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Updated: June 28, 2025
'There is nothing wonderful in that, said I; 'we are at the commencement of a philological age, every one studies languages; that is, every one who is fit for nothing else; philology being the last resource of dulness and ennui, I have got a little in advance of the throng, by mastering the Armenian alphabet; but I foresee the time when every unmarriageable miss, and desperate blockhead, will likewise have acquired the letters of Mesroub, and will know the term for bread, in Armenian, and perhaps that for wine.
I had known him only as a quiet, self-possessed man who, from policy if nothing else, I believed must be as circumspect in his life as in his clothes. Now he spoke to me. His greeting was perfunctory. In his eyes was that watery dulness which comes with the later stages of conviviality. His hair was tousled, his collar crushed, his tie awry; for whiskey muddles the clothes as well as the brain.
This rationality must not be supposed to be dulness. Folly is dull. Now, would women be less charming if they had more power, or at least more appreciation, of reasoning? Their flatterers tell them that their intuition is such that they need not man's slow processes of thought.
Our daughter Janet was in this time at a boarding-school in Ayr, so that I was really a most solitary married man. When the spring in this year began to brighten on the brae, the cloud of dulness that had darkened and oppressed me all the winter somewhat melted away, and I could now and then joke again at the never-ending toil and trouble of that busiest of all bees, the second Mrs Balwhidder.
My heart leapt, for all the talk now was of Dover, of the gaiety that would be there, and the corresponding dulness in London, when the King and the Duke were gone to meet Madame d'Orléans. I longed to go, and the little hope I had cherished that Darrell's good offices with the Secretary of State would serve me to that end had vanished.
I know not whether, in thus accounting for my omissions, I shall be thought pleading for my defects, or proclaiming my deserts. In the German author it was a manifest act of pocket-picking to stuff his novel with such insufferable rubbish. And it seemed to me that, by translating it, I should make myself a party to his knavery as well as to his dulness.
The people she wanted would be at Newport or in Europe, and she was too resolutely bent on a definite object, too sternly animated by her father's business instinct, to turn aside in quest of casual distractions. The chief difficulty in the way of her attaining any distant end had always been her reluctance to plod through the intervening stretches of dulness and privation.
But if the day was fraught with difficulties for him, it was fraught with dulness and disappointment for others; for the undercurrent of interest that had stirred at the Easter adjournment, and risen with added force on this first day of the new session, was gradually but surely threatened with extinction, as hour after hour passed, bringing no suggestion of the battle that had on every side been tacitly expected.
All of beautiful and gracious that there had been in religion, all of joyful and animated and eager that there had been in secular life, everything that amused, interested, excited, all fine pictures, great poems, lovely scenes, intrepid thoughts, exercise, work, jests, laughter, perceptions, fancies they were all one now; only sorrow and weariness and dulness and ugliness and greediness were gone.
And she changed the expression on it. But then it looked insincere, meretricious, affected, and always haggard. For a minute Charmian hesitated, almost resolved to go back to bed. But, oh, the dulness of the long evening shut in there! Three hours ago, at Charing Cross Station, she had looked forward to it. But now! Only once in her life had Charmian made up her face.
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