Becky resumed her picture inspections with Alfred, but as the minutes dragged along and no Tom came to suffer, her triumph began to cloud and she lost interest; gravity and absent-mindedness followed, and then melancholy;
The shock of losing my purse cured me of all my former absent-mindedness.
While the first post in the series looked at the transience of memory, how memory degrades over time, absent-mindedness occurs when we're not really concentrating in the first place.
His absent-mindedness during the experimenting nearly caused an explosion of the chemical.
