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David's simple-mindedness had roused her to enthusiasm, to admiration; she held out her arms to him and held him tightly to her, while she laid her head upon his shoulder. "You give me my reward as if I had succeeded already," he said. For all answer, Eve held up her sweet face, wet with tears, to his, and for a moment she could not speak.
The strange boy had again bent over the coals with an expression of momentary comfort which bordered on simple-mindedness, while Frederick's features showed the alternating play of a sympathy evidently more selfish than good-humored, and his eyes, in almost glassy clearness, for the first time distinctly showed the expression of that unrestrained ambition and tendency to swagger which afterwards revealed itself as so strong a motive in most of his actions.
Her sincere humility, her timid love of shade and silence, had at last produced in her an ardent desire to disappear, to hide her resounding glory the glory of one whom heaven had chosen and whom the world would not leave in peace in the depth of some unknown darkness; and she longed only for simple-mindedness, for a quiet humdrum life devoted to prayer and petty daily occupations.
But in his rough way he cultivated them. He even helped some of them out of their troubles in consideration for "tips" which were to be delivered when the emergency arose. They accepted his gruffness as simple-mindedness, as blunt honesty. One or two, with their morbid imaginations touched by his seeming generosities, made wistful amatory advances which he promptly repelled.
So much anxiety unnerves me, and then I feel so plainly that I do not understand matters of this kind, that I shall be certain to make some foolish blunder, and that I shall become a laughing-stock. I was not born a cunning knave. They will laugh at my simple-mindedness, and will look upon me as a fool. If, with all this, I was only sure of what I was doing!
The Moravians don't handle their young candidates after this fashion. 'Now Mr. Robertson and his good wife refresh one by the reality and simplicity of their life, the simple-mindedness, the absence of all cant and formalism. I mean the formal observance of a certain set of views about the Sabbath, about going to parties, about reading books, &c., the formal utterance of an accepted phraseology.
She said she'd seen the doctor calling at your house almost every day with a little black bag, and made sure there must have been an operation. She mistook Mr Pamphlett for the doctor, if you ever heard tell of such simple-mindedness." "And the awkward part of it was," Miss Oliver continued in a musing voice, searching her memory "the awkward part was, poor Mrs Pamphlett's being present."
But perhaps rather than these accomplishments it was the man's transparent honesty and simple-mindedness, his love for what is true and noble, and his contempt of what is mean and base, which, unwittingly peeping out through his conversation, attracted her more than all the rest. Ida was no more a young girl, to be caught by a handsome face or dazzled by a superficial show of mind.
It is this fervent devotion, this pure, high, yet simple-mindedness, which gives vitality to ancient works of art, and is to be felt by all who are not insensible to its agency in the time present. Who shall rudely criticise the perspective, the draperies, the absence of “scholastic rule,” in this touching work of a true-hearted man? Not the writer of these lines!
Her sincere humility, her timid love of shade and silence, had at last produced in her an ardent desire to disappear, to hide her resounding glory the glory of one whom heaven had chosen and whom the world would not leave in peace in the depth of some unknown darkness; and she longed only for simple-mindedness, for a quiet humdrum life devoted to prayer and petty daily occupations.
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