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He veered towards the off-chance of this opening, in a delirium of icy fury, and plunged away into the dark lane, walking slowly, on firm legs. It is remarkable how many odd or extraordinary people there are in England. We hear continual complaints of the stodgy dullness of the English. It would be quite as just to complain of their freakish, unusual characters.
"Such a journey is a liberal education in itself, knocking the insularity out of a man if he has any receptive faculty that is and ridding him of all manner of stodgy prejudices. I don't the least undervalue my good fortune. But you talk of remembering. That's stretching a point surely. You must have been a mere baby, my dear Damaris, when you left India."
The idealisation of small comfort ... in a case like Mackworth's, fairly unobjectionable ... but in most cases insufferably stodgy ... the dry-rot of art, literature, life ... leading to a smug conceit that in turn ends in that school of "two hills of corn where one cluster of violets grew before."
He was one of those men, of whom there are so many thousands in every large community, with no breadth of vision, no real subtlety, no craft, no great skill in anything. You would never hear a new idea emanating from Stener. He never had one in his life. On the other hand, he was not a bad fellow. He had a stodgy, dusty, commonplace look to him which was more a matter of mind than of body.
This passage illustrates also the difference between the highly- developed imagination of the one and the stodgy prosaical temperament of the other. Tom could enter into the elementary question of giving his schoolfellow a black eye, but could not possibly enter into the drama of the imaginary arrival of a lion. He was sorely in need of fairy stories.
Doubtless he was a bit mad, as are all the isolated men who sit in distant lands longing for the voices of friendship. Next morning he hastened to take the train for Oxford to get away from his loneliness, which lolled evilly beside him in the compartment. He tried to convey to a stodgy North Countryman his interest in the way the seats faced each other.
It was a pity, I sometimes felt, that he had not studied German as thoroughly as French; Goethe might have done more for him than Baudelaire or Balzac, for in spite of all his stodgy German faults, Goethe is the best guide through the mysteries of life whom the modern world has yet produced.
"No well, Lord Kestervin was English, and he fussed and worried, and looked out trains all the time." "I will have a groom of the chambers." "And they were all casual and indifferent to their poor wives and boresome and bored! And one told long stories, and one was stodgy, and one opened his wife's letters before she was down!"
The poet saw that Waram had not changed so very much a little gray hair in that thick, black mop, a few wrinkles, a rather stodgy look about the waist. No more. He was still Waram, neat, self-satisfied, essentially English.... Grimshaw strangled a feeling of aversion and said quietly: "Well, Waram. How d'you do? I call myself Pilleux now." Waram ignored his hand.
"Good heavens, May, do you think I came home to get married, and live on a stodgy father-in-law? I've got plenty of other things to think about." But although he brushed the matter aside scornfully, May's words remained in his memory. Only men of means and position were wanted in their circle. Jimmy's original intention had been to take a couple of rooms of which Douglas Kelly had told him.
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