriously, the young girl's sarcasm slipping harmlessly from his Indian stolidity. "Don't you smell ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... his head; and when I still urged him to escape if he could, he put on that look of stolidity which an Irishman so well knows how to assume, and refused to reply to any ...
— Afar in the Forest • W.H.G. Kingston
... admiration; generosity filled the gulf and the two became firm friends. Reggie's intelligence flicked the inertia of Geoffrey's mind, quickened his powers of observation, and developed his sense of interest in the world around him. Geoffrey's prudence and stolidity had more than once saved the young man from the brink ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... in. I was willing to train her in the duties of her station. I set forth, and would have specified what these were, but for a second interruption that was evidently not intentionally disrespectful, and was uttered with the bovine stolidity that never ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... powerful of all,—the most competent to grasp the helpless, hopeless, half idiotic, and half criminal classes and restore them to normal intelligence and virtue. It was not mentioned in the "New Education," for fear of alarming the orthodox stolidity of the medical college and the church, but it will appear in future editions. It is the method of bringing the subject into absolute sympathy and absolute subordination under ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, June 1887 - Volume 1, Number 5 • Various
... buckets of galvanised iron, in which the lunch was packed. The younger children, the boys with great frilled collars, the girls with ill-fitting shoes cramping their feet, leaned from the sides of buggy and carry-all, eating bananas and "macaroons," staring about with ox-like stolidity. Tied to the axles, the dogs followed the horses' hoofs with lolling tongues coated ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... and she did not hear him. She went to the fireplace now, and leaned her head against the corner of the mantel, looking down, with a bitter stolidity, at the hearth. Herman unharnessed, and came in, a tall brown-haired fellow with dark eyes full of softness, and a deep simplicity of feeling. As his foot struck the sill, his mother roused herself, and became at ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... Watch! (Sends a glance to the Vaynor man, who tries vainly to combine a mouthful of ice pudding, a smirk of self-satisfaction, a glare of intense devotion, and the stolidity of a ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... finding the crux of the situation in recognizing that these features are inherent in Plautus' style and are frequently employed solely for comic effect, though he is often overcome by a natural Teutonic stolidity. He aptly points out that Plautus in his selection of originals has in the main chosen plots with more vigorous action than Terence. We shall have occasion to quote him at intervals, but desire to develop this topic ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... landscape, but that it is an ungrateful and painful task to attack the works of living painters, struggling with adverse circumstances of every kind, and especially with the false taste of a nation which regards matters of art either with the ticklishness of an infant, or the stolidity of a Megatherium. ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... directly and inevitably led. The same result long after followed the folly of regarding the Hebrew books as if they had been written by the unimaginative, hard, practical intellect of the England of James the First and the bigoted stolidity of Scottish Presbyterianism.] ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... wider every day. Farfrae was always considerate to his fallen acquaintance; but it was impossible that he should not, by degrees, cease to regard the ex-corn-merchant as more than one of his other workmen. Henchard saw this, and concealed his feelings under a cover of stolidity, fortifying his heart by drinking more freely at the ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... for the brush of a Hogarth to depict the gallery of faces with which I came in contact as I went along. They were all different, yet all alike; different in their degrees of beefiness, stolidity, and self-sufficiency, but plainly of the same parentage—British to the backbone; British of the wrong kind, with a sprinkling of Welshmen, Irishmen, and Jews. Not a Scotsman discoverable in that whole mob of complacent office-jacks. My countrymen were conspicuous by their absence; they ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... your convent, good father," replied Wilkin, with the same immoveable stolidity of countenance. "We had kept, as you know, too jolly a Christmas to have a very fat Easter. Yon Welsh hounds, who helped to eat up our victuals, are now like to get into our hold ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... was the reason; and I could feel no autumn around me, because I saw no spring beyond me. It had fared with my mind as with the garden in the Sensitive Plant, when the lady was dead. I was amazed and troubled at the stolidity with which I walked up to the door, and, having rung the bell, waited. No sweet memories of the past arose in my mind; not one of the well-known objects around looked at me as claiming a recognition. Yet, when the door was opened, my heart beat so violently at the thought that I might ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... one's family, one's country, and one's nation," how constant is her defence of the people, the peasant, against her Republican friends. Her Republican friends were furious with the peasant; accused him of stolidity, cowardice, want of patriotism; accused him of having given them the Empire, with all its vileness; wanted to take away from him the suffrage. Again and again does George Sand take up his defence, and warn her friends of the folly and danger of their false estimate of him. "The contempt of the masses, ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... now flying free; iron-jointed, supple-sinewed, unceasingly novel in his invention of new, unguessable attitudes; while above, below, and around him, a richly-dressed audience, painted in skilful perspective of stalls, boxes, dress-circle, and gallery, watched the thrilling performance with a stolidity which seemed to mark them out as made in Germany. Hardly versatile enough, perhaps, this Leotard; unsympathetic, not a companion for all hours; nor would you have chosen him to take ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... who was incarnate in the Messiah, under the name of Jesus Christ, offered himself a public sacrifice for human sins, amidst the most striking and imposing circumstances of a Roman execution—a fact which, in an age of extraordinary moral stolidity and ecclesiastical delusion, was regarded as the behest ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... intelligence &c 498, want of intellect &c 450; shadowness^, silliness, foolishness &c adj.; imbecility, incapacity, vacancy of mind, poverty of intellect, weakness of intellect, clouded perception, poor head, apartments to let; stupidity, stolidity; hebetude^, dull understanding, meanest capacity, shortsightedness; incompetence &c (unskillfulness) 699. one's weak side, not one's strong point; bias &c 481; infatuation &c (insanity) 503. simplicity, puerility, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... own, so by heroism he is led to sacrifice himself to the welfare of others. When we see a mother struggling to death, and with admirable self-devotion, against overpowering waves, or ferocious beasts, or devouring flames, to save her child from certain destruction, it would be stolidity and folly for us to bring into comparison with this act, the cares bestowed by a brute in feeding her young, since as soon as the latter has carried into effect the order of nature, she forsakes them, and, when grown, does not even ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... life; even so, and perhaps more, Luigi Pulci must have had a deliberate intention of producing a ludicrous effect; in both cases the deliberate attempt is very little perceptible, in the "Nencia da Barberino" from the genius of Lorenzo, in the "Morgante Maggiore" from the stolidity of Pulci. The "Morgante," of which parts were probably written as a mere sample to amuse a supper party, became interesting to Pulci, in the mere matter of inventing and stringing together new incidents; and despite its ludicrous passages, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... English! No, it wasn't English! So Soames brooded, threading his way on. It was as if he had suddenly caught sight of someone cutting the covenant 'for quiet possession' out of his legal documents; or of a monster lurking and stalking out in the future, casting its shadow before. Their want of stolidity, their want of reverence! It was like discovering that nine-tenths of the people of England were foreigners. And if that were so—then, anything ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Mansions looked exactly the same as usual. What Tuppence had expected she hardly knew, but the sight of its red brick stolidity slightly assuaged the growing and entirely unreasonable uneasiness that possessed her. She was just turning away when she heard a piercing whistle, and the faithful Albert came running from the ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... little progress; nor did he thrive much better at the school in which he was afterward placed. Here he employed his comrades to do his tasks for him, and of course laid no foundation for his future education. His parents, disheartened by the lad's apparent stolidity, sent him next to Dalton's school, two miles distant; and here he certainly acquired something, for he retained, to old age, the memory of some of the scenes through which he used to pass on his way to and from this school. For want of the necessary preliminary training, he could do little ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... was outraged. 'I know nothing of East Side.' Her absolute unconsciousness of his spiritual tumult, her stolidity before this spectacle of his triumphant genius, her matter-of-fact acceptance of his racial affinity, her refusal to be impressed by the heroism of a Hebrew pianoforte solo, all she said and did not say, jarred upon his quivering nerves, chilled his high ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... her, Lylda spoke to the youth and the girl in her native tongue. They listened quietly; Oteo with an almost expressionless stolidity of face, but with his soft, dog-like eyes fixed upon his mistress; Eena with heaving breast and trembling limbs. When Lylda paused they both fell upon their knees before her. She put her hands upon their heads and smiling wistfully, ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... I tell you that I'm one and that I'd see your 'Clarion' blazing in hell before I'd take another cent of your money." The fire died from her face, and in her former tone of dulled stolidity she repeated, "I want to see ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... particularly wished to prevent that Prince marrying Mademoiselle de Tascher, the niece of Josephine, a marriage for which M. de Beauharnais, then Ambassador of France at Madrid, was working with all his might. Lucien also, with his Republican stolidity, submitted without too much scruple to the idea of having a Bourbon King as son-in-law. It was also during this journey of Napoleon that he ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... shut out from life, wandering wearisomely through the world in one long battle with Nature whereby to gain the wherewithal to live in that grim desert. There were no exceptions, it was the common lot. Each day and every day did these men and women, with a stolidity of long-continued destitution, and temporal and spiritual tribulation, gaze upon that bare, unyielding country, pregnant only with aggravation to ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... commiseration, the curiosity, or the jeers of their fellow-beings. Years of matrimony, of continuous compulsory canine constitutionals, have made them callous. They unwind their beasts from lamp posts, or the ensnared legs of profane pedestrians, with the stolidity of mandarins manipulating the strings of ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... as a native observed to me, "olluz spread 'mselves inter bulges." Mollychunkamug and her fellows are the bulges of the Androscoggin; Moosehead, of the Kennebec. Sluggish streams do not need such pauses. Peace is thrown away upon stolidity. The torrents of Maine are hasty young heroes, galloping so hard when they gallop, and charging with such rash enthusiasm when they charge, hurrying with such Achillean ardor toward their eternity of ocean, that they would never know the influence, in their heart ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... the Hilda Merritt whom she had known, and in her place was a queen with a crown! She smiled at her reflection and nodded. For once she was swayed from her stillness and stolidity. She loaded her long hands with rings, and held them to her cheeks; then, struck by the contrast of her white linen sleeve, she rummaged in one of the big closets, and threw on the bed a drift of ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... proper influences and benevolent operations of this mystic disturber to her own mischievous propensities; and thenceforth a malignant spirit troubled the house, heretofore guarded by a saint of true Catholic dignity and stolidity. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... girl was she? Not by any possibility would she fit into the specifications of the cubby-hole his mind had built for Indian women. The daughters even of the boisbrules had much of the heaviness and stolidity of their native mothers. Jessie McRae was graceful as a fawn. Every turn of the dark head, every lift of the hand, expressed spirit and verve. She must, he thought, have inherited almost wholly from her father, though in her lissom ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... useful than the surface-ice Of stiff stolidity. Vigour, aye, and vice, Therein find ready covert. Wickedness here may lurk, or even wit. Not to name happiness; but naught of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 February 15, 1890 • Various
... at concealment. It was a well-constructed domicile, composed of grass, twigs, and moss, but without mortar. The shy owner was nowhere to be seen, nor did she make any outcry, even though I stood for some minutes close to her nest. What stolidity the mountain birds display! You could actually rob the nests of some of them without wringing a chirp from them. On two later visits to the place I found Madame Thrush on her nest, where she sat until I came quite close, when she silently flitted away and ensconced herself among ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... a fact that the worst shocks of life are often received without outcries, without gestures, without a flow of tears and the convulsions of sobbing. The insatiable governess missed these signs exceedingly. This pitiful stolidity was only a fresh provocation. Yet the poor girl was ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... Stranger theory of society, completely believed in by a clear, sharp and altogether human head, incapable of falsity, was seldom heard of in the world. For King: open your mouth, let the first gentleman that falls into it (a mass of Hanover stolidity, stupidity, foreign to you, heedless of you) be King: Supreme Majesty he, with hypothetical decorations, dignities, solemn appliances, high as the stars (the whole, except the money, a mendacity, and sin ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Hepsy with a business-like stolidity inexplicable to Carrie Goldthwaite's warm heart, "an' she's left two children, which Josh an' me'll hev to take, I reckon, seein' their parents is both dead now. We'd a letter to-day from the minister there—Mr. Penn he calls hisself, ...
