A little later I was called to Monte Carlo and went for a few days, leaving Oscar, as he said, perfectly2 happy, with good food, excellent champagne3, absinthe and coffee, and his simple fisher friends.
When I came back to La Napoule, I found everything altered and altered for the worse. There was an Englishman of a good class named M—— staying at the hotel. He was accompanied by a youth of seventeen or eighteen whom he called his servant. Oscar wanted to know if I minded meeting him.
“He is charming, Frank, and well read, and he admires me very much: you won’t mind his dining with us, will you?”
“Of course not,” I replied. But when I saw M—— I thought him an insignificant4, foolish creature, who put to show a great admiration5 for Oscar, and drank in his words with parted lips; and well he might, for he had hardly any brains of his own. He had, however, a certain liking6 for the poetry and literature of passion.43
To my astonishment7 Oscar was charming to him, chiefly I think because he was well off, and was pressing Oscar to spend the summer with him at some place he had in Switzerland. This support made Oscar recalcitrant8 to any influence I might have had over him. When I asked him if he had written anything whilst I was away, he replied casually9:
“No, Frank, I don’t think I shall be able to write any more. What is the good of it? I cannot force myself to write.”
“And your ‘Ballad10 of a Fisher Boy’?” I asked.
“I have composed three or four verses of it,” he said, smiling at me, “I have got them in my head,” and he recited two or three, one of which was quite good, but none of them startling.
Not having seen him for some days, I noticed that he was growing stout11 again: the good living and constant drinking seemed to ooze12 out of him; he began to look as he looked in the old days in London just before the catastrophe13.
One morning I asked him to put the verses on paper which he had recited to me, but he would not; and when I pressed him, cried:
“Let me live, Frank; tasks remind me of prison. You do not know how I abhor14 even the memory of it: it was degrading, inhuman15!”
“Prison was the making of you,” I could not help retorting, irritated by what seemed to me a mere16 excuse. “You came out of it better in health and stronger than I have ever known you. The hard living, regular hours and compulsory17 chastity did you all the good in the world. That is why you wrote those superb letters to the ‘Daily Chronicle,’ and the ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’; the State ought really to put you in prison and keep you there.”
For the first time in my life I saw angry dislike in his eyes.
“You talk poisonous nonsense, Frank,” he retorted. “Bad food is bad for everyone, and abstinence from tobacco is mere torture to me. Chastity is just as unnatural18 and devilish as hunger; I hate both. Self-denial is the shining sore on the leprous body of Christianity.”
To all this M—— giggled19 applause, which naturally excited the combative20 instincts in me — always too alert.
“All great artists,” I replied, “have had to practise chastity; it is chastity alone which gives vigour21 and tone to mind and body, while building up a reserve of extraordinary strength. Your favourite Greeks never allowed an athlete to go into the pal22?stra unless he had previously23 lived a life of complete chastity for a whole year. Balzac, too, practised it and extolled24 its virtues25, and goodness knows he loved all the mud-honey of Paris.”
“You are hopelessly wrong, Frank, what madness will you preach next! You are always bothering one to write, and now forsooth you recommend chastity and ‘skilly,’ though I admit,” he added laughing, “that your ‘skilly’ includes all the indelicacies of the season, with champagne, Mocha coffee, and absinthe to boot. But surely you are getting too puritanical26. It’s absurd of you; the other day you defended conventional love against my ideal passion.”
He provoked me: his tone was that of rather contemptuous superiority. I kept silent: I did not wish to retort as I might have done if M—— had not been present.
But Oscar was determined27 to assert his peculiar28 view. One or two days afterwards he came in very red and excited and more angry than I had ever seen him.
“What do you think has happened, Frank?”
“I do not know. Nothing serious, I hope.”
“I was sitting by the roadside on the way to Cannes. I had taken out a Vergil with me and had begun reading it. As I sat there reading, I happened to raise my eyes, and who should I see but George Alexander — George Alexander on a bicycle. I had known him intimately in the old days, and naturally I got up delighted to see him, and went towards him. But he turned his head aside and pedalled past me deliberately29. He meant to cut me. Of course I know that just before my trial in London he took my name off the bill of my comedy, though he went on playing it. But I was not angry with him for that, though he might have behaved as well as Wyndham,44 who owed me nothing, don’t you think?
