072. Ignorant
Peeling Back The Layers
There is a fundamental difference between someone who is ignorant and someone who is stupid. Ignorance is something that can be corrected with education while stupidity is incurable.
House could tolerate the ignorant...presuming of course that they were willing to correct their ignorance. But he couldn't stand the stupid. Unfortunately he seemed to end up dealing with the stupid far more than he did the ignorant. He always supposed that there were just far more stupid people in the world than ignorant ones.
He'd come to the conclusion that his fellows were ignorant but mostly interested in correcting that state. Wilson on the other hand was anything but ignorant and he definitely wasn't stupid. In fact Wilson was almost sneakily intelligent. And he hid it behind layers of niceness and charm and people ended up underestimating him.
House did his best not to fall for the charm and the niceness and the deliberate underplaying of intelligence. He mostly succeeded but every now and then Wilson got him. He'd have gotten irritated about that but every time it happened Wilson got this quietly delighted look on his face that House found unaccountably charming and he always forgot about being irritated.
He'd never admit it but he liked being caught out by Wilson. Not that he ever willingly allowed it. If Wilson caught him out it was genuine and not because House had given him a hint. And that's why House really liked it. Because Wilson was anything but ignorant or stupid.