— Thankful Rest • Annie S. Swan
... had been penned up, in the darkness the timorous wolves crept into the living-room, squealing, halting, thrown out of their habit of stolidity by the strangeness of advancing through nothingness toward a waiting foe, a mysterious foe which expanded and grew more menacing. The wolves peered to make out landmarks, they touched gliding arms which did not seem to be attached to a body, they quivered ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... kicking for assistance with all his might. Juan of Aragon was usually the hero to extricate these poor estrays from the false step they had taken, the other peons regarding the scene with their tranquil stolidity. A glass of brandy to the unfortunate would always compose his nerves again, and make him hope for a few more accidents of a like nature ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... marshaled them triumphantly to the very door,—with what contortion of face or simulation of character she was unable to guess,—after he had entered the schoolroom and taken his seat every vestige of his previous facial aberration was gone, and only his usual stolidity remained. In vain, as Mrs. Martin expected, the hundred delighted little eyes before her dwelt at first eagerly and hopefully upon his face, but, as she HAD NOT expected, recognizing from the blankness of his demeanor that the previous performance was intended for them exclusively, the same ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... a digression. For our purpose it is enough that the contrast between Miss Widdicombe's vivacity and the deadly stolidity of the County families, between her youth and the maturity of her vanquished competitors, entirely won the heart of Mr. St John Deloraine. He saw—he loved her—he was laughed at—he proposed—he was accepted—and, oh, shame! the County had ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... forward at a run in the same direction, leaving his sentinel in gaping astonishment at his post. After making to the various visible forms of nature a solemn promise to be damned, that gentleman resumed the air of stolidity which is supposed to be appropriate to a ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... Madelon was too stolid to weep for her husband. But even her stolidity was not proof against the fiery influence of jealousy, and, waking and sleeping, her visions were of veiled damsels of Orient assailing the too inflammable heart of Lieutenant ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... divesting himself of his heavy gold watch and chain, and rolling out gold and silver from his pockets, and pulling one or two handsome rings from his fingers, and laying them all upon the tablecloth before him with an extraordinary stolidity ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... mortal anguish in the field, the cries of human sorrow in the city, the shrieks of mothers that lacked sons, the greetings of wives whose loves 'came coffined home.' And he does not mind aggravating the intense selfishness, and narrowness, and stolidity of these private passions and affections of the individual to a truly unnatural and diabolical intensity, by charging on poor Volumnia and Marcius his own reminiscences; as if they could have dared to heighten their ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... his brow. I think our early ancestors must have been much like Landers in this dance, strong, and merry for the time, seeking the woman in pleasures, fiery in movement for the nonce, and relapsing into stolidity. I can see why Landers, who takes what he will of womankind in these islands, still dominates in the trading, and bends most people his way. The animal way is the way here. The way of the city, ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... awe, that they paid no heed to Him, and suspended their work to make sure of their perquisites,—the poor robes which they stripped from His body. Thus gently Matthew hints at the ignominy of exposure attendant on crucifixion, and gives the measure of the hard stolidity of the guards. Gain had been their first thought, comfort was their second. They were a little tired with their march and their work, and they had to stop there on guard for an indefinite time, with nothing ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... America, the being always on the road for all classes in order to cover the enormous distances in this great country between home and work or amusement. All excitement over the mere act of transit has passed; there is stolidity and acquiescence as to delays and speed, unless there are great interests at stake. As a rule, the people in the Port Willis trolley-car had not great interests at stake; they were generally not highly organized, nervously, and were to ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... of Napa Valley, as the man aloft looks down on the ship's deck. There they kept house, with sundry horses and fowls, and a family of sons, Daniel Webster, and I think George Washington, among the number. Nor did they want visitors. An old gentleman, of singular stolidity, and called Breedlove—I think he had crossed the plains in the same caravan with Rufe—housed with them for awhile during our stay; and they had besides a permanent lodger, in the form of Mrs. Hanson's brother, Irvine Lovelands. I spell Irvine by guess; for I could get no information on ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... for M'Adam to draw, but David was an easier. Insults directed at himself the boy bore with a stolidity born of long use. But a poisonous dart shot against his friends at Kenmuir never failed to achieve its object. And the little man evinced an amazing talent for the concoction of deft lies respecting ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... Nordlanders one and all spoke of them, in answer to my questions, with mingled distrust and contempt, and my own limited experiences most assuredly did not tend much toward impressing me with a more favorable opinion. The countenances of most of the Laps present a combination of stolidity, low cunning, and obstinacy, so as to be decidedly repulsive; yet it is undeniably true, that crimes attended with violence rarely occur among them, though I take that as no decided proof of the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... packed with trade goods after a successful season at the southern camps, they must wait until the shifting ice pack settles and the winter hunting begins. Such enforced inaction is irksome to the Eskimo, who does not partake of the stolidity of the Indian, but like a nervous child must be continually employed or amused. So this festival, which is of a purely social character, has ...