“Here there was nobody to see him, yet he cut me. What brutes31 men are! They not only punish me as a society, but now they are trying as individuals to punish me, and after all I have not done worse than they do. What difference is there between one form of sexual indulgence and another? I hate hypocrisy32 and hypocrites! Think of Alexander, who made all his money out of my works, cutting me, Alexander! It is too ignoble33. Wouldn’t you be angry, Frank?”
“I daresay I should be,” I replied coolly, hoping the incident would be a spur to him.
“I’ve always wondered why you gave Alexander a play? Surely you didn’t think him an actor?”
“No, no!” he exclaimed, a sudden smile lighting34 up his face; “Alexander doesn’t act on the stage; he behaves. But wasn’t it mean of him?”
I couldn’t help smiling, the dart35 was so deserved.
“Begin another play,” I said, “and the Alexanders will immediately go on their knees to you again. On the other hand, if you do nothing you may expect worse than discourtesy. Men love to condemn36 their neighbours’ pet vice. You ought to know the world by this time.”
He did not even notice the hint to work, but broke out angrily:
“What you call vice, Frank, is not vice: it is as good to me as it was to C?sar, Alexander, Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It was first of all made a sin by monasticism, and it has been made a crime in recent times, by the Goths — the Germans and English — who have done little or nothing since to refine or exalt37 the ideals of humanity. They all damn the sins they have no mind to, and that’s their morality. A brutal38 race; they overeat and overdrink and condemn the lusts39 of the flesh, while revelling40 in all the vilest41 sins of the spirit. If they would read the 23rd chapter of St. Matthew and apply it to themselves, they would learn more than by condemning42 a pleasure they don’t understand. Why, even Bentham refused to put what you call a ‘vice’ in his penal43 code, and you yourself admitted that it should not be punished as a crime; for it carries no temptation with it. It may be a malady44; but, if so, it appears only to attack the highest natures. It is disgraceful to punish it. The wit of man can find no argument which justifies45 its punishment.”
“Don’t be too sure of that,” I retorted.
“I have never heard a convincing argument which condemns46 it, Frank; I do not believe such a reason exists.”
“Don’t forget,” I said, “that this practice which you defend is condemned47 by a hundred generations of the most civilised races of mankind.”
“Mere prejudice of the unlettered, Frank.”
“And what is such a prejudice?” I asked. “It is the reason of a thousand generations of men, a reason so sanctified by secular48 experience that it has passed into flesh and blood and become an emotion and is no longer merely an argument. I would rather have one such prejudice held by men of a dozen different races than a myriad49 reasons. Such a prejudice is incarnate50 reason approved by immemorial experience.
“What argument have you against cannibalism51; what reason is there why we should not fatten52 babies for the spit and eat their flesh? The flesh is sweeter, African travellers tell us, than any other meat, tenderer at once and more sustaining; all reasons are in favour of it. What hinders us from indulging in this appetite but prejudice, sacred prejudice, an instinctive53 loathing54 at the bare idea?
“Humanity, it seems to me, is toiling55 up a long slope leading from the brute30 to the god: again and again whole generations, sometimes whole races, have fallen back and disappeared in the abyss. Every slip fills the survivors56 with fear and horror which with ages have become instinctive, and now you appear and laugh at their fears and tell them that human flesh is excellent food, and that sterile57 kisses are the noblest form of passion. They shudder58 from you and hate and punish you, and if you persist they will kill you. Who shall say they are wrong? Who shall sneer59 at their instinctive repulsion hallowed by ages of successful endeavour?”
“Fine rhetoric60, I concede,” he replied, “but mere rhetoric. I never heard such a defence of prejudice before. I should not have expected it from you. You admit you don’t share the prejudice; you don’t feel the horror, the instinctive loathing you describe. Why? Because you are educated, Frank, because you know that the passion Socrates felt was not a low passion, because you know that C?sar’s weakness, let us say, or the weakness of Michelangelo or of Shakespeare, is not despicable. If the desire is not a characteristic of the highest humanity, at least it is consistent with it.”45
“I cannot admit that,” I answered. “First of all, let us leave Shakespeare out of the question, or I should have to ask you for proofs of his guilt61, and there are none. About the others there is this to be said, it is not by imitating the vices62 and weaknesses of great men that we shall get to their level. And suppose we are fated to climb above them, then their weaknesses are to be dreaded63.
