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He was a faithful and affectionate friend, this O'Neal, if a little boastful and muddle-headed. He could shortly afterwards have escaped to France as O'Sullivan did in a French ship, if he had not insisted on going to Skye to try to fetch off the Prince. He missed the Prince, and fell into the hands of Captain Fergusson.
Gould, because upon so many obvious issues they showed themselves strangely muddle-headed. Charles Gould, with a careworn calmness which secured for him at once his wife's anxious sympathy, assured her that he was not comparing. He was an American himself, after all, and perhaps he could understand both kinds of eloquence "if it were worth while to try," he added, grimly.
He had assumed a kind of guardian's attitude in the matter of her relations to the Vavasours who in business affairs had proved both greedy and muddle-headed; he had flattered her woman's vanity by the insight he had freely allowed her into the possibilities and the difficulties of his own Parliamentary position, and of his relations to Ferrier; and he had kept alive a kind of perpetual interest and flutter in her mind concerning him, by the challenge he was perpetually offering to the opinions and ideas in which she had been brought up while yet combining it with a respect toward her father's memory, so courteous, and, in truth, sincere, that she was alternately roused and subdued.
It is fortunately probable that the very muddle-headed reasoning which is producing such curious results as these, at a time when the world is preparing to enter on a period of closer co-operation and improved and extended relations between one country and another, is confined, in fact, to a few noisy people who possess in a high degree the faculty of successful self-advertisement.
"You muddle-headed idiot, you did it to injure me, for you must have had some idea in your stupid thick brain that it would do me harm. But come on. You have confessed it, and you shan't go alone to the Doctor to say that you repent and that you are sorry for it all, for you shall come with me. Quick! Now, at once, before the breakfast-bell rings; and we will see what the Doctor says.
"Muddle isn't ended by transferring power from the muddle-headed few to the muddle-headed many, and then cheating the many out of it again in the interests of a bureaucracy of sham experts. But that seems the limit of the liberal imagination. There is no real progress in a country, except a rise in the level of its free intellectual activity. All other progress is secondary and dependant.
So in effect they left the Britishers there and passed back behind their own minefield. So far as regards reports, that was victory enough for any one except those muddle-headed civilians at Whitehall. They deceived the world with that infernal bulletin, and incidentally me. It was on that statement I gave you my orders, not on ours." "It's a damned unfortunate business!" Van Teyl sighed.
The jury, muddle-headed, obstinate country folk, had made up their minds that Lord Loudwater was the kind of man to be murdered, and that, therefore, he had been murdered. They brought in the verdict that Lord Loudwater had been murdered by some person or persons unknown. Mr. Flexen, Mr. Carrington and the Coroner were annoyed, but they had had too wide an experience of juries to be surprised.
It struck me that the two represented two sides of Potterism the intellectual and moral. Clare, the ignorant, muddle-headed sentimentalist; Jane, reacting against this, but on her part grabbing and exploiting.
A nation that has a muddle-headed literature, a nation that to say nothing of not being able to express what it has, has not even made a beginning at expressing what it wants; a nation that has not a great, eager, glowing literature, a sublime clear-headedness about what it is for a nation that cannot put itself into a great book, a nation that cannot weave itself together even in words into a book that can be unfurled before the people like a flag where everybody can see it and everybody can share it, look up to it, live for it, sleep for it, get up in the morning and work for it work for the vision of what it wants to be cannot be a great nation.
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