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A third sat in an attitude of sodden preoccupation, breathing heavily and gazing at the Langleys and at Rose, who wore to-day a wonderful dress. Only a rounded little Jewess, with eyes of black lacquer set in a fat, acquiline face, quite Imogen's least favorite of her girls, showed a proper appreciation. She was as intent and as preoccupied as Jack had been.
Suddenly he was vexatiously conscious of hearing his name lazily called, and looking up found that he was on the outskirts of the town, and interrogated by two horsemen. "Got down to walk, and the coach got away from you, Jack, eh?" A little ashamed of his preoccupation, Brace stammered something about "collections."
With his knurly forefinger at his puckered forehead he sat and pondered. He was very silent at supper. The Colonel, still exulting in his apparent victory, said many sneering and savage things, and clattered his knife truculently on his plate. Sproul merely looked at him with that wistful preoccupation that still marked his countenance. "He's a quitter," pondered the Colonel.
Looking back, we wonder sometimes how some of those interims of our waiting time were bridged. The routine work of study and play had to be gone through with in spite of the preoccupation attendant on the art of flying, as studied from prosaic print. It was a wonder, in fact, that the little group from the boys of the Brighton Academy did not tire of the researches in books and periodicals.
Finally, the preoccupation with the decay and disruption of society produces a variant of Shock and Awe in the form of frustration collapsing the will to resist. The significant weakness of this approach is time duration. In many cases, the time required to impose such a regime of Shock and Awe is unacceptably long or simply cannot be achieved by conventional or politically acceptable means.
The longer Madame Claes postponed inquiring into the cause of his preoccupation the less she dared to do so. At the very idea, her blood ran cold and her voice grew faint. At last the thought occurred to her that she had ceased to please her husband, and then indeed she was seriously alarmed.
"My dear boy," said Hilary, "if any bit of my character has crept into Thyme, I'm truly sorry." Stephen took his brother's hand and gave it a good grip; and, Cecilia coming in, they all sat down. Cecilia at once noted what Stephen in his preoccupation had not that Hilary had come to tell them something.
It is confirmed by their strange and picturesque hymnology, in which the passionate desire to be "free," though generally apparently invoked in connection with a future life, is none the less indicative of their temper, and in their preoccupation with those parts of the Old Testament the history of the Exodus, for instance which appeared applicable to their own condition.
That the religion to which the Empire was now converted, the religion of the Catholic Church, should triumph, was their one preoccupation. For this they exiled themselves; for this they would and did run great risks; as minor to this they sank all other things.
They stared at her helplessly, though not kindly; for in their expressions the conflict between desire and policy was almost staringly vivid. And such was their preoccupation, each with the bitterness of his own case, that neither wondered at the other's strange complaisance. Florence made it clear to them that henceforth she was the editor of The North End Daily Oriole.
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