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Updated: September 26, 2025
The only allusion he made to what we had talked of the last time we were together was to exclaim suddenly, "How can I tell you how easy she has made it? She is so sweet, so noble. She really is a perfect creature!" I took for granted that he was talking of his future wife, but in a moment, as we were at cross-purposes, perceived that he meant Lady Vandeleur. This seemed to me really ominous.
How a Romantic would have lingered over the facial expression of the general, and how a Naturalist would have analysed that 'tapage'! And yet, with all their efforts, would they have succeeded in conveying that singular impression of disturbance, of cross-purposes, of hurry, and of ill-defined fear, which Beyle with his quiet terseness has produced?
As if to complete a very cat's-cradle of cross-purposes, Washington had heard of it only through the Richmond newspapers. The collapse of the northern column, coupled with the Confederate occupation of Port Hudson, had completely changed the nature of the problem confided to Banks for solution.
They'd make you think it was the most complicated, rotten, intriguing business imaginable; all misunderstandings and cross-purposes, and the Lord knows what. But it isn't. It's jolly simple, or it can be. Here we are, you and I, and we aren't at loggerheads, and we've got enough to eat and a pair of boots apiece, and the sun, and the sea, and old Etna behaving nicely and what more do we want?"
Offord was capable of pretending he liked you to do even when he didn't this, I mean, if he thought YOU liked them. If it happened that you didn't either which was rare, yet might be of course there were cross-purposes; but Brooksmith was there to prevent their going very far. This was precisely the way he acted as moderator; he averted misunderstandings or cleared them up.
The internal chemical processes are at cross-purposes; beneficent juices lose their way and work harm in other provinces, while what is malignant may attack the very core of our organism. In a word, the condition of the greatest mental distress becomes the condition of the greatest bodily sickness.
So they kept playing at cross-purposes, without either getting much out of the other. Jawleyford's intimacy with Lord Scamperdale seemed to have diminished with propinquity, for he now no longer talked of him 'Scamperdale this, and Scamperdale that Scamperdale, with whom he could do anything he liked'; but he called him 'My Lord Scamperdale, and spoke of him in a reverent and becoming way.
I could only stand with my own letter in my hands until he had the good taste to leave me by myself. "W. F. Raffles! We had mistaken EACH OTHER for W. F. Raffles for the new manager who had not yet arrived! Small wonder we had conversed at cross-purposes; the only wonder was that we had not discovered our mutual mistake. How the other man would have laughed! But I I could not laugh.
When this genus of Americans abroad comes together with the other genus with the people who think the most wretched daub that hangs in the most obscure corner of a European gallery, labelled with prudent indefiniteness "of the school of ," better far than the most conscientious work by the most gifted of American artists and a discussion arises, as it is sure to do, on the relative merits of Europe and America, then indeed does Greek meet Greek, and, both starting from equally false premises and with equally false views, the cross-purposes, the rabid comparing of things between which no comparison is possible, the amount of absurd nonsense spoken on either side, and the profound disdain of one for the other, furnish a great deal of amusement to Europeans, but make an American who has any self-respect suffer no small amount of mortification.
It was but for four hundred years and those years of confusion and of the gradual elimination of the supernatural that the two had been at cross-purposes.
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