I find it very difficult to trace how form was added to form and interpretation1 followed interpretation in my ever-spreading, ever-deepening, ever-multiplying and enriching vision of this world into which I had been born. Every day added its impressions, its hints, its subtle explications to the growing understanding. Day after day the living interlacing threads of a mind weave together. Every morning now for three weeks and more (for to-day is Thursday and I started on a Tuesday) I have been trying to convey some idea of the factors and early influences by which my particular scrap4 of subjective5 tapestry6 was shaped, to show the child playing on the nursery floor, the son perplexed7 by his mother, gazing aghast at his dead father, exploring interminable suburbs, touched by first intimations of the sexual mystery, coming in with a sort of confused avidity towards the centres of the life of London. It is only by such an effort to write it down that one realises how marvellously crowded, how marvellously analytical9 and synthetic10 those ears must be. One begins with the little child to whom the sky is a roof of blue, the world a screen of opaque11 and disconnected facts, the home a thing eternal, and "being good" just simple obedience12 to unquestioned authority; and one comes at last to the vast world of one's adult perception, pierced deep by flaring14 searchlights of partial understanding, here masked by mists, here refracted and distorted through half translucent15 veils, here showing broad prospects17 and limitless vistas18 and here impenetrably dark.
I recall phases of deep speculation20, doubts and even prayers by night, and strange occasions when by a sort of hypnotic contemplation of nothingness I sought to pierce the web of appearances about me. It is hard to measure these things in receding21 perspective, and now I cannot trace, so closely has mood succeeded and overlaid and obliterated22 mood, the phases by which an utter horror of death was replaced by the growing realisation of its necessity and dignity. Difficulty of the imagination with infinite space, infinite time, entangled23 my mind; and moral distress24 for the pain and suffering of bygone ages that made all thought of reformation in the future seem but the grimmest irony25 upon now irreparable wrongs. Many an intricate perplexity of these broadening years did not so much get settled as cease to matter. Life crowded me away from it.
I have confessed myself a temerarious theologian, and in that passage from boyhood to manhood I ranged widely in my search for some permanently27 satisfying Truth. That, too, ceased after a time to be urgently interesting. I came at last into a phase that endures to this day, of absolute tranquillity28, of absolute confidence in whatever that Incomprehensible Comprehensive which must needs be the substratum of all things, may be. Feeling OF IT, feeling BY IT, I cannot feel afraid of it. I think I had got quite clearly and finally to that adjustment long before my Cambridge days were done. I am sure that the evil in life is transitory and finite like an accident or distress in the nursery; that God is my Father and that I may trust Him, even though life hurts so that one must needs cry out at it, even though it shows no consequence but failure, no promise but pain....
But while I was fearless of theology I must confess it was comparatively late before I faced and dared to probe the secrecies30 of sex. I was afraid of sex. I had an instinctive31 perception that it would be a large and difficult thing in my life, but my early training was all in the direction of regarding it as an irrelevant32 thing, as something disconnected from all the broad significances of life, as hostile and disgraceful in its quality. The world was never so emasculated in thought, I suppose, as it was in the Victorian time....
I was afraid to think either of sex or (what I have always found inseparable from a kind of sexual emotion) beauty. Even as a boy I knew the thing as a haunting and alluring33 mystery that I tried to keep away from. Its dim presence obsessed34 me none the less for all the extravagant35 decency36, the stimulating37 silences of my upbringing....
The plaster Venuses and Apollos that used to adorn38 the vast aisle39 and huge grey terraces of the Crystal Palace were the first intimations of the beauty of the body that ever came into my life. As I write of it I feel again the shameful41 attraction of those gracious forms. I used to look at them not simply, but curiously42 and askance. Once at least in my later days at Penge, I spent a shilling in admission chiefly for the sake of them....
The strangest thing of all my odd and solitary43 upbringing seems to me now that swathing up of all the splendours of the flesh, that strange combination of fanatical terrorism and shyness that fenced me about with prohibitions44. It caused me to grow up, I will not say blankly ignorant, but with an ignorance blurred46 and dishonoured47 by shame, by enigmatical warnings, by cultivated aversions, an ignorance in which a fascinated curiosity and desire struggled like a thing in a net. I knew so little and I felt so much. There was indeed no Aphrodite at all in my youthful Pantheon, but instead there was a mysterious and minatory48 gap. I have told how at last a new Venus was born in my imagination out of gas lamps and the twilight49, a Venus with a cockney accent and dark eyes shining out of the dusk, a Venus who was a warm, passion-stirring atmosphere rather than incarnate50 in a body. And I have told, too, how I bought a picture.
