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His restlessness and absentmindedness could not escape the observation of Mrs. Farquhar, and as the poor fellow sadly needed a confidante, she was soon in possession of his story. "I hate slang," she said, when he had painted the situation black enough to suit Mrs.
Nevertheless, notwithstanding his absentmindedness, he was never too much absorbed to maintain toward Celestina an old-fashioned deference very appealing to one accustomed to being ignored and slighted.
The rigid mechanism which we occasionally detect, as a foreign body, in the living continuity of human affairs is of peculiar interest to us as being a kind of ABSENTMINDEDNESS on the part of life. Were events unceasingly mindful of their own course, there would be no coincidences, no conjunctures and no circular series; everything would evolve and progress continuously.
On the stairs a moist pungent odour of perfumes saluted his nose: evidently Miss Delacour had come while he was out in O'Neill's. He crammed his cap back again into his pocket and re-entered the office, assuming an air of absentmindedness. "Mr. Alleyne has been calling for you," said the chief clerk severely. "Where were you?"
He glanced through them casually, but with an absentmindedness which did not escape his housekeeper when she came in. Mrs. Burns was determined to tell him something, so determined, that as soon as she entered, he felt it coming. He knew that was why she came. The bluff of asking him if he got his telephone messages was too simple. Mrs. Burns was a sad looking woman, with a tired voice.
Systematic absentmindedness, like that of Don Quixote, is the most comical thing imaginable: it is the comic itself, drawn as nearly as possible from its very source.
But, with his usual absentmindedness, Braddock had forgotten all about that, and sat in his chair rubbing his head quite pink and rattling on cheerfully. "I went down with Hope to the embankment," he continued, "but neither of us could see any sign of a boat. There's the rude, short jetty, of course, and if a boat came, a boat could go away without leaving any trace. Perhaps that is so.
Was it possible that I could convince him that I was merely the victim of my own absentmindedness, and not an unprincipled creature trying to obtain a ride upon false pretenses? How I wished that Alec or Alonzo were there. But they weren't because I wanted them. If I HADN'T wanted them they would have been there by the dozen. And I couldn't decide what to say to the conductor when he came around.
It owes its entire being to the structure of the sentence or to the choice of the words. It does not set forth, by means of language, special cases of absentmindedness in man or in events. It lays stress on lapses of attention in language itself. In this case, it is language itself that becomes comic.
We have shown that the comic character always errs through obstinacy of mind or of disposition, through absentmindedness, in short, through automatism. At the root of the comic there is a sort of rigidity which compels its victims to keep strictly to one path, to follow it straight along, to shut their ears and refuse to listen.
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