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"Come in that dashed woodpecker out there!" he shouted, for it was his habit to express himself with a generous strength towards the junior members of his staff. The young man who entered looked exactly like a second clerk in a provincial seed-merchant's office which, strangely enough, he chanced to be. His chief characteristic was an intense ordinariness.
Look at them attentively: they caper about and squeal with joy like puppies in the sun. They are happy, they are victorious! What is there of Byron in them!... and with that, such ordinariness! What a low-bred, irritable vanity? What an abject craving to faire du bruit autour de son nom, without noticing that son nom.... Oh, it's a caricature!
But in George, though he sturdily shared his stepfather's views, the resulting righteous energy was diverted to architectural creation. The circumstances in which, about a month later, George lunched with the Ingram family at their flat in the Rue d'Athènes, near the Gare St. Lazare, Paris, had an appearance of the utmost simplicity and ordinariness.
But when Catholics began to breathe a little more freely and to creep out of their burrows somewhat less nervously; when, in fact, they were seen to be, at least in outward semblance, much as other men; some regard had to be paid to statements that could be checked by observation; and the Papist's disappointing ordinariness had to be attributed to dissimulation or to be otherwise interpreted into accord with the preposterous principles by which their lives were thought to be governed.
He lived in a blaze of adoration as a student, and, though this adoration was tempered by the abuse of opponents in his later years, he still had a way of going about as a conqueror with his charm. Had he only had a little ordinariness in his composition to harden him, he would almost certainly have ended as the leading Irish statesman of his day.
They had a certain basic ordinariness which prevented their making any great hits, and which kept them disillusioned all the while. They remembered their poor and insignificant days. "And I hear you were playing in the orchestra at Covent Garden. We came back from London last week. I enjoyed Beecham's operas so much." "Which do you like best?" said Aaron. "Oh, the Russian. I think Ivan.
Either the distinction will strike the critics, and they will call it pompous and unreal, or the ordinariness will come home to them, and they will deny the distinction. This is the dramatist's constant dilemma.
How came they to hit upon the ugliest tree, and the ugliest creeper, on earth? Infallible instinct! Zurich: who shall sum up thy merciless vulgarity? So this old man had been there. And I remembered an expression in a book recently written by a friend of mine who, oddly enough, had encountered some of these very Italians in Zurich. He talks of its "horrible dead ordinariness" some such phrase.
With these alarmed words Mrs. Tams appeared suddenly from behind the kitchen door; she seemed a little out of breath, as far as Louis could hear; he could not see her very well. The thought flashed through his mind. "She's been listening at doors." "Oh! There you are," he said, with an effort at ordinariness of demeanour. "Just go in to Mrs. Fores, will you? Something's the matter with her.
But for the rest, there was mile after mile of dead, uninspired country uninspired, so neutral and ordinary that it was almost destructive. One gets this feeling always in Switzerland, except high up: this feeling of average, of utter soulless ordinariness, something intolerable. Mile after mile, to Zurich, it was just the same.
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