All this was a thing apart from the rest of my life, a locked avoided chamber51....
It was not until my last year at Trinity that I really broke down the barriers of this unwholesome silence and brought my secret broodings to the light of day. Then a little set of us plunged53 suddenly into what we called at first sociological discussion. I can still recall even the physical feeling of those first tentative talks. I remember them mostly as occurring in the rooms of Ted3 Hatherleigh, who kept at the corner by the Trinity great gate, but we also used to talk a good deal at a man's in King's, a man named, if I remember rightly, Redmayne. The atmosphere of Hatherleigh's rooms was a haze54 of tobacco smoke against a background brown and deep. He professed55 himself a socialist56 with anarchistic57 leanings--he had suffered the martyrdom of ducking for it--and a huge French May-day poster displaying a splendid proletarian in red and black on a barricade58 against a flaring orange sky, dominated his decorations. Hatherleigh affected59 a fine untidiness, and all the place, even the floor, was littered with books, for the most part open and face downward; deeper darknesses were supplied by a discarded gown and our caps, all conscientiously60 battered61, Hatherleigh's flopped62 like an elephant's ear and inserted quill29 pens supported the corners of mine; the highlights of the picture came chiefly as reflections from his chequered blue mugs full of audit63 ale. We sat on oak chairs, except the four or five who crowded on a capacious settle, we drank a lot of beer and were often fuddled, and occasionally quite drunk, and we all smoked reckless-looking pipes,--there was a transient fashion among us for corn cobs for which Mark Twain, I think, was responsible. Our little excesses with liquor were due far more to conscience than appetite, indicated chiefly a resolve to break away from restraints that we suspected were keeping us off the instructive knife-edges of life. Hatherleigh was a good Englishman of the premature64 type with a red face, a lot of hair, a deep voice and an explosive plunging65 manner, and it was he who said one evening--Heaven knows how we got to it--"Look here, you know, it's all Rot, this Shutting Up about Women. We OUGHT to talk about them. What are we going to do about them? It's got to come. We're all festering inside about it. Let's out with it. There's too much Decency altogether about this Infernal University!"
We rose to his challenge a little awkwardly and our first talk was clumsy, there were flushed faces and red ears, and I remember Hatherleigh broke out into a monologue66 on decency. "Modesty67 and Decency," said Hatherleigh, "are Oriental vices68. The Jews brought them to Europe. They're Semitic, just like our monasticism here and the seclusion70 of women and mutilating the dead on a battlefield. And all that sort of thing."
Hatherleigh's mind progressed by huge leaps, leaps that were usually wildly inaccurate71, and for a time we engaged hotly upon the topic of those alleged72 mutilations and the Semitic responsibility for decency. Hatherleigh tried hard to saddle the Semitic race with the less elegant war customs of the Soudan and the northwest frontier of India, and quoted Doughty73, at that time a little-known author, and Cunninghame Graham to show that the Arab was worse than a county-town spinster in his regard for respectability. But his case was too preposterous74, and Esmeer, with his shrill75 penetrating76 voice and his way of pointing with all four long fingers flat together, carried the point against him. He quoted Cato and Roman law and the monasteries77 of Thibet.
"Well, anyway," said Hatherleigh, escaping from our hands like an intellectual frog, "Semitic or not, I've got no use for decency."
We argued points and Hatherleigh professed an unusually balanced and tolerating attitude. "I don't mind a certain refinement78 and dignity," he admitted generously. "What I object to is this spreading out of decency until it darkens the whole sky, until it makes a man's father afraid to speak of the most important things, until it makes a man afraid to look a frank book in the face or think--even think! until it leads to our coming to--to the business at last with nothing but a few prohibitions, a few hints, a lot of dirty jokes and, and "--he waved a hand and seemed to seek and catch his image in the air--"oh, a confounded buttered slide of sentiment, to guide us. I tell you I'm going to think about it and talk about it until I see a little more daylight than I do at present. I'm twenty-two. Things might happen to me anywhen. You men can go out into the world if you like, to sin like fools and marry like fools, not knowing what you are doing and ashamed to ask. You'll take the consequences, too, I expect, pretty meekly79, sniggering a bit, sentimentalising a bit, like--like Cambridge humorists.... I mean to know what I'm doing."
