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"Hallo!" shouted Lumley and Spooner simultaneously, as they bounded rather than rose from my bed. Before they had crossed the threshold I was out of bed and into my trousers. There is nothing like the cry of "Fire!" for producing prompt action or paralysis! Also for inducing imbecile stupidity. I could not find my moccasins! Thought is quick quicker than words.
Besides, music is so thoroughly an expression of mood, and a good letter has so necessarily a unity of mood, that musicians, ex officio, tend to write correspondence that is literary without trying to be so, sincere without stupidity.
"No one has ever denied that to your race. But you have also the unconquerable stupidity which makes heroes and victims of your soldiers." Julien smiled. "Well, I am at least warned, and for that I thank you. Now let me ask you another question. You have told me this very strange thing about yourself and Herr Freudenberg. You have told me of your feelings concerning him.
It is only right to add, for the sake of fairness, thought Des Esseintes, that it is not the awkward man, who generally loses no time in disappearing, but rather the woman, the victim of his stupidity, who expiates the crime of having saved an innocent life.
"Why, he takes me for one of their party," thought Hilary; and, dark though it was, he felt astonished at the man's stupidity, for it did not occur to him then that he was hatless, that his hair was rough, his face and hands anything but clean, and his old uniform shrunken by his immersion, and so caked with mud and dirt, and withal so torn and ragged, that even by broad daylight anyone would have strongly doubted that he was a king's officer, while in the gloom of that ravine he could easily be taken for a rough-looking carrier belonging to their gang.
Robina replied, with unnecessary severity as I thought, that an architect, if anyone, might have known the difference between the right side of a house and the wrong; but presumed that youth and inexperience could always be pleaded as excuse for stupidity. I cannot myself see why Robina should have been so much annoyed.
Lives had been lost, it is true; but that was owing to the stupidity of other people of the nuns who had run for shelter when no danger threatened save in their own silly imaginations, and of the peasants who had come blundering to their assistance where no assistance was required; the latter were the people responsible for the bloodshed, since they had attacked the dragoons.
The news of the arrival of the strangers had come to him late at night, and, with Whipshire stupidity, he had thought that any one coming from the wilds of British America must be but a savage after all. "Very well; I wouldn't throw myself out of a place, if I were you." "Oh, no, sir! Beg pardon, sir, I " "Attend to your hounds there, Lugley."
They know they are not ignorant, except as everyone is ignorant who lacks contact with new customs and changes in world progress. They are fully cognizant of their lack of that knowledge which "comes only out of a book." But whatever their educational shortcomings, no one has ever laid at their door the charge of stupidity. Raised in nature's school they are masters of its non-elective course.
Similar jests have been long current in other countries of Europe and throughout Asia, and accident or malice may have fixed the stigma of stupidity on any particular spot.
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