“I have not even tried to put the strongest reasons before you; I should have thought your own mind would have supplied them; but surely you see that the historical argument is against you. This vice of yours is dropping out of life, like cannibalism: it is no longer a practice of the highest races. It may have seemed natural enough to the Greeks, to us it is unnatural. Even the best Athenians condemned it; Socrates took pride in never having yielded to it; all moderns denounce it disdainfully. You must see that the whole progress of the world, the current of educated opinion, is against you, that you are now a ‘sport,’ a peculiarity65, an abnormality, a man with six fingers: not a ‘sport’ that is, full of promise for the future, but a ‘sport’ of the dim backward and abysm of time, an arrested development.”
“You are bitter, Frank, almost rude.”
“Forgive me, Oscar, forgive me, please; it is because I want you at long last to open your eyes, and see things as they are.”
“But I thought you were with us, Frank, I thought at least you condemned the punishment, did not believe in the barbarous penalties.”
“I disbelieve in all punishment,” I said; “it is by love and not by hate that men must be redeemed66. I believe, too, that the time is already come when the better law might be put in force, and above all, I condemn punishment which strikes a man, an artist like you, who has done beautiful and charming things as if he had done nothing. At least the good you have accomplished67 should be set against the evil. It has always seemed monstrous68 to me that you should have been punished like a Taylor. The French were right in their treatment of Verlaine: they condemned the sin, while forgiving the sinner because of his genius. The rigour in England is mere puritanic hypocrisy, shortsightedness and racial self-esteem.”
“All I can say, Frank, is, I would not limit individual desire in any way. What right has society to punish us unless it can prove we have hurt or injured someone else against his will? Besides, if you limit passion you impoverish70 life, you weaken the mainspring of art, and narrow the realm of beauty.”
“All societies,” I replied, “and most individuals, too, punish what they dislike, right or wrong. There are bad smells which do not injure anyone; yet the manufacturers of them would be indicted71 for committing a nuisance. Nor does your plea that by limiting the choice of passion you impoverish life, appeal to me. On the contrary, I think I could prove that passion, the desire of the man for the woman and the woman for the man, has been enormously strengthened in modern times. Christianity has created, or at least cultivated, modesty72, and modesty has sharpened desire. Christianity has helped to lift woman to an equality with man, and this modern intellectual development has again intensified73 passion out of all knowledge. The woman who is not a slave but an equal, who gives herself according to her own feeling, is infinitely74 more desirable to a man than any submissive serf who is always waiting on his will. And this movement intensifying75 passion is every day gaining force.
“We have a far higher love in us than the Greeks, infinitely higher and more intense than the Romans knew; our sensuality is like a river banked in with stone parapets, the current flows higher and more vehemently76 in the narrower bed.”
“You may talk as you please, Frank, but you will never get me to believe that what I know is good to me, is evil. Suppose I like a food that is poison to other people, and yet quickens me; how dare they punish me for eating of it?”
“They would say,” I replied, “that they only punish you for inducing others to eat it.”
He broke in: “It is all ignorant prejudice, Frank; the world is slowly growing more tolerant and one day men will be ashamed of their barbarous treatment of me, as they are now ashamed of the torturings of the Middle Ages. The current of opinion is making in our favour and not against us.”
“You don’t believe what you say,” I cried; “if you really thought humanity was going your way, you would have been delighted to play Galileo. Instead of writing a book in prison condemning your companion who pushed you to discovery and disgrace, you would have written a book vindicating77 your actions. ‘I am a martyr,’ you would have cried, ‘and not a criminal, and everyone who holds the contrary is wrong.’
“You would have said to the jury:
“‘In spite of your beliefs, and your cherished dogmas; in spite of your religion and prejudice and fanatical hatred78 of me, you are wrong and I am right: the world does move.’
“But you didn’t say that, and you don’t think it. If you did you would be glad you went into the Queensberry trial, glad you were accused, glad you were imprisoned79 and punished because all these things must bring your vindication80 more quickly; you are sorry for them all, because in your heart you know you were wrong. This old world in the main is right: it’s you who are wrong.”