He paused to drink, and I think I cut in with ideas of my own. But one is apt to forget one's own share in a talk, I find, more than one does the clear-cut objectivity of other people's, and I do not know how far I contributed to this discussion that followed. I am, however, pretty certain that it was then that ideal that we were pleased to call aristocracy and which soon became the common property of our set was developed. It was Esmeer, I know, who laid down and maintained the proposition that so far as minds went there were really only two sorts of man in the world, the aristocrat81 and the man who subdues83 his mind to other people's.
"'I couldn't THINK of it, Sir,'" said Esmeer in his elucidatory84 tones; "that's what a servant says. His mind even is broken in to run between fences, and he admits it. WE'VE got to be able to think of anything. And 'such things aren't for the Likes of Us!' That's another servant's saying. Well, everything IS for the Likes of Us. If we see fit, that is."
A small fresh-coloured man in grey objected.
"Well," exploded Hatherleigh, "if that isn't so what the deuce are we up here for? Instead of working in mines? If some things aren't to be thought about ever! We've got the privilege of all these extra years for getting things straight in our heads, and then we won't use 'em. Good God! what do you think a university's for?"...
Esmeer's idea came with an effect of real emancipation86 to several of us. We were not going to be afraid of ideas any longer, we were going to throw down every barrier of prohibition45 and take them in and see what came of it. We became for a time even intemperately87 experimental, and one of us, at the bare suggestion of an eminent88 psychic89 investigator90, took hashish and very nearly died of it within a fortnight of our great elucidation91.
The chief matter of our interchanges was of course the discussion of sex. Once the theme had been opened it became a sore place in our intercourse92; none of us seemed able to keep away from it. Our imaginations got astir with it. We made up for lost time and went round it and through it and over it exhaustively. I recall prolonged discussion of polygamy on the way to Royston, muddy November tramps to Madingley, when amidst much profanity from Hatherleigh at the serious treatment of so obsolete93 a matter, we weighed the reasons, if any, for the institution of marriage. The fine dim night-time spaces of the Great Court are bound up with the inconclusive finales of mighty94 hot-eared wrangles95; the narrows of Trinity Street and Petty Cury and Market Hill have their particular associations for me with that spate96 of confession97 and free speech, that almost painful goal delivery of long pent and crappled and sometimes crippled ideas.
And we went on a reading party that Easter to a place called Pulborough in Sussex, where there is a fishing inn and a river that goes under a bridge. It was a late Easter and a blazing one, and we boated and bathed and talked of being Hellenic and the beauty of the body until at moments it seemed to us that we were destined98 to restore the Golden Age, by the simple abolition99 of tailors and outfitters.
Those undergraduate talks! how rich and glorious they seemed, how splendidly new the ideas that grew and multiplied in our seething100 minds! We made long afternoon and evening raids over the Downs towards Arundel, and would come tramping back through the still keen moonlight singing and shouting. We formed romantic friendships with one another, and grieved more or less convincingly that there were no splendid women fit to be our companions in the world. But Hatherleigh, it seemed, had once known a girl whose hair was gloriously red. "My God!" said Hatherleigh to convey the quality of her; just simply and with projectile101 violence: "My God!"
Benton had heard of a woman who lived with a man refusing to be married to him--we thought that splendid beyond measure,--I cannot now imagine why. She was "like a tender goddess," Benton said. A sort of shame came upon us in the dark in spite of our liberal intentions when Benton committed himself to that. And after such talk we would fall upon great pauses of emotional dreaming, and if by chance we passed a girl in a governess cart, or some farmer's daughter walking to the station, we became alertly silent or obstreperously102 indifferent to her. For might she not be just that one exception to the banal103 decency, the sickly pointless conventionality, the sham40 modesty of the times in which we lived?
We felt we stood for a new movement, not realising how perennially104 this same emancipation returns to those ancient courts beside the Cam. We were the anti-decency party, we discovered a catch phrase that we flourished about in the union and made our watchword, namely, "stark105 fact." We hung nude106 pictures in our rooms much as if they had been flags, to the earnest concern of our bedders, and I disinterred my long-kept engraving107 and had it framed in fumed108 oak, and found for it a completer and less restrained companion, a companion I never cared for in the slightest degree....
This efflorescence did not prevent, I think indeed it rather helped, our more formal university work, for most of us took firsts, and three of us got Fellowships in one year or another. There was Benton who had a Research Fellowship and went to Tubingen, there was Esmeer and myself who both became Residential109 Fellows. I had taken the Mental and Moral Science Tripos (as it was then), and three years later I got a lectureship in political science. In those days it was disguised in the cloak of Political Economy.
