"Stolidity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Mr. Murch with professional stolidity. 'I happened to be on leave with the missus at Haley, which is only twelve miles 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. I bicycled over yesterday evening, ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... she came in a very good second-best in most of the harum-scarum escapades. She could always be relied upon for support, could keep a secret, and had a peculiarly convenient knack of baffling awkward questions by putting on an attitude of utter stolidity. When her eyes were half-closed under their heavy lids, and her mouth wore what the girls called its "John Bull" expression, not even Miss Beasley herself could drag information out of Aveline. The Sphinx, as she was sometimes nicknamed, prided herself ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... 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, ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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 ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... Canada is to be as big nationally as she is latitudinally, as great in soul as in area, she must get rid of this negative thing in her attitude to herself and life. It makes for solidity, but it also makes for stolidity. Nations do not grow great by what they leave undone. Psychologists say all mentality divides itself into two great classes: those giving off negative response to stimulus; those giving off positive. ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... 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 not face him, for ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... he demanded in Ojibway. "Where you get your blankets? Where you get your grub? How you make the Long Trail? What you do when we go far and fast? What we do with you now?" Then meeting nothing but the stolidity with which the Indian always conceals pain, he flung her ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... scenes, had our still Friend shrunk forcibly together; and shrouded-up his tremors and flutterings, of what sort soever, in a safe cover of Silence, and perhaps of seeming Stolidity. How was it, then, that here, when trembling to the core of his heart, he did not sink into swoons, but rose into strength, into fearlessness and clearness? It was his guiding Genius (Daemon) that inspired him; he must go forth and meet his Destiny. Show thyself now, whispered ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... 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
... at following the Spencerian style of writing in his copybooks. Instinctively he rebelled at the flourishes which embellished that form of handwriting. He seemed to divine somehow that such penmanship could not be useful or practicable for after life, and so, with that Dutch stolidity that, once fixed, knows no altering, he refused to copy his writing lessons. Of course trouble immediately ensued between Edward and his teacher. Finding herself against a literal blank wall—for Edward ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... thoughtful and unthinking men alike. He had previously made an able and sincere effort in the Irish Council to compel the landlord class to some redeeming act of good sense and good will, which their own true interests required as well as the agonies of the starving tenantry. He was met by ignorance, stolidity and scorn. A timid and narrow measure of improvement in the relation between landlord and tenant had been proposed, and ably supported by Messrs. Ferguson, Ireland and O'Loghlen; and such was the ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... 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 his sooner hearing ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... been secretly married for several years to Young Hopeful, and was left penniless with two boys. Lord Chesterfield was above all things a practical philosopher, as hard and as exquisitely rounded and polished as a granite column. He accepted the vanishing of his lifelong dream with the admirable stolidity of a fatalist, and in those last days of his radically artificial life he disclosed a welcome tenderness, a touch of the divine, none the less so for being common duty, shown in the few brief letters ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... 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; ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... If hypocrisy, stolidity, inhumanity, or vice finds its way into the chambers of disease through the would-be 365:27 healer, it would, if it were possible, convert into a den of thieves the temple of the Holy Ghost, - the patient's ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... of a face that then expressed the extremity of mental agony, fell full the wavering light of the uplifted torches. The Dutch, accustomed to every species of extra-judicial cruelty by sea and land, looked on with the most grave stolidity and apathetic indifference; while I felt an astonishment and indignation that rapidly gave ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... subject 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
... cry, warming to our theme) so apt to imbue the spirit with patience, stolidity, endurance, all the ripe and seasoned qualities of manhood? It is well known that the fiercest and most terrible fighters in the late war were those who had been commuters. It was a Division composed ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... to Evreux (for a consideration), which Markham refused, an the two companions took to the road and soon passed out of sight, leaving the group of peasants staring after them, still mystified as to the whole occurrence and wondering with Norman stolidity whether Hermia was mad or ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... in an indefinite tweed suit, carrying brown-paper parcels. That is what we met suddenly, at the bend of a muddy Dorsetshire lane, and the roan mare stared and obviously thought of a curtsey. The mare is road-shy, with intervals of stolidity, and there is no telling what she will pass and what she won't. We call her Redford. That was my first meeting with Judkin, and the next time the circumstances were the same; the same muddy lane, the same rather apologetic figure in the tweed suit, the same—or very ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... brutes who encumbered the roadway I had to travel, and though the noise of war was near, the canine regiment not actually called to fight rested immobile, its members suffering themselves to be kicked by foot passengers, trodden on by cattle, and rolled over by wheels with an astonishing stolidity. ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... knocked down at one-third their value, and so on. He began to wish he could bid; but he had no money, just a little pocket change. The auctioneer noticed him standing almost directly under his nose, and was impressed with the stolidity—solidity—of the ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... repartees, and showers them about, with 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 ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... 