— The Dance Festivals of the Alaskan Eskimo • Ernest William Hawkes
... him. "What's up?" they chorused. With a fine assumption of indifference he briefly informed them. McSporran received the news with his customary stolidity, only his gray eyes twinkled and he chuntered something that was totally unintelligible to anyone save himself. But its effect upon McCullough and Hardy was peculiar, not to say, startling in the extreme. With brush and burnisher clutched in their respective ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... a degree of liberality and total absence of reserve or constraint, which occasionally excites no small amazement in the minds of strangers. She cuts jokes with Nicholas, too, but looks up to him with a great deal of respect—the immovable stolidity with which Nicholas receives the aforesaid jokes, and looks on, at certain pastoral friskings and rompings (Jane's only recreations, and they are very innocent too) which occasionally take place in the passage, is not the least amusing part of ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... but Macleod had no pride in her triumph. He was glad when the piece ended—when the honest-hearted Englishman so far recovered speech as to declare that his confidence in his wife was restored, and so far forgot his stolidity of face and demeanor as to point out to the villain the way to the door instead of kicking him thither. Macleod breathed more freely when he knew that Gertrude White was now about to go away to the shelter and quiet of her own home. He went back ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... so undisturbed that the cannonade rocking it might have been some unheeded echo of the hills. These frontier towns inured to the clash of war go about their business with what one might call stolidity if there were not finer, and truer, names for it. In Commercy, to be sure, there is little business to go about just now save that connected with the military occupation; but the peaceful look of ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... and shame, with which Arthur looked on at all this, struck him dumb. Mr Flintwinch, who had spun backward some two or three yards under the impetus last given to him, brought himself up with a face completely unchanged in its stolidity except as it was affected by shortness of breath, and looked hard at Arthur. Not a whit less reticent and wooden was Mr Flintwinch outwardly, than in the usual course of things: the only perceptible difference in him being that ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... rattling avenues and passed between rows of houses with sternness and stolidity stamped upon their features. She hung her head for she felt their eyes ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane
... church, excited, mysteriously curious, like queer young creatures who have experienced a miracle. They entered immediately into full fellowship with William. They loved him with a kind of wide-eyed stolidity that would have tried the nerves of some people. They were prepared to believe anything he said to the uttermost. Only once was there any symptom of higher criticism. This was a certain Sabbath morning in the Sunday school when William told the story of the forty and two children who were devoured ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... regard to details. That the guard's plans were concerned in some way with the mined hillock was evident enough. But an explosion which merely would create a diversion to assist in an escape was not a device that would effectively solve his difficulties, Vaniman reflected. Wagg's general stolidity made him seem rather stupid; the young man felt that his own wits ought to be enlisted in the affair. In the stress of circumstances he hankered to co-operate instead of being a sort of ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... others, Maggie did not at once know of the fact of Flower's disappearance with the baby. She was naturally a slow girl; ideas came to her at rare intervals; she even received startling and terrible news with a certain outward stolidity and calm. Still, Maggie was not an altogether purposeless and thoughtless maiden; thoughts occasionally drifted her way; ideas, when once born in her heart, were slow to die. When affection took root there it became a very sturdy plant. If there was any one in the world whom ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... the Reader's most whimsical impersonations. The little judge—described in the book as "all face and waistcoat"—was presented to view upon the platform as evidently with no neck at all (to speak of), and as blinking with owl-like stolidity whenever he talked, which he always did under his voice, and with apparently a severe cold in the head. On the night more particularly referred to, Sam Weller, being at the moment in the witness-box, had just replied to the counsel's suggestion, that what he (Sam) meant by calling ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... war-machine was thereby foiled. G.J. was on the point of a full explanation, but he checked himself. A recital of the circumstances would not immediately help, and it might hinder. Concealing his astonishment at the excesses of which unimaginative stolidity is capable, even in an Italian, he turned down the ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... that name)—was simply marvellous. And yet Powell, if he will forgive me for saying so, was the merest whipper-snapper. Sir Christopher Hatton could scarcely have emerged from the nursery; and yet the idea of utter stolidity never found a better exponent than ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... therefore, the public did not exhibit the unbounded hilarity which marked that of their predecessors. The audience looked on quietly, and even with stolidity. There was nothing to excite laughter, and since the figures were slavish repetitions, it became monotonous. Some of the spectators withdrew to their houses, and those who remained belonged to the cliffs, whence they had come ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... connection with the proverbial contempt for the supposed stolidity of the goose, there is something still unexplained in the extraordinary honours paid to it by the ancients, and the veneration in which it is held to the present day by some of the eastern nations. The figure that occurs so frequently on ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... to the great cross at the foot of which we were standing, and straightway bent the knee and crossed himself. Some few of the Indians likewise made the sign upon their breasts, though the greater part contained themselves with the same stolidity that had ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... fond of exerting her brains, and her exercises were generally full of "howlers". Miss Clark, her form mistress, was apt to wax eloquent over her mistakes, but she took the teacher's sarcasms with the same stolidity as the girls' teasings. It was a saying in the class that nothing could knock sparks out of Dona. Yet she possessed a certain reserve of shrewd common sense which was sometimes apt to astonish people. If she took the trouble to evolve a plan ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... to call his master at three, to have breakfast ready at half past, and the horses at the door at four, with somewhat less than his usual stolidity. ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty
... assigned to Shakespeare and Rowley the authorship of an infinitely inferior play—a play of which German sagacity has discovered that "none of Rowley's other works are equal to this." Assuredly they are not—in utter stolidity of platitude and absolute impotence of drivel. Rowley was a vigorous artist in comedy and an original master of tragedy: he may have written the lighter or broader parts of the play which rather unluckily took its name from these, and Webster may have written ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... all drank the toast?—What is that old wife about? Give her a glass of brandy, she shall drink the king's health, by"—"If your honour pleases," said Cuddie, with great stolidity of aspect, "this is my mither, stir; and she's as deaf as Corra-linn; we canna mak her hear day nor door; but if your honour pleases, I am ready to drink the king's health for her in as mony glasses of ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... even longer pause. Pitiable, ridiculous infants were pondering, somewhat vaguely but very solemnly, over certain mysteries of existence, which most of us have learned to accept with stolidity. We were young, and to us the miraculous insecurity and inconsequence of human life was still a little impressive, and we had not yet come to regard the universe as a more or less comfortable place, ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... representing Mary visiting Elizabeth, but the intense religious zeal back of them was a salt that saved from offending. Occasionally, the staid and sober Dutch successfully attempted the same theme, and their stolidity stood for them as religious zeal had done for the early Italians—we pardon them simply because they knew no better than to choose a subject that is ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... warfare in the Great War—submarines and aircraft. The first free flight of an aeroplane, December 17, 1903. Attitude of the peoples; English stolidity. The navy and the air. The German menace hastens the making of our air service. The British air force at the outbreak of the war, and at its close. The achievement of the British air force. Uses of aircraft ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... a friendly smack on the shoulder which nearly knocked me down—relapsed, the instant after, into her leaden stolidity of look and manner—-and led the way out by the front door. I heard her hoarse chuckling laugh as she locked the gate behind me. My star was at last in the ascendant! In one and the same day I had found my way into the confidence of ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... appeared no more than the ordinary man, and even a close observer would have seen no more than that his face was clean-cut and thoughtful, that his eye was blue and singularly clear and fearless, and that he was calm with a calmness that might come from anything else than stolidity of temperament—and that, by the way, is the self-control which counts most against the unruly passions of other men—but anybody near Hale, at a time when excitement was high and a crisis was imminent, would have felt the resultant of forces emanating from him that were beyond analysis. ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... help admiring the calm stolidity with which the two men bore what must have been a painful operation, for neither flinched, but sat in turn gazing at his messmate, as much as to say, "That's the way to take it, ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... have it in her to worship at so abstract a shrine? Had she conceived Abstract Truth to be the one high goal of human endeavour on that day of long ago when she named her first-born Samuel? Or was hers the stubborn obstinacy of the ox? the fixity of purpose of the balky horse? the stolidity of the self-willed peasant-mind? Was it whim or fancy?—the one streak of lunacy in what was otherwise an eminently rational mind? Or, reverting, was hers the spirit of a Bruno? Was she convinced of the intellectual ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... whole Irish family is crowded into one bed; often a heap of filthy straw or quilts of old sacking cover all in an indiscriminate heap, where all alike are degraded by want, stolidity, and wretchedness. Often the inspectors found, in a single house, two families in two rooms. All slept in one, and used the other as a kitchen and dining-room in common. Often more than one family lived in a single damp cellar, in ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... more Highland excitement than Russian stolidity, as he watched the oncoming of a small boat, beautifully riding the waves, and masterfully rowed by sailors who understood the art. Drummond ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... get nothing out of him. I have not often sat out with a more embarrassing partner. To be continually stared at and never spoken to would, I think, make the boldest woman shy. There was a stolidity about Thomas that promised well for England's future. There was a steady resistance from attack that was really admirable; but I was not altogether sorry when Fraulein pounced upon him. As ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... and admirable; but, never bringing thought up to the point of reflection; never learning self-control, nor the necessity of holding passion in abeyance; never getting beyond the degrading influence of intercourse with a race whose stolidity and servility, the inevitable result of their condition, on the one hand, are both the cause and effect of the habit of irresponsible power and selfish disregard of right fostered in the ruling class, on the other—what could be expected of them ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... will prevail. We have had reverses, but no misfortune hath happened unto us but such as is common unto nations. Country has been sacrificed to partisanship. Early love has fallen away, and lukewarmness has taken its place. Unlimited enthusiasm has given place to limited stolidity. Disloyalty, overawed at first into quietude, has lifted its head among us, and waxes wroth and ravening. There are dissensions at home worse than the guns of our foes. Some that did run well have faltered; some signal-lights ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... to see the world, or could be travelling either on business or pleasure. At last he had to give it up, and to turn to the black sailors. Going forward, he addressed one after the other; but as he spoke, their countenances also changed, and they stood before him with downcast looks, pictures of stolidity. Suddenly he at last bethought him of calling up Pango from the pinnace, to try if he could elicit any information from his sable countrymen. Pango, on being summoned, immediately sprang on board. No sooner had ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... even crucifying Christ. There is a haunting and horrible sense of insecurity about the book. The terror we thus feel is a terror for the machinery of law, that we can hear tearing, in the dark, good and bad between its formidable wheels with the iron stolidity of all machinery, human or divine. This terror incarnates itself sometimes and leaps horribly out upon us; as when the crouching mendicant looks up, and Jean Valjean, in the light of the street lamp, ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his long, black robe, Prosper ascended the steps of the platform and passed to the Lord Keeper's side. He looked eagerly into Dom Gillian's eyes, but the old man's face might have been a mask in its impassive stolidity. Plainly he had neither heard nor understood aught of ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... ideal skeletons, wild and gigantic—fretting, gambolling, moping, grinning, raving, and vaporing—each wrapped in its own Vision, and indifferent to all the influence of the collateral faculties. There, now, is a man, moping about, the very picture of stolidity; observe how his heavy head hangs down until his chin rests upon his breastbone, his mouth open and almost dribbling. That man, sir, so unpoetical and idiotic in appearance, imagines himself the author of Beattie's ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... beer," said Grumbach, sinking down at a table. A thousand questions surged against his lips, but he kept them shut with all the stolidity of his native blood. When the waiter set the beer down before him, he said: "Where ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... would not write his name unconsciously. The only Geoffrey that I know is Mr. Geoffrey Bingham, the barrister, who is staying at the Vicarage, and whose life Beatrice saved." She paused to watch her companion's face, and saw a new idea creep across its stolidity. "But of course," she went on, "it cannot be Mr. Bingham that she was thinking of, because you see he ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... people had in reality worked an amazing improvement in her, and people no longer regarded her as an Indian, but referred to her now as "that Russian governess," nevertheless she could retreat behind a baffling air of stolidity—almost of sullenness—when she chose, and that was precisely the mask she wore for Bill. In reality she was far from stolid ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... The Kunbi has the stolidity, conservative instincts, dulness and patience of the typical agriculturist. Sir R. Craddock describes him as follows [39]: "Of the purely agricultural classes the Kunbis claim first notice. They are divided into several sections or classes, and are of Maratha ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... moment the face of the applicant lost its stolidity; the lustreless, staring eyes dropped. With some warmth he next said, "I do not care for myself, but I have with me my wife, and the night is cold—colder on these heights than in Nazareth. She cannot live in the open air. Is there not ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... the post-coach for Dover, he arrived on the channel shore just in time to learn that the very coach in which he rode brought the news to the authorities there that all intercourse between the two nations was indefinitely suspended. The characteristic taciturnity and formal stolidity of his fellow-travellers—all Englishmen, mutually unacquainted with each other, and occupying different positions in life—having prevented ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... the contemplation of Chinese Charley at the ranch. He has been with Mrs. Kitty twenty-five years; he wears American clothes; he speaks English with hardly a trace of either accent or idiom; he has long since dropped the deceiving Oriental stolidity and weeps out his violent Chinese rages unashamed. Yet even now Mrs. Kitty's summing up is that Charley is ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... would scarcely have been noticed had she disappeared altogether. Somehow she had floated into Sunday-school, and been placed in the class which afterward became Etta Mountjoy's, but here her apparent stolidity made her perhaps the least interesting of all the girls. Perhaps this was in part owing to the fact that one is not likely to be very talkative in a ...
