And I recall that when the music started and all the children and the mothers were obediently dancing and swaying to the carefully calibrated, fantastically educational music (Learn your letters! Your colors! All while dancing!), I felt someone pulling on my skirt, and looking down, I saw Charlotte with that same steadfast look around her mouth.
There is something about those large eyes and that steadfast look that tells you that you are in the presence of a remarkable actor; and so it has proved in a career that has encompassed everything from Greek tragedy and Ibsen to Pinter and Albee, and that has led Atkins to be revered on both sides of the Atlantic.
Drawn to Michael not for his money - or at least "not only for his money" - Elizabeth finds in Michael's "steadfast, boring look" the complete dependability her father lacked, though this doesn't altogether compensate for the niggling awareness that they don't "laugh a lot together".
Clarke remains steadfast and looks like he could score as many runs as he likes.
When Mrs. Roosevelt died, a poem by Cecil Spring-Rice about the statue was found at her bedside: "O steadfast, deep, inexorable eyes/Set look inscrutable, nor smile nor frown!/O tranquil eyes that look so calmly down/Upon a world of passion and of lies!" My friend Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, first took me to "Grief" a decade ago and makes regular visits.
If the mass grieving filmed in Pyongyang was a mixture of brainwashed reverence, genuine fear of the unknown, choreography, and the seditious risk of looking nonchalant, the images of the young Un at the foot of his father's coffin were a study in how to make a ruling clique look sombre, steadfast and united.
But the way he looks - steadfast, calm and very, very hard - and the way he sees more than the eye ever could (because he views geopolitics metaphorically) make them extended poems.
He surveys the human geography of his native suburbia with what looks like unbridled disgust but is actually an unquenchable and steadfast love.
But the greatest challenge was that once you looked beyond our steadfast trustees, a handful of friends, and productivity from our Centers and Institutes, the donor pool was quite shallow.
For more than a decade, in an unofficial but steadfast way, Ms. Wilson had looked after Mr. Jackson, a 55-year-old man who'd suffered a stroke in his early 40s and was paralyzed on his left side.
Dr. Tramaglini is steadfast in his resolve, and looks forward to the day when his full story is told".