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 ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... she thought that she would be murdered this time for certain. She had a strange, unemotional conviction that the house was particularly convenient for a crime. One could never get to the bottom of her wild notions which she held with the stolidity of a peasant allied to the outward serenity of a nun. She quaked all over as she came down to her doom, but when she recognized me she got such a shock that she sat down suddenly on the lowest step. She did not expect me for another week at least, and, ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... covert—a small wood on the flank of a hill—was blank, and the hounds moved on across country to the next draw. It was a land of pasture, and in every fence was a deep muddy passage, through which the field splashed in single file with the grave stolidity of the cows by whom the gaps had been made. Mrs. Pat was feeling horribly bored. Her escort had joined himself to two of the ladies of the hunt, and though it was gratifying to observe that one wore a paste brooch in her tie and the other had an imitation ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... With the stolidity and indifference of despair, however, he endured it all, sleeping in an attic at the roof of the house, eating what the cook gave him, accepting a few dollars a week, which he tried to save. His constitution was in ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... his son appeared in the doorway, he apparently did not realize it, though in fact the agitation the young man was concealing under that unfortunate manner was calmness itself in comparison with the state of mind behind Hiram's mask of somber stolidity. ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... 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 ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... 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 mildness of their disposition. They also are strict ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... the incredible stiffness and the incurable honesty of the race that belonged over yonder on those white chalk cliffs dimly visible along the horizon. Gone were the phlegm and stolidity of those people who manifest emotion only on the occasions when they stand up to ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... school seemed flat and poor, except perhaps Johnny's, which steadily improved. Robert, whose father wished him to be pushed on so as to be fit for examination for Sandhurst, opposed, to all pressure, the passive resistance of stolidity. He was nearly sixteen, but seemed incapable of understanding that compulsory studies were for his good and not a cruel exercise of tyranny. He disdainfully rejected an offer from his aunt to help him in the French and arithmetic which had become imminent, while of the first he ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... wrought with the kaleidoscopic transformations 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 ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... of my horror and amazement when I saw outside the curious ring of tree-tops, scores of huge alligators peering at us with horrid stolidity through the branches, some of them snapping their capacious jaws with a viciousness that left no doubt as to its meaning. Yamba explained to me that she had been obliged to take refuge in this peculiar ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... 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 ...
— Dave Darrin at Vera Cruz • H. Irving Hancock
... is 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, ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... desire 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 he done so than his eye fell on one of the blacks, ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... him, I faced him, I smiled. He was the same as he had been. A little stouter, perhaps, his pale hair and square-cut beard looking as though it had been carved from some pale honey-coloured wood, the thick stolidity of his long body and short legs, the squareness of his head, the coldness of his eyes and the violent red of his lips, all were just as they had been—the same man, save that now he was in civilian clothes, in a black suit ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... with a stolidity that walled in securely his threatening emotions. "I am not a bit good at guessing the meaning of sentences that have no direct statement in them. You see, they are not the kind my ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... the women that the 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 was like fire, while she still ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... 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
... collected by 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 this ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... 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 that ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... His eyes are bigger than his belly, but an Englishman's belly is a deal bigger than his eyes, and the number of plum puddings and the amount of Welsh rarebit he devours annually would send the best of us to his grave in half that time. We have not enough constitutional inertia and stolidity; our climate gives us no rest, but goads us day and night; and the consequent wear and tear of life is no doubt greater in this country than in any other on the globe. We are playing the game more rapidly, and I fear less thoroughly and ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... "Critic," played by the most Lilliputian boys. Puff—played by Powell (I don't forget 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
... philosophical state as Peter. Their mother had been German——a lady-in-waiting to one of the German princesses; and their father had met her and married her while he was secretary at the English Embassy in St. Petersburg. And Susie, who had heard of German philosophy and German stolidity, and despised them both with all her heart, concluded that the German strain was accountable for everything about Peter and Anna that was beyond her comprehension; and sometimes, when Peter was more than usually wise and unapproachable, would call him Herr Schopenhauer—which had an immediate effect ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... of 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 ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... announced his intention of having a "big talk," he immediately lights his pipe and relapses into silence until the big talk shall break out accidentally and naturally. But Julia, having neither the pipe nor the Indian's stolidity, found herself under the necessity of beginning abruptly. Every minute of delay made her position worse. For every minute increased her doubt ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... demanded charity as clamorously as so many Italians; only a few faces were of a clear dark, as if stained by walnut-juice, and it was plain that the Hurons were fading, if not dying out. They responded with a queer mixture of French liveliness and savage