— Katie Robertson - A Girls Story of Factory Life • Margaret E. Winslow
... Familiarity, Fascination, Command, Dogmatism, Combativeness, Aggressiveness, Secretiveness, Avarice, Stolidity, Force, Rivalry, Profligacy, or Lawless Impulse, Irritability, Baseness, Destructiveness, Hatred, Disgust, Animalism, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... stolidity. She understood with regret why Jake did not find Abbie an ideal inspirational companion. She hated to think well of Jake or ill of her sister, but one cannot ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... his goods and chattels in his small domain, to examining the lovely scenery of Dartmouth harbour—the sight of which is enough to make any outward-bound individual bitterly regret his determination to quit his native land— and to inspecting the outward man of his fellow-passengers with that icy stolidity which characterizes the true-born Briton. But the great event of the morning was the arrival of the mail-train, bringing the bags destined for various African ports, loose letters for the passengers, ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... touched a spring. He seemed to be of the opinion that if you are a cyclone, it is never too soon to begin behaving like one. He danced round the Kid with an india-rubber agility. The Cosy Moments representative exhibited more stolidity. Except for the fact that he was in fighting attitude, with one gloved hand moving slowly in the neighbourhood of his stocky chest, and the other pawing the air on a line with his square jaw, one would have said that he did not realise the position of affairs. He wore the friendly ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... image, and expected to see Mary Ann smile in response. He was disappointed when she did not; it was not only that her stolidity made his humour seem feeble—he half wanted to see how she looked ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... looked very smart and efficient and satisfied with themselves and life. In my compartment they were talking together eagerly all the way, talking shop with unaffected appetite, as though shop were so interesting that even on Sundays they couldn't let it be, and poring together over maps. No trace of stolidity. But where is this stolidity one has heard about? Compared to the Germans I've seen, it is we who are stolid; stolid, and slow, and bored. The last thing these people are is bored. On the contrary, the officers had that ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... this information with much stolidity. The grandeur of having old silver made no impression on them. They saw that Grandma Padgett had one pair of horses hitched to her moving-wagon instead of three pairs, and they secretly rated her resources by ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... and looked steadily at Harcourt. Harcourt met his look with a dull, ox-like stolidity. "I shall begin the ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... has ever since been a scene of continual wars, dynastic changes, and territorial confusion. What evils have not the wars of the present century brought upon her! Yet, owing to the phlegmatic disposition, one might call it the stolidity of the majority of Germans, the disturbances have been so far external, and the lower masses of society have scarcely been agitated, except by the first rude explosion of Protestantism, and the sudden ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... thirtieth birthday, a difficulty once with an emissary of Pinkerton, the incredible plague of flies in summer. And during all those racing years of clangour and success in New York, the life of Bursley, self-sufficient and self-contained, had preserved its monotonous and slow stolidity. Bursley had become a museum to him; he entered it as he might have entered the Middle Ages, and was astonished to find that beautiful which once he had deemed sordid and commonplace. Some of the streets seemed like a monument of the past, a picturesque survival; the crate-floats, drawn ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... alone are capable—the one through weakness, the other by strength—of that equanimity of temper, that unvarying gentleness, which soften the asperities of daily life. In the one, it is indifference or stolidity; in the other, indulgence and a portion of the divine thought of which he is the interpreter, and which needs to be consistent alike in principle and application. Both natures are equally simple; but in one there is vacancy, in the other depth. This is why clever women are disposed to take ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... when I have heard brilliant "conversationalists" conversing with other people, the conversation had much more equality and give and take than this age of intellectual snobs will admit. I have sometimes felt tired, like other people; but rather tired with men's talk and variety than with their stolidity or sameness; therefore it was that I sometimes longed to find the refreshment of ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... her own unrest; and because it is not always good for two people to be too much together, and because she had nothing better to do, she began to pick Joel to pieces in her thoughts, and fret at his patience and stolidity. She wished he would grow angry, wished even that he might be angry with her.... She wished for anything to break the long days of deadly calm. And she watched Joel more intently than it is well for wife to watch husband, or for ...
— All the Brothers Were Valiant • Ben Ames Williams
... some idea can be formed to give a stronger impulse even than selfishness, or unless the selfishness can be utilised. The complacency with which the mass of people go about their daily task, absolutely indifferent to all other considerations, is appalling in its concentrated stolidity. They do not intend wrong—they intend rightly: in truth, they work against the entire human race. So wedded and so confirmed is the world in its narrow groove of self, so stolid and so complacent under ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... believe (to this hour with less penitence than I ought to feel), that if these hands could have taken a linchpin out of his chaise-cart, they would have done it. The miserable man was a man of that confined stolidity of mind, that he could not discuss my prospects without having me before him,—as it were, to operate upon,—and he would drag me up from my stool (usually by the collar) where I was quiet in a corner, and, putting me before the fire as if I were going ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... forthcoming. In that case it is possible that tact and faith combined with an enterprising genius may score the victory which surrenders itself only to the most patient and determined search. If the people are of mountainous proportions and are unyielding in their attitude of stolidity or unconcernment in the affairs of their business leaders, for the latter naught is left but to assume the role of Mohamet and go ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... had not spoken; yet for some reason a thrill had passed through the small group surrounding him, which had heightened the consciousness of them all. Eyes and ears became alert; only the Indian showed stolidity. ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... meditating an outbreak into speech. It was the kind of day that bred reflection; one could put anything one liked into the picture with a certainty of its fitting the frame. We were putting a certain amount of regret into it; for though Villerville has seen us depart with civilized indifference or the stolidity of the barbarian—for they are one, we found our own attainments in the science of unfeelingness deficient: to look down upon the village from the next hill top was like facing ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... wondered that McLean's austere Scotch soul stood in danger of being thawed in the sunshine of Lit-lit's eyes. She was pretty, and slender, and willowy; without the massive face and temperamental stolidity of the average squaw. "Lit-lit," so called from her fashion, even as a child, of being fluttery, of darting about from place to place like a butterfly, of being inconsequent and merry, and of laughing as lightly as ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... glancing at the scout, who was at the moment seated on a keg before the fire lighting his pipe, and with a look of simple benignant stolidity on his grave countenance. "Have you no idea, Ben, where these outlaws ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... on the hill presently engaged in a frightful duel. The white legs of the gunners scampered this way and that way, and the officers redoubled their shouts. The guns, with their demeanours of stolidity and courage, were typical of something infinitely self-possessed in this clamour of death that swirled around ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... Highlanders, light blue pantaloons fitting closely their thick short leg, and boots which rose above the ankle, and laced in front. The prevailing expression on their broad swarthy faces was not ferocity, but stolidity. Their eyes were dull, and contrasted strikingly with the dark fiery glances of the children of the land. They seemed men of appetites rather than passions; and, if guilty of cruel deeds, were likely to be so from the dull, cold, unreflecting ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... the car fare with the same stolidity she had shown through the whole interview. "I do not think I would like you for a madam, either," she said quietly as she ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... came very rarely to her eyes, the orphan had wept bitterly, and, surprised at finding herself so completely unnerved on this occasion, she made a powerful effort to regain her composure and usual stolidity of expression. Shaking ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... second time what was her errand up there—whether she was following the man, or had suspected that he would be there—she shook her head vaguely and took refuge behind the stolidity of her race. ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... on the mountain?" Billy looked up sharply, startled out of his usual stolidity with which he had learned from early youth to mask all interest or emotion from ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... and attuned to any pitch that Nature might strike in her marvelous symphony, the experience was one to be taken in the same spirit as all else that pertained to their romantic calling. Rosendo and his men accepted the day's stint of toil and danger with dull stolidity. Carmen threw herself upon her thought, and saw in her shifting environment only the human mind's interpretation of its mixed concept of good and evil. The insects swarmed around her as around the others. The tantalizing jejenes urged their insidious attacks upon her, as upon the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... summon the other peasants, without whom the roads were unsafe in these times of disorder. He and Blaise must go round and warn them to be ready. A man could not be ready in a wink of the eye, as Madame seemed to think, and the two peasants looked impenetrable in stolidity. ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... preparations for the wedding must be stopped and that the invitations to the two big dinners that were to be given in honor of Colonel Ashley had been withdrawn she gathered from small signs—the feigned stolidity of some of them and the overacted astonishment of others—that they had probably been even better informed than Drusilla Fane. After that the food they brought her choked her and the maid's touch on her person ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... few uncertain steps onwards, and then again stood still, my brain reeling, my heart swelling nigh to bursting with anguish. I was still standing motionless, with hand pressed to my breast, when Nuflo overtook me. "Where is it—the house?" I stammered, pointing with my hand. All his stolidity seemed gone now; he was trembling too, his lips silently moving. At length he spoke: "They have come—the children of hell have been ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... splendidly garrisoned pride. Singing Arrow stood equally aloof, intrenched in her stoicism, but I think the root motives of the two were different, though the outside index was the same. Indeed, we all had different wellsprings for our composure. Pierre's stolidity was largely training. Starling's quiet might mean instinctive imitation, but I feared it was something more sinister. While mine—— But I had no composure. I swaggered and shrugged and ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... greatly affected by the thrilling account; but her phlegmatic husband listened to the recital with a stolidity which betrayed either a strange indifference or a wonderful control over his nerves ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... whether to strike or not, father," said Sadie, in a flippant manner. She raised a hand and adjusted a stray lock of hair as she spoke, then she straightened her ribbon stock. Her father said nothing, but his face assumed a stolidity ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... explained what was to be done, and thrust his rifle into the Indian's hands. The latter listened in silence and stolidity, then turned, and without a word departed swiftly in the darkness. The two white men stood a minute attentive. Nothing was to be heard but the steady beat of rain and the ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... into the yard, and she did not hear him. She went to the fireplace now, and leaned her head against the corner of the mantel, looking down, with a bitter stolidity, at the hearth. Herman unharnessed, and came in, a tall brown-haired fellow with dark eyes full of softness, and a deep simplicity of feeling. As his foot struck the sill, his mother roused herself, and became at once animated by a commonplace activity. She did ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... though he had not heard—a proceeding which his natural stolidity rendered easy. The little old gentleman, however, was not so easily put off. He tapped the man once ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... on. It was as if he had suddenly caught sight of someone cutting the covenant 'for quiet possession' out of his legal documents; or of a monster lurking and stalking out in the future, casting its shadow before. Their want of stolidity, their want of reverence! It was like discovering that nine-tenths of the people of England were foreigners. And if that were so—then, anything ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... as interpreter, Vernon put his case before the Dutch skipper, who seemed only too delighted at the way events had turned. His satisfaction at getting rid of his Hunnish visitors was evident, in spite of the stolidity of ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... the proverbial contempt for the supposed stolidity of the goose, there is something still unexplained in the extraordinary honours paid to it by the ancients, and the veneration in which it is held to the present day by some of the eastern nations. The figure that occurs so frequently on Buddhist ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... undid his arms from his breast, drew a revolver from his belt and sprang forward at a run in the same direction, leaving his sentinel in gaping astonishment at his post. After making to the various visible forms of nature a solemn promise to be damned, that gentleman resumed the air of stolidity which is supposed to be appropriate to a state ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... observing the Indian. Peigan Charley's bovine stare changed swiftly as the white chief whom he regarded above all men gave his decision. Its stolidity had given way to incredulity, and Bill found in it ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... soldiers of the North, in this disastrous series of blunders, fought with constancy and courage. Beaten day after day by unfailing troops in strong works, they ever came again straight at those impregnable positions, against which obstinate stolidity, or blind rage for blood, drove them to the slaughter. Hancock's men especially seemed to catch inspiration from their chivalric leader. Broken and beaten at the Wilderness—decimated at Spottsylvania, ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... dead," continued Miss Hepsy with a business-like stolidity inexplicable to Carrie Goldthwaite's warm heart, "an' she's left two children, which Josh an' me'll hev to take, I reckon, seein' their parents is both dead now. We'd a letter to-day from the minister there—Mr. Penn he calls hisself, ...
— Thankful Rest • Annie S. Swan
... so infinitely far, that he seldom even entered her thought. Yet as she looked at him curiously he seemed quite commonplace and usual. He was a tall, dark workingman of the better class, with a sensitive face trained to stolidity and a poor man's clothes and hands. His face was soft and slow and his manner at once cold and nervous, like fires long banked, but ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... know." Esther was settling into the stolidity of the obstinate when they are crowded too far; yet she still remembered she must not ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... and stolidity of Khalid, are shaken, aroused, by the ghoulish greed, the fell inhumanity of these sharpers. And Shakib from his cage of fancy lets loose upon them his hyenas of satire. In a squib describing the bats ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... deceive themselves as to the character of other shrewd people. The difficulty was quite different. It was a peculiar sort of stolidity on the part of Mr. Shanks, for which she was ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... presently engaged in a frightful duel. The white legs of the gunners scampered this way and that way, and the officers redoubled their shouts. The guns, with their demeanours of stolidity and courage, were typical of something infinitely self-possessed in this clamour of death that ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... attempt to go far beyond their predecessors in rendering the character of the gods according to the form consecrated by tradition. Even in the expression of the face the same process is to be traced. In early works we find sometimes no expression at all, or an apparent stolidity which is really the absence of expression; in the archaic smile we see an attempt to enliven the face, and possibly also, as we have noticed, to express and even to induce the benignity of the deity. But this attempt, made with inadequate artistic ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... garrisoned pride. Singing Arrow stood equally aloof, intrenched in her stoicism, but I think the root motives of the two were different, though the outside index was the same. Indeed, we all had different wellsprings for our composure. Pierre's stolidity was largely training. Starling's quiet might mean instinctive imitation, but I feared it was something more sinister. While mine—— But I had no composure. I swaggered and shrugged and ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... foil of the butcher-bird's stolidity we may set the inquisitive, garrulous temperament of the white-eyed vireo and the yellow-breasted chat. The vireo is hardly larger than the goldfinch, but let him be in one of his conversational moods, and he will fill a smilax thicket with noise enough for two or three cat-birds. Meanwhile he ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... cut him to his inmost soul. He retired to the house of one of his supporters in the neighbourhood, where he completely broke down, and wept with a bitterness which evoked the active sympathy of those present. But this mood did not last. It was succeeded by a sullenness and stolidity such as had never before been observed in him. He knew that he had been beaten unfairly, and resolved to petition against the election. Meanwhile his rage against the party which had been concerned in his defeat was ungovernable, and ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... overflowing and uncultivated talent and love of art and beauty, which in Russia brings forth so much that approaches indefinitely near to genius without ever quite reaching it. In Paul the effect of the Slavonic blood was totally opposite, and showed itself in that strange stolidity, that cold and ruthless exercise of force and pursuance of conviction, which have characterized so many Russian generals, so many Russian monarchs, and which have produced also so many Russian martyrs. There is something fateful in that ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... Commercy looked so undisturbed that the cannonade rocking it might have been some unheeded echo of the hills. These frontier towns inured to the clash of war go about their business with what one might call stolidity if there were not finer, and truer, names for it. In Commercy, to be sure, there is little business to go about just now save that connected with the military occupation; but the peaceful look of the sunny sleepy streets made one doubt if the fighting line was really less than five ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... that," said Mr. Murch with professional stolidity. "I happened to be on leave with the Missus at Halvey, which is only twelve mile or so along the coast. As soon as our people there heard of the murder they told me. I wired to the Chief, and was put in charge of the case at once. ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... he raised his eyes to the great cross at the foot of which we were standing, and straightway bent the knee and crossed himself. Some few of the Indians likewise made the sign upon their breasts, though the greater part contained themselves with the same stolidity that had marked them ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... feeling his pulse that I was able to pronounce with certainty that he was alive. One single gleam of animation overspread his features for an instant when I gently removed the crushed corpse from his knees, and laid it on the bed, but he quickly relapsed into stolidity. I was informed that he had sat thus ever since he had first received the corpse from the arms of Joe Pentland, who had brought it home without changing his clown's dress. Heaven grant that I may never look upon such a sight again as the poor, half-recovered invalid presented ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... had remained silent in his chair, with a stolidity that aroused no sympathy for him. Not once was he seen to lift his eyes to the judge; and but once, when Tess was being maligned by Dominie Graves, did the bible-back rise and fall as if the heart ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... in the Great War—submarines and aircraft. The first free flight of an aeroplane, December 17, 1903. Attitude of the peoples; English stolidity. The navy and the air. The German menace hastens the making of our air service. The British air force at the outbreak of the war, and at its close. The achievement of the British air force. Uses of ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... he easily surpassed his achievement as author. Mr. TOZER as a slum-parson was extremely probable with his quiet sincerity. But our chief consolation came from Miss RACHEL DE SOLLA as the maiden aunt, a reactionary type of the most confirmed stolidity, with a weakness for diamonds and indigestion. Miss MARIE LOeHR had many clever things to say, but it didn't matter what Miss DE SOLLA said; her ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 21, 1920 • Various