“Of course everything can be argued, Frank; but I hold to my conviction: the best minds even now don’t condemn us, and the world is becoming more tolerant.46 I didn’t justify81 myself in court because I was told I should be punished lightly if I respected the common prejudices, and when I tried to speak afterwards the judge would not let me.”
“And I believe,” I retorted, “that you were hopelessly beaten and could never have made a fight of it, because you felt the Time-spirit was against you. How else was a silly, narrow judge able to wave you to silence? Do you think he could have silenced me? Not all the judges in Christendom. Let me give you an example. I believe with Voltaire that when modesty goes out of life it goes into the language as prudery. I am quite certain that our present habit of not discussing sexual questions in our books is bound to disappear, and that free and dignified82 speech will take the place of our present prurient83 mealy-mouthedness. I have long thought it possible, probable even, in the present state of society in England, where we are still more or less under the heel of the illiterate84 and prudish85 Philistinism of our middle class, that I might be had up to answer some charge of publishing an indecent book. The current of the time appears to be against me. In the spacious86 days of Elizabeth, in the modish87 time of the Georges, a freedom of speech was habitual88 which today is tabooed. Our cases, therefore, are somewhat alike. Do you think I should dread64 the issue or allow myself to be silenced by a judge? I would set forth89 my defence before the judge and before the jury with the assurance of victory in me! I should not minimise what I had written; I should not try to explain it away; I should seek to make it stronger. I should justify every word, and finally I’d warn both judge and jury that if they condemned and punished me they would only make my ultimate triumph more conspicuous90. ‘All the great men of the past are with me,’ I would cry; ‘all the great minds of today in other countries, and some of the best in England; condemn me at your peril91: you will only condemn yourselves. You are spitting against the wind and the shame will be on your own faces.’
“Do you believe I should be left to suffer? I doubt it even in England today. If I’m right, and I’m sure I’m right, then about me there would be an invisible cloud of witnesses. You would see a strange movement of opinion in my favour. The judge would probably lecture me and bind92 me over to come up for judgment93; but if he sentenced me vindictively94 then the Home Secretary47 would be petitioned and the movement in my favour would grow, till it swept away opposition95. This is the very soul of my faith. If I did not believe with every fibre in me that this poor stupid world is honestly groping its way up the altar stairs to God, and not down, I would not live in it an hour.”
“Why do you argue against me, Frank? It is brutal of you.”
“To induce you even now to turn and pull yourself out of the mud. You are forty odd years of age, and the keenest sensations of life are over for you. Turn back whilst there’s time, get to work, write your ballad and your plays, and not the Alexanders alone, but all the people who really count, the best of all countries — the salt of the earth — will give you another chance. Begin to work and you’ll be borne up on all hands: No one sinks to the dregs but by his own weight. If you don’t bear fruit why should men care for you?”
He shrugged96 his shoulders and turned from me with disdainful indifference97.
“I’ve done enough for their respect, Frank, and received nothing but hatred. Every man must dree his own weird98. Thank Heaven, life’s not without compensations. I’m sorry I cannot please you,” and he added carelessly, “M—— has asked me to go and spend the summer with him at Gland69 in Switzerland. He does not mind whether I write or not.”
“I assure you,” I cried, “it is not my pleasure I am thinking about. What can it matter to me whether you write or not? It is your own good I am thinking of.”
“Oh, bother good! One’s friends like one as one is; the outside public hate one or scoff99 at one as they please.”
“Well, I hope I shall always be your friend,” I replied, “but you will yet be forced to see, Oscar, that everyone grows tired of holding up an empty sack.”
“Frank, you insult me.”
“I don’t mean to; I’m sorry; I shall never be so brutally100 frank again; but you had to hear the truth for once.”
“Then, Frank, you only cared for me in so far as I agreed with you?”
“Oh, that’s not fair,” I replied. “I have tried with all my strength to prevent you committing soul-suicide, but if you are resolved on it, I can’t prevent you. I must draw away. I can do no good.”
“Then you won’t help me for the rest of the winter?”
“Of course I will,” I replied, “I shall do all I promised and more; but there’s a limit now, and till now the only limit was my power, not my will.”