stolidity to the colonel's jocose advances. Great lean dogs lounged about the thresholds; they and the women and children were alone visible; there were no men. None of the houses were fenced, save the chief's; this stood behind a neat ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... was made, the members of the Wild West company entered special coaches and were whirled toward London. Then even the stolidity of the Indians was not proof against sights so little resembling those to which they had been accustomed, and they showed their pleasure and appreciation by frequent repetition of ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... lieutenants sometimes cracked and broke away the formidable husks which enveloped divine kernels in the hearts of some of the wretches, and she frequently wept at the stories of victories gained over monsters whose defences of silence and stolidity had suddenly fallen into ruin above the slow but persistent sapping of constant kindness. Acute tinglings and chilling thrills would pervade her entire body when she read that on Christmas every wretch seemed to become for that day, at least, a gracious man; that the sight ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... have taken the Boer character second-hand, or have not taken the trouble to enter into his feelings or obtain his friendship, have often been misled by his quiet phlegmatic demeanour, which at times verges on stolidity. They have described him as being sour, morose and unkind. To such he appeared a sort of obstreperous, cantankerous being, who simply delights to quarrel with every man he meets—especially if an Englishman came in his way. Needless to say he ...
— In the Shadow of Death • P. H. Kritzinger and R. D. McDonald
... fair enough; and the burgomaster, who was an honest man and blessed with true Dutch stolidity, after consulting with his clerk and colleague, informed me that inquiries would be made, and that meanwhile I should remain ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... end, when the plates had been generally cleared, and the boys sat staring with the stolidity of repletion at one another across the tables, the junior house-master, Mr. Tinkler, made his appearance. He had lately left a small and little-known college at Cambridge, where he had contrived, contrary to expectation, to evade the uncoveted wooden spoon by just two places, ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... sculpture bears eloquent witness to the closest observation of all its varying and changeful moods. Others have excelled in this or that interpretation of child-life: Greuze with his sentimentalism, the Dutch painters with their stolidity. In Velasquez every child is the scion of some Royal House, in Murillo they are all beggars. They are too often stupid in Michelozzo: in Andrea della Robbia they are always sweet and winsome; Pigalle's children know too much. Donatello alone ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... 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 were used to ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... extremes of the moral scale. The good-natured fool and the man of genius 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 ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... 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
... 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 ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... acquired. In the anxiety, the fear of disgrace, spoke the nineteenth century civilization with which Ben Davis had been more or less closely in touch during twenty years of slavery and fifteen years of freedom. In the stolidity with which he received this sentence for a crime which he had not committed, spoke who knows what trait of inherited savagery? For stoicism ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... 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
... humour 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 and ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... 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 must have vent. He resolved that ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... gushing patroness of art who asked him what were his ideals, his simple reply was "My ideal is to become a good composer." Certain English critics in their fault-finding have been particularly boresome, because, forsooth, Tchaikowsky's music does not show the serenity of Brahms or the solidity or stolidity of their own composers. To the well-fed and prosperous Briton "God's in his Heaven, all's right with the world" is hardly an expression of faith, but a certainty of existence. Not so with the Russian, upon whom the oppression ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... one of the best that has ever been gotten up by the champions of nescience, and is worthy of a statement in the Journal as quite an improvement on the common expression of materialistic stolidity. He claims that he does not deny immortality, but he recognizes no immortality of man—no human soul. He recognizes only the immortality of the world, such as it is, which nobody denies. The future life of man he considers nothing but an illusion, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... most congenial part, in which 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
... just fallen 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 hiding ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... distressed by her 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
... 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 ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... was settling into the stolidity of the obstinate when they are crowded too far; yet she still remembered she must not cease to ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... one of the senior messenger boys came in and approached Spargo. His countenance, usually subdued to an official stolidity, showed signs of something ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher
... motionless, with the stolidity of the veteran hunter waiting to make sure. Torpor rapidly seized on Parker's mind. He shouted as best he could, but his voice was hoarse from hours of shouting into the vastness of the deserted woods. His faculties were ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... still not wholly satisfied. His complete stolidity frustrated every effort she made ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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 ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... have been the nastiest of jars, but there was no play of expression on his finely chiselled to indicate it. There very seldom is on Jeeves's f-c. In moments of discomfort, as I had told Tuppy, he wears a mask, preserving throughout the quiet stolidity of a ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... in case they did not like the other things! It was during this course that Barbara's gravity was a little tried, not so much because of the idea of chicken with sage and onions, as because of the stolidity of her aunt's expression—the girl knowing that if there was one thing that lady was particular about, it was the correct cooking ...