... were only the Duke—Ah!" She stopped, a new alarm in her eyes. She searched my face eagerly. Of deliberate purpose I set it to an immutable stolidity. ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... they were not enthusiastic. A traditional pastime is to be distinguished from a mere revival in no more striking feature than in this, that while in the revival all is excitement and fervour, the survival is carried on with a stolidity and absence of stir which sets one wondering why a thing that is done so perfunctorily should be kept up at all. Like Balaam and other unwilling prophets, the agents seem moved by an inner compulsion to say and do their allotted parts whether ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... just in time to learn that the very coach in which he rode brought the news to the authorities there that all intercourse between the two nations was indefinitely suspended. The characteristic taciturnity and formal stolidity of his fellow-travellers—all Englishmen, mutually unacquainted with each other, and occupying different positions in life—having prevented his sooner hearing ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... a fashion, it is an art. People have to train for it, and as it is a unique amusement, it is worth some trouble to be able to succeed in it. Men, by reason of their stolidity and deeper voices, can never be proficients in it; and they do not have so much practice—unless they are stock-brokers. Ladies keep themselves in training in their ordinary calls. If three or four meet in a drawing-room they all begin to scream, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... of admiration; generosity filled the gulf and the two became firm friends. Reggie's intelligence flicked the inertia of Geoffrey's mind, quickened his powers of observation, and developed his sense of interest in the world around him. Geoffrey's prudence and stolidity had more than once saved the young man from the ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... portrays the intellectual class, and The Patrician (1911) pictures the aristocrat. Galsworthy is the relentless analyist of well-to-do, conventional English society. As Frederic Taber Cooper well says, "British stolidity, British conservatism, the unvarying fixity of the social system, the sacrifice of individual needs and cravings to caste and precedent and public opinion,—these are the themes which Mr. Galsworthy never wearies of satirizing with ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... stupidity. And it is a fact that the worst shocks of life are often received without outcries, without gestures, without a flow of tears and the convulsions of sobbing. The insatiable governess missed these signs exceedingly. This pitiful stolidity was only a fresh provocation. Yet the ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... no roving eye. He seemed, indeed, steady of hearing to the verge of stolidity, yet in a few seconds he had noted and drawn rapid conclusions from the environment. The cheerlessness of the house had struck him and the somber room, decorated, if one calls it decoration, with faded steel engravings of Landseer hunting ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... and agility, and in a variety of other ways exhibited both wonderful suppleness and remarkable docility. The collie was handsome, beautifully groomed, and rather snappish. The Stone bulldog made a picture of good-humored British stolidity, and if his hind quarters had been equal to his superbly massive front and marvelously "smashed-up" face he would have been tolerably sure of a win in any class. The Dandie Dinmont had the most delightful eyes imaginable, and was a good-bodied ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... this had been arranged by the small cunning of this really witless couple. I was left to find my way down stairs as I might; and just when I was about to leave the dwelling—vexed to the heart at the desperate stolidity of the miserable man, whom avarice and weakness were about to expose to a loss which might be averted in part, and an exposure to infamy which might wholly be avoided—I was encountered by the attenuated form and wan countenance of his suffering but ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... personage tapped with his crutch-handled cane on a chair that stood near, and nodded in an authoritative way to the apothecary to sit down in it. Dr. Dolliver complied submissively, and the Colonel, with dull, unkindly eyes, looked at him sternly, and with a kind of intelligence amid the aged stolidity of his aspect, that somewhat puzzled the Doctor. In this way he surveyed him all over, like a judge, when he means to hang a man, and for some reason or none, the apothecary felt his nerves shake, beneath ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... women stopped for breath just in front of us. She was pushing a heavy cart and her poor old body was trembling from the strain. Her legs were bare, and her feet were cut by the stones. There was absolute stolidity in her weather-beaten face, and the hands that lighted her pipe were gnarled and black. Miss Lessing has a perfect genius for getting at people, I think it is her good kind face through which her soul shines. She asked the old woman if she was very tired. ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... to her, Lylda spoke to the youth and the girl in her native tongue. They listened quietly; Oteo with an almost expressionless stolidity of face, but with his soft, dog-like eyes fixed upon his mistress; Eena with heaving breast and trembling limbs. When Lylda paused they both fell upon their knees before her. She put her hands upon their heads and smiling wistfully, ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... Slow in flying from point to point, they yet have a wonderful quickness, and snap up the fleetest insects with little apparent effort. There is a constant play of quick, nervous movements underneath their outer show of calmness and stolidity. They do not scour the limbs and trees like the warblers, but, perched upon the middle branches, wait, like true hunters, for the game to come along. There is often a very audible snap of the beak as ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... in Europe and America, China appears the most stationary of nations. She has moved less in centuries than western peoples have in decades. The restless Anglo-Saxon is alternately irritated and awed by this massive solidity, not to say stolidity. There is, after all, something impressive about it, the impressiveness of a mighty glacier which moves, indeed, but so slowly and majestically that the duration of an ordinary nation's life appears insignificant as compared with the almost timeless ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... the brush of a Hogarth to depict the gallery of faces with which I came in contact as I went along. They were all different, yet all alike; different in their degrees of beefiness, stolidity, and self-sufficiency, but plainly of the same parentage—British to the backbone; British of the wrong kind, with a sprinkling of Welshmen, Irishmen, and Jews. Not a Scotsman discoverable in that whole ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... at the old woman's effrontery, he wanted to crush her with angry eloquence; but her stolidity baffled him, and he went up to his room without a word. When he was alone, his anger soon cooled; but he found himself repeating those cruel words, and as he said them over, he began to fear that Florou was not so ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Polish • Various
... travelling either on business or pleasure. At last he had to give it up, and to turn to the black sailors. Going forward, he addressed one after the other; but as he spoke, their countenances also changed, and they stood before him with downcast looks, pictures of stolidity. Suddenly he at last bethought him of calling up Pango from the pinnace, to try if he could elicit any information from his sable countrymen. Pango, on being summoned, immediately sprang on board. No sooner had he done so than his eye fell on one of the ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... the old "institutions" are, of being utterly ineligible for the furthering of modern progressive ideas, they revenge themselves for their supersession on everybody and everything, save and except their own arrogant stolidity. White individuals who have part and lot in the various Colonies, with their hearts and feelings swayed by affections natural to their birth and earliest associations; and Whites who have come to think the land of their adoption ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... not a positive unbeliever, from the Pentateuch to Revelation. In addition to this, his flings at the Chaplain, his messmate, made him unpopular with the religiously inclined of the regiment. He had besides, the stolidity of the German, and their cool calculating practicalism. This did not always please the ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... from life, wandering wearisomely through the world in one long battle with Nature whereby to gain the wherewithal to live in that grim desert. There were no exceptions, it was the common lot. Each day and every day did these men and women, with a stolidity of long-continued destitution, and temporal and spiritual tribulation, gaze upon that bare, unyielding country, pregnant only with aggravation to their own ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... gracefulness of peasant life; even so, and perhaps more, Luigi Pulci must have had a deliberate intention of producing a ludicrous effect; in both cases the deliberate attempt is very little perceptible, in the "Nencia da Barberino" from the genius of Lorenzo, in the "Morgante Maggiore" from the stolidity of Pulci. The "Morgante," of which parts were probably written as a mere sample to amuse a supper party, became interesting to Pulci, in the mere matter of inventing and stringing together new incidents; and despite its ludicrous passages, it must have been more seriously ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... murmured Captain Wilmot, glancing at the scout, who was at the moment seated on a keg before the fire lighting his pipe, and with a look of simple benignant stolidity on his grave countenance. "Have you no idea, Ben, where these outlaws ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... Herr Haase, and made of his solidity and stolidity a screen and a shield for the master-mind in its master-body. Herr Bettermann, bending behind his machine, took in the grouping with an eye that sneered and exulted, jerked his angular blue-clad shoulders contemptuously, and turned ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... reverses, but no misfortune hath happened unto us but such as is common unto nations. Country has been sacrificed to partisanship. Early love has fallen away, and lukewarmness has taken its place. Unlimited enthusiasm has given place to limited stolidity. Disloyalty, overawed at first into quietude, has lifted its head among us, and waxes wroth and ravening. There are dissensions at home worse than the guns of our foes. Some that did run well have faltered; some signal-lights have gone shamefully out, and some are lurid with a baleful ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... with patient, bovine eyes looking out heavily from under half-closed lids. He breathed jerkily, but he neither cried out nor groaned. There was something almost brutal and inhuman in his absolute stolidity. He asked no sympathy, for his life had been without it. It was a broken tool rather than ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... is apparent; there is a determination of blood to the head, headache, noises and roaring sounds in the ears, the eyes may be blood-shot and watery, weak or painful, the patient imagines bright spots or flashes passing before them, and there may be partial blindness. There is increasing stolidity of expression, the eye is without sparkle, and the face becomes blotched and animal-like in its expression. The victim is careless of his personal appearance, not unscrupulously neat, and not unfrequently a rank odor exhales ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... no insolence in his tone. He had gone out, with his heavy German stolidity of mien unchanged, and had closed the door ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... when I tell you that I'm one and that I'd see your 'Clarion' blazing in hell before I'd take another cent of your money." The fire died from her face, and in her former tone of dulled stolidity she repeated, "I want ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... case it is possible that tact and faith combined with an enterprising genius may score the victory which surrenders itself only to the most patient and determined search. If the people are of mountainous proportions and are unyielding in their attitude of stolidity or unconcernment in the affairs of their business leaders, for the latter naught is left but to assume the role of Mohamet and go to ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... or at the mill, and it would scarcely have been noticed had she disappeared altogether. Somehow she had floated into Sunday-school, and been placed in the class which afterward became Etta Mountjoy's, but here her apparent stolidity made her perhaps the least interesting of all the girls. Perhaps this was in part owing to the fact that one is not likely to be very talkative in ...