It was at Napoule a few days later that an incident occurred which gave me to a certain extent a new sidelight on Oscar’s nature by showing just what he thought of me. I make no scruple101 of setting forth his opinion here in its entirety, though the confession102 took place after a futile103 evening when he had talked to M—— of great houses in England and the great people he had met there. The talk had evidently impressed M—— as much as it had bored me. I must first say that Oscar’s bedroom was separated from mine by a large sitting-room104 we had in common. As a rule I worked in my bedroom in the mornings and he spent a great deal of time out of doors. On this especial morning, however, I had gone into the sitting-room early to write some letters. I heard him get up and splash about in his bath: shortly afterwards he must have gone into the next room, which was M——‘s, for suddenly he began talking to him in a loud voice from one room to the other, as if he were carrying on a conversation already begun, through the open door.
“Of course it’s absurd of Frank talking of social position or the great people of English society at all. He never had any social position to be compared with mine!” (The petulant105 tone made me smile; but what Oscar said was true: nor did I ever pretend to have such a position.)
“He had a house in Park Lane and owned The Saturday Review and had a certain power; but I was the centre of every party, the most honoured guest everywhere, at Clieveden and Taplow Court and Clumber. The difference was Frank was proud of meeting Balfour while Balfour was proud of meeting me: d’ye see?” (I was so interested I was unconscious of any indiscretion in listening: it made me smile to hear that I was proud of meeting Arthur Balfour: it would never have occurred to me that I should be proud of that: still no doubt Oscar was right in a general way).
“When Frank talks of literature, he amuses me: he pretends to bring new standards into it; he does: he brings America to judge Oxford106 and London, much like bringing Macedon or Boeotia to judge Athens — quite ridiculous! What can Americans know about English literature? . . .
“Yet the curious thing is he has read a lot and has a sort of vision: that Shakespeare stuff of his is extraordinary; but he takes sincerity107 for style, and poetry as poetry has no appeal for him. You heard him admit that himself last night. . . .
“He’s comic, really: curiously108 provincial109 like all Americans. Fancy a Jeremiad110 preached by a man in a fur coat! Frank’s comic. But he’s really kind and fights for his friends. He helped me in prison greatly: sympathy is a sort of religion to him: that’s why we can meet without murder and separate without suicide. . . .
“Talking literature with him is very like playing Rugby football. . . . I never did play football, you know; but talking literature with Frank must be very like playing Rugby where you end by being kicked violently through your own goal,” and he laughed delightedly.
I had listened without thinking as I often listened to his talk for the mere music of the utterance111; now, at a break in the monologue112, I went into the next room, feeling that to listen consciously would be unworthy. On the whole his view of me was not unkindly: he disliked to hear any opinion that differed from his own and it never came into his head that Oxford was no nearer the meridian113 of truth than Lawrence, Kansas, and certainly at least as far from Heaven.
Some weeks later I left La Napoule and went on a visit to some friends. He wrote complaining that without me the place was dull. I wired him and went over to Nice to meet him and we lunched together at the Café de la Regence. He was terribly downcast, and yet rebellious114. He had come over to stay at Nice, and stopped at the Hotel Terminus, a tenth-rate hotel near the station; the proprietor115 called on him two or three days afterwards and informed him he must leave the hotel, as his room had been let.
“Evidently someone has told him, Frank, who I am. What am I to do?”
I soon found him a better hotel where he was well treated, but the incident coming on top of the Alexander affair seemed to have frightened him.
“There are too many English on this coast,” he said to me one day, “and they are all brutal to me. I think I should like to go to Italy if you would not mind.”
“The world is all before you,” I replied. “I shall only be too glad for you to get a comfortable place,” and I gave him the money he wanted. He lingered on at Nice for nearly a week. I saw him several times. He lunched with me at the Reserve once at Beaulieu, and was full of delight at the beauty of the bay and the quiet of it. In the middle of the meal some English people came in and showed their dislike of him rudely. He at once shrank into himself, and as soon as possible made some pretext116 to leave. Of course I went with him. I was more than sorry for him, but I felt as unable to help him as I should have been unable to hold him back if he had determined to throw himself down a precipice117.
