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There was the same discursiveness in his talk as in his sermon, Harry thought; and the same uneasy restlessness of manner. "Then, we give to various causes, and and there is, also, my own salary " "That is what it was intended for," said Harry. "I hope the two hundred dollars will be of some use to you, and then, indirectly, it will help your church."
Staines bloomed again, and they gave one or two unpretending little dinners at the Bijou. Dr. Staines admitted no false friends to these. They never went beyond eight; five gentlemen, three ladies. By this arrangement the terrible discursiveness of the fair, and man's cruel disposition to work a subject threadbare, were controlled and modified, and a happy balance of conversation established.
It is well to avoid discursiveness, over-use of parentheses, and positiveness of statement. Keep your desires and feelings from over-coloring your views. A flexible attitude of mind is more likely to win an opponent to your way of thinking. Take special pains to enter into the minds and feelings of others. Be interested in what they want to talk about. Let your interest be deep and sincere.
But for an end all abstinences are permissible, and if the kinetic type of believer finds both his individual and his associated efficiency enhanced by a systematic discipline, if he is convinced that he must specialize because of the discursiveness of his motives, because there is something he wants to do or be so good that the rest of them may very well be suppressed for its sake, then he must suppress.
He goes a long way about, but never tires of his circuitous journey. Ploddingly and perseveringly he zigzags from one point to another. He alters his course as often as the crooked way of his subject changes. He twists, turns, and diverges without the slightest inconvenience to himself. He likes nothing better than to trace out details. His talking disease is discursiveness.
The major had proposed the army, and they had drunk deep to their noble selves. A young man of weak expression and quavering legs had proposed "The commerce of Aureataland," coupled with the name of Mr. John Martin, in laudatory but incoherent terms, and I was on my legs replying. Oh, that speech of mine! For discursiveness, for repetition, for sheer inanity, I suppose it has never been equaled.
He set himself to work, therefore, hurried on his business with an activity which nothing could discourage, neither Oriental discursiveness that refined fair-spoken politeness, under which is hidden ferocity nor coolly indifferent smiles, nor averted looks, invoking divine fatalism when human lies fail.
He could not understand it; but he felt he had been, somehow, shamelessly betrayed by Nafferton. He realized that he had wrapped himself up in the Pigskin without need, and that he could not well set himself right with his Government. All his acquaintances asked after his "nebulous discursiveness" or his "blatant self-sufficiency," and this made him miserable.
And so, although the desultory maxims of the Works and Days give but a faint image of the comprehensive width and studied discursiveness of the Georgics, yet they present a much more real parallel to it than the learned trifling of Aratus or Nicander.
But though we are tolerant of discursiveness where it affects only the flow of the story, we like it less where it disturbs the flow of the style. A paragraph ought never, by the mere form into which it is cast, to require to be read over and over in order to get at the meaning.