— Katie Robertson - A Girls Story of Factory Life • Margaret E. Winslow
... on her. I was assured of this by the sudden softening of his expression—the first real softening I had ever seen in it. It was but a momentary flash, but it was unmistakable in its character, as was his speedy return to his former stolidity. Whatever his thoughts were at sight of his little sweetheart, he meant to hide them even from his counsel—most of all from his counsel, I decided after further contemplation of them both. If Mr. Moffat still showed nervousness, it was for some other reason than anxiety about this little body ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... Elsie forward, and left Dorothy and his father to entertain one another on the quarter-deck. The two children amused themselves very well talking to Alphonse, the steersman, and Adolphe, the engineer, thick-set, thick-witted men, who combined the picturesqueness of organ-grinders with the stolidity of agriculturalists; Nature had plainly intended them for the plough, and Circumstance had pitched ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... ashamed to face Mary Eastmann, she received us with the same stolidity she had manifested when we first met, and at once insisted that I should remain for dinner. "Go into ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... That is the true spirit of the mercenary, who cannot conceive of a man taking trouble unless he gets paid for it somehow, and will fight and kill, all in the way of business, without the least spark of enthusiasm for a cause. Hard stolidity and brutal carelessness shielded him from any 'womanish' tenderness. Absalom was dead, and he had killed him. It was a good thing, for it had put out the fire of revolt. No doubt David would be sorry, but that mattered little. Only it was better for the message to go by some one ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... is quiet to-day. Does longing stupefy one, or does it wear itself out and turn at last into stolidity? Oh that burning longing night and day were happiness! But now its fire has turned to ice. Why does home seem so far away? It is one's all; life without it is so empty, so empty—nothing but dead emptiness. Is it the restlessness of spring that is beginning ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... moment; and, finally, the fortunes of the Simeuse and the Cinq-Cygne families had been seized and wasted by the Republic without being of any benefit to the nation. Her grave demeanor, now lapsing into apparent stolidity, can be readily understood. ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... injunction, when the habit of thinking before he spoke closed his half-opened lips. Immediately, his face assumed the obstinate, expressionless look which made those who searched no deeper than the surface pronounce him a dull boy. Rutford, for instance, interpreted this stolidity as unintelligence and lack of perception. John, meantime, was struggling with a thought which shaped itself slowly into a plan of action. He had just heard Lovell lie to save the Caterpillar. John knew well enough ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... harass on Miss Blomfield's countenance deepened visibly, and her crochet-needle trembled in her hand, whilst a despondent stolidity settled on ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... somebody had touched a spring. He seemed to be of the opinion that if you are a cyclone, it is never too soon to begin behaving like one. He danced round the Kid with an india-rubber agility. The Cosy Moments representative exhibited more stolidity. Except for the fact that he was in fighting attitude, with one gloved hand moving slowly in the neighbourhood of his stocky chest, and the other pawing the air on a line with his square jaw, one would have said that he did not realise the position of affairs. He wore the ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... the spectator could follow. They ran, as it were, under her skin. There was no stolidity or phlegm. She was astoundingly alive and real. Unimportant, without sublimity of emotion or intellectual power, she was irresistibly real. The public understood all she told it, ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... drank like a Dutchman, and having reeled round with a thousand oaths, to the manifold amusement of the crowd, he suddenly began to smoke like a Prussian. Nothing could be more admirable than the look of complacent and pompous stolidity with which he accompanied each puff of his pipe. The applause was continued; and the one-eyed Bohemian serjeant, delighted at the ridicule which was heaped on his military rival, actually ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... then even the poor solace of remonstrance would have been denied. As it was, I spent much breath in trying to hurry them, and it is pleasanter now than it was then to reflect how futilely. For I rated them roundly, while they accepted my verbal goadings with the trained stolidity of folk who ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... nothing—though indeed I never could do that, being far too much interested in every one who came my way—and the invader was soon repelled. There is nothing so resistant as the dull security of possession the stolidity ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... brusquerie, carefully avoiding the least movement of hands or head during converse. This was exceedingly difficult of attainment to me, and took me an infinite deal of time and trouble; but I had for my model a middle-aged Englishman who was staying in the same hotel as myself, and whose starched stolidity never relaxed for a single instant. He was a human iceberg—perfectly respectable, with that air of decent gloom about him which is generally worn by all the sons of Britain while sojourning in a foreign clime. I copied his manners as closely as possible; I kept ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... pupils painted realistic pictures representing Mary visiting Elizabeth, but the intense religious zeal back of them was a salt that saved from offending. Occasionally, the staid and sober Dutch successfully attempted the same theme, and their stolidity stood for them as religious zeal had done for the early Italians—we pardon them simply because they knew no better than to choose a subject that is beyond the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... acknowledgment of his interest, but not getting it, went on bitterly enough, for his stolidity was a very great ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... not always so," said Pastor Lindal. "I have won the sympathy and friendship of the children of my parish by years of work amongst them. The character of the Jutland people is suspicious—there is a strange mixture of shrewdness and stolidity; they are slow to appreciate, but when once their sympathy is won, they are fast friends. It is impossible for a sermon to have any effect without you have won their friendship ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... gambolling, moping, grinning, raving, and vaporing—each wrapped in its own Vision, and indifferent to all the influence of the collateral faculties. There, now, is a man, moping about, the very picture of stolidity; observe how his heavy head hangs down until his chin rests upon his breastbone, his mouth open and almost dribbling. That man, sir, so unpoetical and idiotic in appearance, imagines himself the author ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... some little way behind the others, Maggie did not at once know of the fact of Flower's disappearance with the baby. She was naturally a slow girl; ideas came to her at rare intervals; she even received startling and terrible news with a certain outward stolidity and calm. Still, Maggie was not an altogether purposeless and thoughtless maiden; thoughts occasionally drifted her way; ideas, when once born in her heart, were slow to die. When affection took root ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade
... his morbid fears for humanity, seemed stung by the mere stolidity of the automatic official, a mere bulk of ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... looks. The Lieutenant-General has been allowed to depart, but the Lieutenant-Governor and Tartar General are still in custody at head-quarters. At my suggestion a proposal was made to the Lieutenant-Governor to-day to continue to govern the city under us; but the stolidity of the Chinese is so great that there is no saying what he may do. We have given him till to-morrow to determine whether he will accept. My whole efforts have been directed to preserve the Cantonese from the evils of a ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... just under Mark's window by the guard from the break at the end of the train, when a hurried conference took place, in which there was no stolidity on either side. 'Run back as quick as you can and set the detonators—there ain't a minute to lose, she may be down on us any time, and she'll never see the other signals this weather. I'd get 'em all out of the train if I was you, mate—they ain't ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... every now and then running on ahead of mother, he looked quite young. There was so much life and movement in his whole figure that I could only detect the treachery of age when I came close up behind and saw beneath his cap a fringe of close-cropped silver hair. Instead of the staid dignity and stolidity of a general, I saw an almost schoolboyish nimbleness; instead of a collar sticking up to his ears, an ordinary light blue necktie. Mother and my uncle were walking in the avenue talking together. I went softly up to them ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... whole entertainment I had frequently turned my eyes toward the prime minister, and had been much impressed by his apparent stolidity. When he presented his arm to the lady mayoress, when he walked with her, and during all the time at table, he seemed much like a wooden image galvanized into temporary life. When he rose to speak, there was the same wooden stiffness ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... thoroughly comfortable,—as comfortable as a truly pious fat man deserves to be, and all the work he had to do was to preach twice on Sundays, to a quiet, primitive, decently ordered congregation, who listened to his words respectfully though without displaying any emotional rapture. Their stolidity, however, did not affect him,—he preached to please himself,—loving above all things to hear the sound of his own voice, and never so happy as when thundering fierce denunciations against the Church of Rome. His thoughts seemed tending in that direction now, as he ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... whom she had known, and in her place was a queen with a crown! She smiled at her reflection and nodded. For once she was swayed from her stillness and stolidity. She loaded her long hands with rings, and held them to her cheeks; then, struck by the contrast of her white linen sleeve, she rummaged in one of the big closets, and threw on the bed a drift of ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... Whigs were much the same to him as cleaving firewood. He did his duty with a stupid unconcern which successfully imposed on the soldiers; and as soon as they allowed him to go, he fell to his wood-chopping with the same stolidity and rustic boorishness that had ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... between annoyance and compassion, fumed in silence. He himself had only enough food for a few days. The breed wore him out with his stolidity. ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... in her marvelous symphony, the experience was one to be taken in the same spirit as all else that pertained to their romantic calling. Rosendo and his men accepted the day's stint of toil and danger with dull stolidity. Carmen threw herself upon her thought, and saw in her shifting environment only the human mind's interpretation of its mixed concept of good and evil. The insects swarmed around her as around the others. The tantalizing jejenes urged their ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... at Falconer. He admired the stolidity of that sandy-haired young man's countenance. He envied the ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... commence, since he could not as a gentleman keep his kind patrons within waiting any longer. His habit, which emphasised itself as he grew older, was to treat the staring crowd in front of his booth like a family of nephews and nieces. The device was quite useless, for the public's stolidity was impregnable. It touched the heroic. No more granitic and crass stolidity could have been discovered in England. The crowd stood; it exercised no other function of existence. It just stood, and there it would stand until convinced that the gratis part of the spectacle ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... to pick oakum, casting Galileo into prison, even crucifying Christ. There is a haunting and horrible sense of insecurity about the book. The terror we thus feel is a terror for the machinery of law, that we can hear tearing, in the dark, good and bad, between its formidable wheels with the iron stolidity of all machinery, human or divine. This terror incarnates itself sometimes and leaps horribly out upon us; as when the crouching mendicant looks up, and Jean Valjean, in the light of the street lamp, recognises the face of the detective; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... enough, limping, nursing their bruises, while Hansen, his stolidity momentarily vanished in the rush of the fight and not yet regained, exhibited an unusual vocabulary as he bossed them. Lund turned to the two ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... clowns aimed their shafts and drew their bow, sometimes to find the arrow on the grass at their feet, sometimes to see it producing consternation among the bystanders; but when he saw Brewster standing silently apart, viewing their efforts with a scorn visible enough in the dead stolidity of his countenance, he murmured a bitter interjection, and turned away with ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... goods after a successful season at the southern camps, they must wait until the shifting ice pack settles and the winter hunting begins. Such enforced inaction is irksome to the Eskimo, who does not partake of the stolidity of the Indian, but like a nervous child must be continually employed or amused. So this festival, which is of a purely social ...