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vice
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| n.坏事；恶习；[pl.]台钳，老虎钳；adj.副的 | |
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perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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champagne
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| n.香槟酒；微黄色 | |
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insignificant
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| adj.无关紧要的，可忽略的，无意义的 | |
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admiration
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| n.钦佩，赞美，羡慕 | |
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liking
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| n.爱好；嗜好；喜欢 | |
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astonishment
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| n.惊奇，惊异 | |
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recalcitrant
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| adj.倔强的 | |
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casually
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| adv.漠不关心地，无动于衷地，不负责任地 | |
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ballad
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| n.歌谣，民谣，流行爱情歌曲 | |
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ooze
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| n.软泥，渗出物；vi.渗出，泄漏；vt.慢慢渗出，流露 | |
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catastrophe
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| n.大灾难，大祸 | |
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abhor
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| v.憎恶；痛恨 | |
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inhuman
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| adj.残忍的，不人道的，无人性的 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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compulsory
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| n.强制的，必修的；规定的，义务的 | |
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unnatural
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| adj.不自然的；反常的 | |
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giggled
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| v.咯咯地笑( giggle的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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combative
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| adj.好战的；好斗的 | |
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vigour
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| （=vigor）n.智力，体力，精力 | |
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pal
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| n.朋友，伙伴，同志；vi.结为友 | |
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previously
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| adv.以前，先前（地） | |
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extolled
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| v.赞颂，赞扬，赞美( extol的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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virtues
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| 美德( virtue的名词复数 )； 德行； 优点； 长处 | |
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puritanical
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| adj.极端拘谨的；道德严格的 | |
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determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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deliberately
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| adv.审慎地；蓄意地；故意地 | |
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brute
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| n.野兽，兽性 | |
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brutes
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| 兽( brute的名词复数 )； 畜生； 残酷无情的人； 兽性 | |
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hypocrisy
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| n.伪善，虚伪 | |
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ignoble
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| adj.不光彩的，卑鄙的；可耻的 | |
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lighting
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| n.照明，光线的明暗，舞台灯光 | |
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dart
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| v.猛冲，投掷；n.飞镖，猛冲 | |
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condemn
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| vt.谴责，指责；宣判(罪犯)，判刑 | |
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exalt
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| v.赞扬，歌颂，晋升，提升 | |
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brutal
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| adj.残忍的，野蛮的，不讲理的 | |
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39
lusts
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| 贪求（lust的第三人称单数形式） | |
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revelling
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| v.作乐( revel的现在分词 )；狂欢；着迷；陶醉 | |
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vilest
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| adj.卑鄙的( vile的最高级 )；可耻的；极坏的；非常讨厌的 | |
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42
condemning
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| v.（通常因道义上的原因而）谴责( condemn的现在分词 )；宣判；宣布…不能使用；迫使…陷于不幸的境地 | |
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43
penal
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| adj.刑罚的；刑法上的 | |
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44
malady
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| n.病，疾病(通常做比喻) | |
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justifies
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| 证明…有理( justify的第三人称单数 )； 为…辩护； 对…作出解释； 为…辩解（或辩护） | |
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46
condemns
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| v.（通常因道义上的原因而）谴责( condemn的第三人称单数 )；宣判；宣布…不能使用；迫使…陷于不幸的境地 | |
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47
condemned
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| adj. 被责难的, 被宣告有罪的 动词condemn的过去式和过去分词 | |
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secular
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| n.牧师，凡人；adj.世俗的，现世的，不朽的 | |
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49
myriad
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| adj.无数的；n.无数，极大数量 | |
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50
incarnate
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| adj.化身的，人体化的，肉色的 | |
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51
cannibalism
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| n.同类相食；吃人肉 | |
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52
fatten
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| v.使肥，变肥 | |
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53
instinctive
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| adj.(出于)本能的；直觉的；(出于)天性的 | |
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54
loathing
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| n.厌恶，憎恨v.憎恨，厌恶( loathe的现在分词)；极不喜欢 | |
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55
toiling
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| 长时间或辛苦地工作( toil的现在分词 )； 艰难缓慢地移动，跋涉 | |
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survivors
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| 幸存者，残存者，生还者( survivor的名词复数 ) | |
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sterile
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| adj.不毛的，不孕的，无菌的，枯燥的，贫瘠的 | |
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58
shudder
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| v.战粟，震动，剧烈地摇晃；n.战粟，抖动 | |
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59
sneer
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| v.轻蔑；嘲笑；n.嘲笑，讥讽的言语 | |
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60
rhetoric
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| n.修辞学，浮夸之言语 | |
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61
guilt
