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"You're much too smart with your tongue, young 'un," said Miss Hepsy severely, and then relapsed into stolid silence. The click of her knitting needles, the ticking of the clock, and the rain beating on the panes, were the only sounds to be heard in the house. Tom drew a half-sheet of paper and a pencil from his pocket, laid it on the table, and kept his attention there for a few minutes.
It was the chief object he had had in view since he had himself been converted to the truth. He immediately broke ground. His mother and Laneta were very much astonished at his doctrine, but they would not acknowledge that he was right. Father Nicholas had scarcely a word to say in return, so he put on the stolid look of a schoolboy brought up unwillingly to receive a lecture.
His court was sleepy, lackadaisical, unemotional, impregnable to the taunts of progression; his people were thrifty, stolid and absolutely stationary in their loyalty to the ancient traditions of the duchy; his army was a mere matter of taxation and not a thing of pomp or necessity.
For I know she loves me; I know it far better than she knows it herself, the dear innocent child! and I will not have her torn from me to waste her life in a lonely, barren convent, or to be the wife of a stolid peasant. I am a man of my word, and I will vindicate my right to her in the face of God and man." "Well, well, my son, as I said before, patience, one thing at a time.
Bob observed a noticeable change in his companion's demeanour, when he arrived at the tree and, on passing the last garden, his face assumed a stolid expression; his brisk, springy walk settled down into a business pace; his words became few; and he was again a steady, and mechanical, clerk. A fortnight later, Bob was summoned to the counting house. "Mr. Bale wishes to see you," Mr. Medlin said.
The murmur of Hugh's recital, rising now and then to some melodramatic climax, then dropping cautiously, rippled on, broken now and again by Sylvie's ejaculations. Behind the door Bella stood like a wooden block, colorless and stolid as though she understood not a syllable of what she heard. But after a rigid hour she faltered away, stumbled across the kitchen and out into the snow.
One of them now smiled broadly, and another so far forgot himself and his dignity as to wink; but all the rest, as American freemen by birth or adoption, united in a stolid determination to refrain from seeing, or at least from acknowledging, any distinguishing peculiarity, any differentiation above all, any savor of superiority.
This last came one evening as a variant in the usual formula. It startled Chug a little, so that he held the girl off the better to look at her. She was Wanda something-or-other, and anybody but Chug would have been alive to the fact that she had been stalking him for weeks with a stolid persistence. "Danced with you three times to-night, haven't I?" he demanded.
With a sudden return of his inspiration, Jacob retorted, affecting an air of stolid indifference: "Jes' ez ye choose. I won't hev ter ax Becky Stiles twict." And he turned to go. "I never said no, Jacob," said Cynthia precipitately. "I never said ez how I wouldn't hev ye." "Waal, then, jes' come along with me right now while I hitch up the mare. I ain't a-goin' ter leave yer a-standin' hyar.
He was clever, and gifted with readiness of speech, but something in the audience baffled him; whether it was the stolid imperturbability of the faces in the back benches, or May Webster's half-amused, half-scornful smile just below him, he could not decide. But he pulled himself together, determining to state his case as shortly and clearly as he could.
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