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People who did nothing, or who did not know exactly what they were going to do, or who did not take the most direct way to accomplish what they set their hands to, were objects of her entire contempt, a contempt shown less frequently by anything she said, than by a kind of stony grimness, as if she scorned to say anything about the matter.
"You must know," she said, "that in my family, as in most historical families particularly Corsican there have been many tragedies. In some cases merely orthodox tragedies a smile, a blow, a groan; in other cases peculiar tragedies peculiar even in that country and in the grimness of the mediæval age.
But John Milton, though but a weak-eyed boy with a chronic headache, had a deal of whipcord fiber in his make-up. He stood the test and grubbed at his books every night until the clock tolled twelve. He was born at a peculiar time, being a child of the Reformation married to the Renaissance. The toughness and grimness of Calvin were united in him with the tenderness of Erasmus.
The voice of Darius, ordinarily weak and languid, was rising and becoming strong. "Well, you'd be falling up and down the cellar steps. You know how dark they are. Supposing you hurt yourself?" "Ye'd only be too glad if I killed mysen!" said Darius, with a touch of his ancient grimness. There was a pause.
The friendly smile rippled again at the corners of Blount's steady gray eyes, but this time it was shot through with a faint suggestion of the Blount grimness. "It has touched me on the sympathetic side, Dick. I saw a large-hearted, open-handed old cattle-king wading good-naturedly into the muddy stream of politics to gratify an ambition that wasn't at all his own a woman's ambition.
"Their hearts were soft with whiskey, And their heads were soft with blows." A wild, frolicking, drinking, fiddling, courting, horse-racing, riotous merry-making, a sort of Protestant carnival, relaxing the grimness of Puritanism for leagues around it.
"I see no necessity for it. What do I care, whether I live or not?" "Well, then, I am obliged to ask whether you feel it incumbent upon you to pay your debts?" The last words came out with a jerk, after a little pause which proved what it cost Warburton to speak them. To save his countenance, he assumed an unnatural grimness of feature, staring Franks resolutely in the face.
He had reached the stage in a young man's life when the grimness of the general human situation first becomes clear; and the realization of this causes ambition to halt awhile. In France it is not uncustomary to commit suicide at this stage; in England we do much better, or much worse, as the case may be. The love between the young man and his mother was strangely invisible now.
"You seem to know them well," I remarked, fearful she would observe the emotion I could not quite keep out of my face. "No," she returned, with an assumption of grimness, which was evidently meant for sarcasm, "not well. Every one knows the Pollards, but I never heard any one say they knew them well." "Didn't Mr. Barrows?"
In customary British fashion, the O.C. and the Inspector strove to mask their emotions under an exaggerated grimness of mien, only their eyes betraying their feelings.
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