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| n.犯罪；内疚；过失，罪责 | |
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vices
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| 缺陷( vice的名词复数 )； 恶习； 不道德行为； 台钳 | |
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63
dreaded
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| adj.令人畏惧的；害怕的v.害怕，恐惧，担心( dread的过去式和过去分词) | |
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64
dread
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| vt.担忧，忧虑；惧怕，不敢；n.担忧，畏惧 | |
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peculiarity
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| n.独特性，特色；特殊的东西；怪癖 | |
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redeemed
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| adj. 可赎回的，可救赎的 动词redeem的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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67
accomplished
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| adj.有才艺的；有造诣的；达到了的 | |
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monstrous
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| adj.巨大的；恐怖的；可耻的，丢脸的 | |
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69
gland
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| n.腺体，(机)密封压盖，填料盖 | |
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impoverish
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| vt.使穷困，使贫困 | |
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indicted
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| 控告，起诉( indict的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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modesty
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| n.谦逊，虚心，端庄，稳重，羞怯，朴素 | |
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intensified
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| v.（使）增强， （使）加剧( intensify的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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infinitely
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| adv.无限地，无穷地 | |
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75
intensifying
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| v.（使）增强， （使）加剧( intensify的现在分词 )；增辉 | |
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vehemently
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| adv. 热烈地 | |
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vindicating
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| v.澄清（某人/某事物）受到的责难或嫌疑( vindicate的现在分词 )；表明或证明（所争辩的事物）属实、正当、有效等；维护 | |
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hatred
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| n.憎恶，憎恨，仇恨 | |
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imprisoned
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| 下狱，监禁( imprison的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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80
vindication
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| n.洗冤，证实 | |
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81
justify
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| vt.证明…正当(或有理)，为…辩护 | |
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82
dignified
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| a.可敬的，高贵的 | |
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83
prurient
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| adj.好色的，淫乱的 | |
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84
illiterate
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| adj.文盲的；无知的；n.文盲 | |
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85
prudish
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| adj.装淑女样子的，装规矩的，过分规矩的；adv.过分拘谨地 | |
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86
spacious
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| adj.广阔的，宽敞的 | |
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87
modish
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| adj.流行的，时髦的 | |
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88
habitual
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| adj.习惯性的；通常的，惯常的 | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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90
conspicuous
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| adj.明眼的，惹人注目的；炫耀的，摆阔气的 | |
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91
peril
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| n.(严重的)危险；危险的事物 | |
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92
bind
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| vt.捆，包扎；装订；约束；使凝固；vi.变硬 | |
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93
judgment
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| n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见 | |
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94
vindictively
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| adv.恶毒地；报复地 | |
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95
opposition
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| n.反对，敌对 | |
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96
shrugged
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| vt.耸肩（shrug的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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97
indifference
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| n.不感兴趣，不关心，冷淡，不在乎 | |
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98
weird
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| adj.古怪的，离奇的；怪诞的，神秘而可怕的 | |
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99
scoff
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| n.嘲笑，笑柄，愚弄；v.嘲笑，嘲弄，愚弄，狼吞虎咽 | |
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100
brutally
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| adv.残忍地，野蛮地，冷酷无情地 | |
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101
scruple
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| n./v.顾忌，迟疑 | |
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102
confession
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| n.自白，供认，承认 | |
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103
futile
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| adj.无效的，无用的，无希望的 | |
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104
sitting-room
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| n.（BrE）客厅，起居室 | |
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105
petulant
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| adj.性急的，暴躁的 | |
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106
Oxford
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| n.牛津（英国城市） | |
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107
sincerity
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| n.真诚，诚意；真实 | |
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108
curiously
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| adv.有求知欲地；好问地；奇特地 | |
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109
provincial
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| adj.省的，地方的；n．外省人，乡下人 | |
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110
jeremiad
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| n.悲欢；悲诉 | |
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111
utterance
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| n.用言语表达，话语，言语 | |
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112
monologue
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| n.长篇大论，（戏剧等中的）独白 | |
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113
meridian
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| adj.子午线的；全盛期的 | |
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114
rebellious
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| adj.造反的，反抗的，难控制的 | |
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115
proprietor
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| n.所有人；业主；经营者 | |
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116
pretext
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| n.借口，托词 | |
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117
precipice
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| n.悬崖，危急的处境 | |
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