2
It was our affectation to be a little detached from the main stream of undergraduate life. We worked pretty hard, but by virtue110 of our beer, our socialism and suchlike heterodoxy, held ourselves to be differentiated111 from the swatting reading man. None of us, except Baxter, who was a rowing blue, a rather abnormal blue with an appetite for ideas, took games seriously enough to train, and on the other hand we intimated contempt for the rather mediocre112, deliberately113 humorous, consciously gentlemanly and consciously wild undergraduate men who made up the mass of Cambridge life. After the manner of youth we were altogether too hard on our contemporaries. We battered our caps and tore our gowns lest they should seem new, and we despised these others extremely for doing exactly the same things; we had an idea of ourselves and resented beyond measure a similar weakness in these our brothers.
There was a type, or at least there seemed to us to be a type--I'm a little doubtful at times now whether after all we didn't create it--for which Hatherleigh invented the nickname the "Pinky Dinkys," intending thereby114 both contempt and abhorrence115 in almost equal measure. The Pinky Dinky summarised all that we particularly did not want to be, and also, I now perceive, much of what we were and all that we secretly dreaded117 becoming.
But it is hard to convey the Pinky Dinky idea, for all that it meant so much to us. We spent one evening at least during that reading party upon the Pinky Dinky; we sat about our one fire after a walk in the rain--it was our only wet day--smoked our excessively virile118 pipes, and elaborated the natural history of the Pinky Dinky. We improvised119 a sort of Pinky Dinky litany, and Hatherleigh supplied deep notes for the responses.
"The Pinky Dinky extracts a good deal of amusement from life," said some one.
"Damned prig!" said Hatherleigh.
"The Pinky Dinky arises in the union and treats the question with a light gay touch. He makes the weird120 ones mad. But sometimes he cannot go on because of the amusement he extracts."
"I want to shy books at the giggling121 swine," said Hatherleigh.
"The Pinky Dinky says suddenly while he is making the tea, 'We're all being frightfully funny. It's time for you to say something now.'"
"The Pinky Dinky shakes his head and says: 'I'm afraid I shall never be a responsible being.' And he really IS frivolous123."
"Frivolous but not vulgar," said Esmeer.
"Pinky Dinkys are chaps who've had their buds nipped," said Hatherleigh. "They're Plebs and they know it. They haven't the Guts125 to get hold of things. And so they worry up all those silly little jokes of theirs to carry it off."...
We tried bad ones for a time, viciously flavoured.
Pinky Dinkys are due to over-production of the type that ought to keep outfitters' shops. Pinky Dinkys would like to keep outfitters' shops with whimsy126 'scriptions on the boxes and make your bill out funny, and not be snobs127 to customers, no!--not even if they had titles."
"Every Pinky Dinky's people are rather good people, and better than most Pinky Dinky's people. But he does not put on side."
"Pinky Dinkys become playful at the sight of women."
"'Croquet's my game,' said the Pinky Dinky, and felt a man condescended128."
"But what the devil do they think they're up to, anyhow?" roared old Hatherleigh suddenly, dropping plump into bottomless despair.
We felt we had still failed to get at the core of the mystery of the Pinky Dinky.
We tried over things about his religion. "The Pinky Dinky goes to King's Chapel129, and sits and feels in the dusk. Solemn things! Oh HUSH130! He wouldn't tell you--"
"He COULDN'T tell you."
"Religion is so sacred to him he never talks about it, never reads about it, never thinks about it. Just feels!"
"But in his heart of hearts, oh! ever so deep, the Pinky Dinky has a doubt--"
Some one protested.
"Not a vulgar doubt," Esmeer went on, "but a kind of hesitation131 whether the Ancient of Days is really exactly what one would call good form.... There's a lot of horrid132 coarseness got into the world somehow. SOMEBODY put it there.... And anyhow there's no particular reason why a man should be seen about with Him. He's jolly Awful of course and all that--"
"The Pinky Dinky for all his fun and levity133 has a clean mind."
"A thoroughly134 clean mind. Not like Esmeer's--the Pig!"
"If once he began to think about sex, how could he be comfortable at croquet?"
"It's their Damned Modesty," said Hatherleigh suddenly, "that's what's the matter with the Pinky Dinky. It's Mental Cowardice135 dressed up as a virtue and taking the poor dears in. Cambridge is soaked with it; it's some confounded local bacillus. Like the thing that gives a flavour to Havana cigars. He comes up here to be made into a man and a ruler of the people, and he thinks it shows a nice disposition136 not to take on the job! How the Devil is a great Empire to be run with men like him?"
