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And though the day was pleasantly warm, she decided that there were about her at least a thousand cases of incipient pneumonia, for not one child in five had on a hat. They raged and dashed and rippled from curb to curb so that they might have made her think of a swift mountain torrent at the bottom of a gloomy canyon, but that the worthy woman was too literal-minded for such fancies.
People, she had noted, had behavior patterns very similar to the complex computer; not as individual units, though as individual units they could also be as surprisingly obtuse as the literal-minded reaction of the computer; but in statistical numbers they had an even greater tendency to act as the computer did.
These were of all sorts from honest literal-minded dealers, through shady contractors and operators, down to grafters and the very lowest type of strong-arm bullies. The tone and respectability came from the first, the practical results from the second.
They cling to a mediæval Morality-Play, Servant-in-the-House idea, a kind of head-waiter idea of what Christ meant. This seems to some of us a literal-minded, Western way of interpreting an Oriental metaphor. We do not believe that Christ meant servanthood.
But Mary was a literal-minded monkey and thought she was referring to quotations from books superior to the ones she used. "Oh, is that so?" said Mary. Charlie, also literal-minded and still after the foot, echoed Rachel, "You bet your life it is." "And I suppose you know all about them, Miss Laskin." Very sarcastic.
"Well, if that's all you want, to die happy," said Judith, the literal-minded, "I will do that much for you!" "Oh gracious, no! That wouldn't do any good! You know I couldn't take any satisfaction letting you do that!" objected Sylvia, peevishly, fuming and fumbling helplessly before the baffling quality of her desires. "I don't want just somebody to pick it up for me.
He was rather a literal-minded young man, as Caroline's brother would have been likely to be. Betty buried her face in her hands. "My head aches," she said, "and I was never in my life so mad and so miserable. I can't understand why everything and everybody should behave so devilishly. You and every one else, I mean. I just simply can't bear to have Nancy suffer so.
And perhaps we, too, do not need to be literal-minded about a prayer that we may hear, or that we may overhear, roaring its way up past our smooth, beautiful lives rudely to Heaven. What is the gist of the prayer to God, and to us? What is it that the men are trying to say in this awful, flaming, blackening metaphor of wishing Lord Devonport dead?
Just think of being able to eat an apple that would teach you all your dates and French verbs." "There weren't any dates then, unless they counted the geological periods; and the Tower of Babel came later, so the French language wasn't invented," objected Tattie. "Oh! don't be so literal-minded. I never meant that Eve sat at a desk and wrote exercises. I'm only telling you I like apples."
Somewhat dazedly, too, he realised at this close range the severely practical aspects of much that he had taught in theory. It was strange, almost unnerving, to behold his own teachings naked of their pulpit rhetoric; to find his long-cherished ideals materialised by literal-minded, practiced men.
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