— The Dance Festivals of the Alaskan Eskimo • Ernest William Hawkes
... full and firm. From her rosy cheeks to her stout ankles she was superabundant with vitality, the strangest contrast to her shadowy, thin old grandfather. About the preparation of her father's tea she moved with a sort of brooding stolidity, out of which would suddenly gleam a twinkle of rogue-sweetness, as when she stopped to stroke the little cat or to tickle the back of her grandfather's lean neck in passing. Having set the tea, she ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... down by the roadside, bridle in hand, head bowed in his arms. Beside him his horse fed quietly on the weeds. In his ears rang the cries of the wounded; all around him he was conscious of people passing to and fro; and he sat there, face covered, deadly tired, already exhausted to a stolidity ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... vast amounts of high explosive, new big guns, indeed a score of things, which were afterward obtained. Lloyd George at this period saw that, as usual, Britain was just "muddling through," relying on her stolidity and her power of endurance, rather than on her initiative and striking strength. His efforts to improve matters within Government circles could not have endeared him to his Government colleagues. But his blood was up, and he cared as little for their good opinion ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... move—unanimous—that the gipsies' right hands made to clutch their weapons resembled the jump from surprise into stillness when the jungle is caught unawares. A second later when somebody tossed dry fagots on the fire the blaze betrayed no other expression on their faces than the stock-in-trade stolidity. Even the women looked as if thundering on a kahveh door at night was nothing to be noticed. Kagig did not move, but I could see that he was breathing faster than the normal, and he, too, clutched a weapon. Von Quedlinburg began shouting for help alternately ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... noble Stoical impassibility, let him secure himself in the bosom of this popular stolidity of mine; what they performed by virtue, I inure myself to do by temperament. The middle region harbours storms and tempests; the two extremes, of philosophers and peasants, concur ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... Langen in his Plautinische Studien. He really succeeds in finding the crux of the situation in recognizing that these features are inherent in Plautus' style and are frequently employed solely for comic effect, though he is often overcome by a natural Teutonic stolidity. He aptly points out that Plautus in his selection of originals has in the main chosen plots with more vigorous action than Terence. We shall have occasion to quote him at intervals, but desire to develop ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... the man had been thrown off his balance by being hauled out of the harbour against his wish. His stolidity had been profoundly stirred, else he would never have made up his mind to ask me unexpectedly whether I had not remarked that Falk had been casting eyes upon his niece. "No more than myself," I answered with literal truth. The girl was of the sort one necessarily casts eyes ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... draw his own inferences, but the countenance into which Sidney glanced at intervals was one of intense stolidity. ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... would be to see her taking it!' whispered Bertha into Phoebe's ear, unheard by Augusta, who, in her satisfied stolidity, was declaring, 'No, I could not undertake that. I am the worst person in the world for taking ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... however, made no impression on Timmins's stolidity. The latter's eye followed the elder's in its peregrinations till it came to rest, when, without further preliminaries, he began to unfold his suit, which in matter and essence was such as are usually put forward by those whom ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... moment no one spoke. The silence was intolerable to Mrs. Crowley, and she inveighed inwardly against the British stolidity. She could not look at Lucy, but the others, full of sympathy, kept their eyes upon her. Mrs. Crowley wondered why she did not faint. It seemed to Lucy that an icy hand clutched her heart so that the blood was squeezed out of it. She made a determined effort to keep her ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... ye all drank the toast?—What is that old wife about? Give her a glass of brandy, she shall drink the king's health, by"—"If your honour pleases," said Cuddie, with great stolidity of aspect, "this is my mither, stir; and she's as deaf as Corra-linn; we canna mak her hear day nor door; but if your honour pleases, I am ready to drink the king's health for her in as mony glasses of brandy as ye ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... present time, although the old system still stands in many countries with the inert stolidity of established institutions, it no longer commands general approval. As Paul and Victor Margueritte have truly stated, in the course of an acute examination of the phenomena of state-regulated prostitution as found in Paris, the system ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... statement was being made Dave sat with his gaze riveted to the face of Lieutenant Cantor. The officer looked stolid, but his stolidity had the appearance of ...
— Dave Darrin at Vera Cruz • H. Irving Hancock
... their patroons may be observed among their descendants in contemporary New York; the men whose ancestors controlled a thousand tenants have not lost the powers of handling large matters in a large spirit; but they exercise it now for worthier ends than of old. Similarly, the Dutch stolidity which amuses us in the chronicles, reappears to-day in the form of steadiness and judgment; the obstinacy of headstrong Peter, as self-confidence and perseverance; the physical grossness of the old burghers, as constitutional vigor. Many of their customs too have come down to ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... amusing. A Chinese coolie, watching two prisoners handle a stack of cased goods, could not at last contain himself. He walked up to them, saying: "Hun no damn good," and proceeded to show them how it should be done. The stolidity of the Chinaman is generally proof against surprise, but some of those coming from the backwoods of Northern China were occasionally bewildered and overwhelmed when set down amid the amazing and to them terrifying wonders of the "back" of a European Army. One company of such men arrived at their ...
— Fields of Victory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... questioned him; the train officials were civil and incurious, and went calmly about their business with all the traditional stolidity of official John Bull. ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... rain was now grown to be a deluge; the gutters of the house roared; the air was filled with the continuous, strident crash. The stolidity of his face, on which the rain streamed, was far from reassuring me. On the contrary, I was aware of a distinct qualm of apprehension, which was not at all lessened by a view of the driver, craning from his perch to observe us with the expression of a fascinated bird. So we stood silent, ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... first for food, and, while he ate, gave a clear if callous account of his son's death and the lugger's danger. Having eaten, he went to his bedroom, dragged off his boots, flung himself down and was soon sleeping heavily; while Thomasin, marveling at his stolidity and resenting it not a little, gave way to utter grief. During an interval between storms of tears the woman put on a black gown, then went to her work. The day had now advanced. On seeing her again downstairs, two ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... flexibility of the English character and national system, and to the consequent ease with which they adapted themselves to changing environment. Indeed, whatever may be the case at present, a survey of English history suggests that the conventional stolidity ascribed to John Bull was the least obvious of his characteristics; and even to-day the only people who never change their mind at general elections are the mercurial Celts. Certainly England has never suffered ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... accompanying illustrations shows the fate which befell an infant chiton upon intrusion on a small black-lip oyster, and coincidentally the origin of a blister. The chiton family being notorious for stolidity, the infant could not have realised the risks of its trespass until the strait-jacket made its retirement impossible. The nacre has reproduced the details of the chiton's exterior with the fidelity ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... the smallest speck of dust, very many shining glasses, empty glasses, glasses with straws sticking in them, and glasses partially filled with bits of ice. Bar-keepers in spotless white linen prepared the famous American drinks, innumerable in variety, with a dexterity bordering on art and a stolidity out of which nothing ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
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