"All his little jokes and things," said Esmeer regarding his feet on the fender, "it's just a nervous sniggering--because he's afraid.... Oxford137's no better."
"What's he afraid of?" said I.
"God knows!" exploded Hatherleigh and stared at the fire.
"LIFE!" said Esmeer. "And so in a way are we," he added, and made a thoughtful silence for a time.
"I say," began Carter, who was doing the Natural Science Tripos, "what is the adult form of the Pinky Dinky?"
But there we were checked by our ignorance of the world.
"What is the adult form of any of us?" asked Benton, voicing the thought that had arrested our flow.
3
I do not remember that we ever lifted our criticism to the dons and the organisation139 of the University. I think we took them for granted. When I look back at my youth I am always astonished by the multitude of things that we took for granted. It seemed to us that Cambridge was in the order of things, for all the world like having eyebrows140 or a vermiform appendix. Now with the larger scepticism of middle age I can entertain very fundamental doubts about these old universities. Indeed I had a scheme--
I do not see what harm I can do now by laying bare the purpose of the political combinations I was trying to effect.
My educational scheme was indeed the starting-point of all the big project of conscious public reconstruction141 at which I aimed. I wanted to build up a new educational machine altogether for the governing class out of a consolidated142 system of special public service schools. I meant to get to work upon this whatever office I was given in the new government. I could have begun my plan from the Admiralty or the War Office quite as easily as from the Education Office. I am firmly convinced it is hopeless to think of reforming the old public schools and universities to meet the needs of a modern state, they send their roots too deep and far, the cost would exceed any good that could possibly be effected, and so I have sought a way round this invincible143 obstacle. I do think it would be quite practicable to side-track, as the Americans say, the whole system by creating hardworking, hard-living, modern and scientific boys' schools, first for the Royal Navy and then for the public service generally, and as they grew, opening them to the public without any absolute obligation to subsequent service. Simultaneously144 with this it would not be impossible to develop a new college system with strong faculties145 in modern philosophy, modern history, European literature and criticism, physical and biological science, education and sociology.
We could in fact create a new liberal education in this way, and cut the umbilicus of the classical languages for good and all. I should have set this going, and trusted it to correct or kill the old public schools and the Oxford and Cambridge tradition altogether. I had men in my mind to begin the work, and I should have found others. I should have aimed at making a hard-trained, capable, intellectually active, proud type of man. Everything else would have been made subservient146 to that. I should have kept my grip on the men through their vacation, and somehow or other I would have contrived147 a young woman to match them. I think I could have seen to it effectually enough that they didn't get at croquet and tennis with the vicarage daughters and discover sex in the Peeping Tom fashion I did, and that they realised quite early in life that it isn't really virile to reek148 of tobacco. I should have had military manoeuvres, training ships, aeroplane work, mountaineering and so forth149, in the place of the solemn trivialities of games, and I should have fed and housed my men clean and very hard--where there wasn't any audit ale, no credit tradesmen, and plenty of high pressure douches....
I have revisited Cambridge and Oxford time after time since I came down, and so far as the Empire goes, I want to get clear of those two places....
Always I renew my old feelings, a physical oppression, a sense of lowness and dampness almost exactly like the feeling of an underground room where paper moulders150 and leaves the wall, a feeling of ineradicable contagion151 in the Gothic buildings, in the narrow ditch-like rivers, in those roads and roads of stuffy152 little villas153. Those little villas have destroyed all the good of the old monastic system and none of its evil....
Some of the most charming people in the world live in them, but their collective effect is below the quality of any individual among them. Cambridge is a world of subdued154 tones, of excessively subtle humours, of prim155 conduct and free thinking; it fears the Parent, but it has no fear of God; it offers amidst surroundings that vary between disguises and antiquarian charm the inflammation of literature's purple draught156; one hears there a peculiar157 thin scandal like no other scandal in the world--a covetous158 scandal--so that I am always reminded of Ibsen in Cambridge. In Cambridge and the plays of Ibsen alone does it seem appropriate for the heroine before the great crisis of life to "enter, take off her overshoes, and put her wet umbrella upon the writing desk."...
We have to make a new Academic mind for modern needs, and the last thing to make it out of, I am convinced, is the old Academic mind. One might as soon try to fake the old VICTORY at Portsmouth into a line of battleship again. Besides which the old Academic mind, like those old bathless, damp Gothic colleges, is much too delightful159 in its peculiar and distinctive160 way to damage by futile161 patching.
