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The days that immediately follow this experience may not be happy days. Many a man has to serve and wait ere he can awaken love in her who is to him the one woman in the world. Many a woman has to wait and wonder and face distress. Then, too, till the stage of mutual acknowledgment is reached love makes men and women awkward. They do uncouth, crude, and clumsy things. They get into muddles.
"You sit down and go on eating. The difficulty is what to call it?" "Oh, do godfathers provide the names?" "I think so. It is what they are there for, I fancy. That is about all there is in it, I believe." "And can't you find anything in the dictionary?" "Well, I don't think the dictionary is helping as much as I expected. It only muddles me.
He puts his thumb upon the slab and makes the thumbmark first with the utmost deliberation. Meanwhile he studies the other two entries. The "numbers" of the previous guests above are complex muddles of letters and figures. He writes his name, then with a calm assurance writes down his number, A.M.a.1607.2.ab+. I am wrung with momentary admiration.
I don't mind the exclamation of any old stager who drinks Madeira worth from two to six Bibles a bottle, and burns, according to his own premises, a dozen souls a year in the cigars with which he muddles his brains.
With that I had got my problem clear, and the solution, so far as I was concerned, lay in finding out the point in the ostensible life of politics at which I could most subserve these ends. I was still against the muddles of Bromstead, but I had hunted them down now to their essential form.
"How did you know that! And what does it all amount to! Blame yourself all you like, dear, if it does you any good, but don't make him out a fool! There's not much that comes to us straight in this world not even orders, you'll find. But we have to take it straight and leave the muddles and the blunders as they are. That's the brave man's courage and the brave woman's.
And the school, too, must answer for the fact that although unless he is one of the small specialized set who "swat" at games he plays cricket and football quite without distinction, he regards these games as much more important than military training and things of that sort, spends days watching his school matches, and thumbs and muddles over the records of county cricket to an amazing extent.
He smiled. "I think we differ as to where the root of the mischief lies. You place it in a lack of appreciation of the value of human life." "Rather of the sacredness of human personality." "Put it as you like. To me the great cause of our muddles and mistakes seems to lie in the mental disease called religion." "Do you mean any religion in particular?" "Oh, no!
To be free, released from Sonya... She was right," he thought, remembering what the governor's wife had said: "Nothing but misfortune can come of marrying Sonya. Muddles, grief for Mamma... business difficulties... muddles, terrible muddles! Besides, I don't love her not as I should. O, God! release me from this dreadful, inextricable position!" he suddenly began to pray.
Even your modern Englishman as the saying goes "muddles through." The minds of our American forefathers were not always lucid. The mysticism of the New England Calvinists sometimes bred fanaticism. The practical and the theoretical were queerly blended. The essential unorderliness of the American mind is admirably illustrated by that "Father of all the Yankees," Benjamin Franklin.
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