— Barbara in Brittany • E. A. Gillie
... 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 ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... Stareleigh—upon every occasion that we saw him, one of 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 ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... universality of travel in 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 all appearances carried ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... houses 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 ...
— The Dance Festivals of the Alaskan Eskimo • Ernest William Hawkes
... 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 ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... distress so impolitic, so unprincipled, that none but the driest, mustiest, most petrified parish official could be expected to lift up his voice to defend it; so complicated that no man under heaven knows its length or breadth or height or depth; yet it stands to this hour a monument of English stolidity—a marvel of lazy or ignorant statesmanship. Imagine, if you please, a Lord Chief Justice and three Puisnes, all keen, practical men, alive to public policy and the common weal, eager to extricate the truth and do the right, plunging into this "ungodly jungle," thwarted at ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... licence. They burst in audaciously, and with gestures almost frantic, disturb all order which any one hath established for the good of his scholars. Divers outrages they commit, with a wonderful stolidity, punishable by law, did not custom uphold them; that custom evincing them to be the more miserable, in that they now do as lawful what by Thy eternal law shall never be lawful; and they think they do it unpunished, ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... perform their high functions worthily, and no teacher can with impunity evade this responsibility. Somehow, we must contrive to instill the quality of aspiration into the lives of our pupils if we would acquit ourselves of this obligation. To do less than this is to convict ourselves of stolidity ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... to be 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 ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... the 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, they still were first in the deadly hail of Cold Harbor—breaking ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... an Indian Lodge (Sternly, with great emphasis). This is as strong and impressive a piece as MacDowell ever composed for the pianoforte. From the first bar the note of the stern stolidity of the Red man is struck. The rude, elemental power of the bare octaves of the introductory bars is unmistakable. The ensuing stolid oration, punctuated by emotionless grunts, is an ingenious musical sketch of a pow-wow scene in an Indian wigwam. The piece ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... 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, said ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... shocked for a moment out of his Oriental stolidity. A delighted smile spread over his face and he broke into an excited jargon of "pidgin English," ...
— Bert Wilson in the Rockies • J. W. Duffield
... with the stolidity of the old soldier. I have known men who have been informed that they would be court-martialled and most certainly shot, ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... 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 resources, tends to result in a mere grimace; ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... a very inadequate picture of the mental torments to which his hero is exposed. He is frightened by a parrot calling him by name, and by the strangely picturesque incident of the footmark on the sand; but, on the whole, he takes his imprisonment with preternatural stolidity. His stay on the island produces the same state of mind as might be due to a dull Sunday in Scotland. For this reason, the want of power in describing emotion as compared with the amazing power of describing facts, 'Robinson Crusoe' is a book for boys rather ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... so with an air of indifference, as if hunting 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 marked ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... 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
... 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 annexed Tuscany ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... faintly conjecture Mr. Wintermuth's surprise and genuine anguish upon receiving, one bright April morning, a communication in German, which, being translated by Mr. Otto Bartels with something more than his customary stolidity, proved to read, stripped of all superfluous verbiage, substantially ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... bed. The sergeant sprung in and was covered up without a word. There was no time then for plans and explanations. A moment later the door was broken, and a score of fierce-visaged men streamed in. Now the girl was stolidity itself. ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... at this revolutionary more carefully than he ever had before. Broad-browed and strong-chinned, with a fineness in the honest gray eyes that were like Kerry's, Burne was a man who gave an immediate impression of bigness and security—stubborn, that was evident, but his stubbornness wore no stolidity, and when he had talked for five minutes Amory knew that this keen enthusiasm had in it ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... more useful scale. If we survey the institutions and the monuments with care, and refer to their origin, associations and purposes, the historical and economical national facts are revealed with the utmost clearness and unity. The old Bastile represented, in its gloomy stolidity, the whole tragedy of the Revolution; and St. Genevieve combines the holy memories of the early church with that of the first French kings; the site of a fosse commune attests the valor of republican martyrs; the Champs Elysees ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... 