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Do you mean to say that you expect me to drag Miss Battersby over to the Archdeacon's house and dump her down there in a white satin dress with a wedding ring tied round her neck by a ribbon and a stodgy cake tucked under her arm?" "I haven't actually worked out all the details," I said. "I am thinking more of the plan in its broad outlines. After all, the Archdeacon isn't married.
Then there's the Lady Thug, Square jaw, square shoulder, sort of bulging out at the top you know in decollete one cannot help thinking 'one more struggle and she'll be free!" "Oh, fie, Mr. Sansome," laughed Nan, half shocked. Sansome rattled on. The ultimate effect was to convey an impression of San Francisco society such as existed at all as stodgy, stupid, pretentious, unattractive.
Surely in those days before his health broke down, with his fervid imagination, his intimacy with the masterworks of music and poetry, he must have drawn in a richer air than the reek of a Leipzig café, his inner vision must have seen a diviner light than the common light of the stodgy Leipzig streets, with his inner ear he must have heard a music sweeter than the hoarse arguments of students half-filled with lager-beer.
Harlots, or those who might well pass as such, beside the best morale there is in women; daughters of washerwomen beside daughters of such proud blood as we have; bookmakers' wives, blazing with the jewels which will be pawned to-morrow, beside German housewives on a Saturday night revel; jockies and touts from the race tracks beside roistering students from Stanford and Berkeley; soldiers of fortune blown in by the Pacific winds, taking their first intoxicating taste of civilization after their play with death and wealth, beside stodgy burghers grown rich in real estate; clerks beside magnates all united in the worship of the body.
It's better than stodgy sense: literature is blocked up with that. Why not follow their advice?" "Because I don't believe they are right. I'm not a clown; I don't mean to be. Because a man has a sense of humour it doesn't follow he has nothing else. That is only one of my gifts, and by no means the highest. I have knowledge of human nature, poetry, dramatic instinct. I mean to prove it to you all.
There seems to me no escape for them. Do what they will, unless they become suffragettes and smash windows or smack fat policemen, their life drifts one way. Charity? it ends in a charity ball. Politics? it means just garden-parties or stodgy week-ends at country houses, with a little absurd canvassing of rural labourers at election times.
"What for?" "Never mind!" The dinner went on, with the clattering of knives and forks upon plates, and, the meat being ended, the pudding came along, round, stodgy slices, with glittering bits of yellow suet in it, and here and there a raisin, or plum, as we called it, playing at bo-peep with those on the other side, "Spotted Dog," we used to call it, and I got on a little better, for it was nice and warm and sweet, from the facts that the Doctor never stinted us boys in our food, and that, while the cook always said she hated all boys, she contrived to make our dinners tasty and good.
I was getting fat; I was beginning to think that the most important thing in the universe was dinner. Well, I'm not stodgy any longer, Esme Falconer; you've reformed me. But of all the men in all the ages who were ever desperately, consumedly, imbecilely in love " In the distance two figures were strolling toward the blue car, the duke and the duchess.
Friends! but, lacking him, what shall we do to be saved? for truly this 'civilization' of ours is a blood-washed civilization, friends, a reddish Juggernaut, you know, whose wheels cease not: so we should be prying into it, provided we be not now too hide-bound: for that's the trouble that our thoughts grow to revolve in stodgy grooves of use-and-wont, and shun to soar beyond.
And it seemed to him rather tragic that for Clayton, who still looked like a boy, there should be nothing but his day at the mill, his silent evening at home, or some stodgy dinner-party where the women were all middle-aged, and the other men a trifle corpulent. For the first time he was beginning to think of Clayton as a man, rather than a father. Not that all of this was coherently thought out.
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