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 that he might be called upon to lie also, to save not himself, but Scaife. If he ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... and he had deprived her of her unionist trump card. The Czar found his project of becoming Grand Duke of a Greater Bulgaria blocked by the action of this same hated kinsman. Is it surprising that his usual stolidity gave way to one of those fits of bull-like fury which aroused the fear of all who beheld them? Thenceforth between the Emperor Alexander and Prince Alexander the relations might be characterised by the curt phrase which Palafox hurled at the French from the weak walls of Saragossa—"War ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... 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
... 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
... 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, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... doubted that 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 ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... 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, and a motley contingent of the passengers themselves. Amongst ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... With the stolidity of their race the Britishers did not show any surprise, as, some time afterward, they strolled down toward Tom's big craft, after supper, and looked it over. Soon they went back to their own camp, and a little later, Koku, who walked toward it, ...
— Tom Swift and his Wizard Camera - or, Thrilling Adventures while taking Moving Pictures • Victor Appleton
... elation and tightly clutching the precious box, Drew hastened to the rail where the men were preparing to launch the boat. Wah Lee and Namco stood by, blinking with true Oriental stolidity. They betrayed neither eagerness nor reluctance, nor was there the slightest trace of curiosity. For them it was all in ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... 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 a ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... 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
... 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 ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... answered Steinmetz, with the Teutonic stolidity of manner which sometimes came over him. "But ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... outraged into a chronic state of secret ever-ready hatred. Here are innocent, small countries, defenceless through their position and size. Here is France rich, careless, super-modern and cynic. Here is England comfortable to stolidity, prosperous and secure to dullness in her own half belief in a world civilization, which no longer argues in terms of blood and steel. And here—in a well-entrenched position in the midst of it all—within ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... a marching safari. The two shenzi guides pointed and grinned, much pleased with themselves. Their pleasure was short lived; for they were promptly seized, disarmed, and tied together. The grieved astonishment of their expressions almost immediately faded into fatalistic stolidity. So many ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... a broken chair in the room, and I got a leg of it loose and put it down beside me where it was not visible, but where I might get at it in a hurry if necessary. I moved that the bill be reported favorably. This was voted down without debate by the "combine," some of whom kept a wooden stolidity of look, while others leered at me with sneering insolence. I then moved that it be reported unfavorably, and again the motion was voted down by the same majority and in the same fashion. I then put the bill in my pocket and announced that I would report ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... were worth a thousand times more to Britain than the gilded corruption of Rome. But in the course of time the Saxons or English themselves lost spirit (S36). Their besetting sin was a stolidity which degenerated into animalism and ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... gray duffle greatcoats like those used by our 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
... 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
... way at all into Mr. Becker's patient kind of equanimity, the utter quietude of his personality, which could efface itself behind a newspaper for two or even three hours at a time, never revealed it. His was the stolidity of an oak, tickled rather than assailed by ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... quite plain now," he answered seriously, the young girl's sarcasm slipping harmlessly from his Indian stolidity. ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... waiting for him to say something, though they were waiting for different things. Mr. Roy put his hands behind him, balanced himself on his toes, hoped that Captain Benyon had enjoyed his cruise,—though he should n't care much for the navy himself,—and evidently wondered at the stolidity of his wife's visitor. Benyon knew he was speaking, for he indulged in two or three more observations, after which he stopped. But his meaning was not present to our hero. This personage was conscious of only one thing, ...
— Georgina's Reasons • Henry James
... a thousand pardons!" returned the strange seaman, with a grave inclination of his body. "The stolidity of your worship's countenance deceived me. It may be, indeed, unreasonable to expect any Alderman to know the position of the Atlantic Ocean! And yet, gentlemen, on the honor of a man who has seen ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... 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 ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various |