My heart warms to a sense of affectionate absurdity162 as I recall dear old Codger, surely the most "unleaderly" of men. No more than from the old Schoolmen, his kindred, could one get from him a School for Princes. Yet apart from his teaching he was as curious and adorable as a good Netsuke. Until quite recently he was a power in Cambridge, he could make and bar and destroy, and in a way he has become the quintessence of Cambridge in my thoughts.
I see him on his way to the morning's lecture, with his plump childish face, his round innocent eyes, his absurdly non-prehensile fat hand carrying his cap, his grey trousers braced163 up much too high, his feet a trifle inturned, and going across the great court with a queer tripping pace that seemed cultivated even to my naive164 undergraduate eye. Or I see him lecturing. He lectured walking up and down between the desks, talking in a fluting165 rapid voice, and with the utmost lucidity166. If he could not walk up and down he could not lecture. His mind and voice had precisely167 the fluid quality of some clear subtle liquid; one felt it could flow round anything and overcome nothing. And its nimble eddies168 were wonderful! Or again I recall him drinking port with little muscular movements in his neck and cheek and chin and his brows knit--very judicial169, very concentrated, preparing to say the apt just thing; it was the last thing he would have told a lie about.
When I think of Codger I am reminded of an inscription170 I saw on some occasion in Regent's Park above two eyes scarcely more limpidly171 innocent than his--"Born in the Menagerie." Never once since Codger began to display the early promise of scholarship at the age of eight or more, had he been outside the bars. His utmost travel had been to lecture here and lecture there. His student phase had culminated172 in papers of quite exceptional brilliance173, and he had gone on to lecture with a cheerful combination of wit and mannerism174 that had made him a success from the beginning. He has lectured ever since. He lectures still. Year by year he has become plumper, more rubicund175 and more and more of an item for the intelligent visitor to see. Even in my time he was pointed176 out to people as part of our innumerable enrichments, and obviously he knew it. He has become now almost the leading Character in a little donnish world of much too intensely appreciated Characters.
He boasted he took no exercise, and also of his knowledge of port wine. Of other wines he confessed quite frankly177 he had no "special knowledge." Beyond these things he had little pride except that he claimed to have read every novel by a woman writer that had ever entered the union Library. This, however, he held to be remarkable178 rather than ennobling, and such boasts as he made of it were tinged179 with playfulness. Certainly he had a scholar's knowledge of the works of Miss Marie Corelli, Miss Braddon, Miss Elizabeth Glyn and Madame Sarah Grand that would have astonished and flattered those ladies enormously, and he loved nothing so much in his hours of relaxation180 as to propound181 and answer difficult questions upon their books. Tusher of King's was his ineffectual rival in this field, their bouts182 were memorable183 and rarely other than glorious for Codger; but then Tusher spread himself too much, he also undertook to rehearse whole pages out of Bradshaw, and tell you with all the changes how to get from any station to any station in Great Britain by the nearest and cheapest routes....
Codger lodged184 with a little deaf innocent old lady, Mrs. Araminta Mergle, who was understood to be herself a very redoubtable185 Character in the Gyp-Bedder class; about her he related quietly absurd anecdotes186. He displayed a marvellous invention in ascribing to her plausible187 expressions of opinion entirely188 identical in import with those of the Oxford and Harvard Pragmatists, against whom he waged a fierce obscure war....
It was Codger's function to teach me philosophy, philosophy! the intimate wisdom of things. He dealt in a variety of Hegelian stuff like nothing else in the world, but marvellously consistent with itself. It was a wonderful web he spun189 out of that queer big active childish brain that had never lusted190 nor hated nor grieved nor feared nor passionately191 loved,--a web of iridescent192 threads. He had luminous193 final theories about Love and Death and Immortality194, odd matters they seemed for him to think about! and all his woven thoughts lay across my perception of the realities of things, as flimsy and irrelevant and clever and beautiful, oh!--as a dew-wet spider's web slung195 in the morning sunshine across the black mouth of a gun....
4
All through those years of development I perceive now there must have been growing in me, slowly, irregularly, assimilating to itself all the phrases and forms of patriotism196, diverting my religious impulses, utilising my esthetic197 tendencies, my dominating idea, the statesman's idea, that idea of social service which is the protagonist198 of my story, that real though complex passion for Making, making widely and greatly, cities, national order, civilisation199, whose interplay with all those other factors in life I have set out to present. It was growing in me--as one's bones grow, no man intending it.
I have tried to show how, quite early in my life, the fact of disorderliness, the conception of social life as being a multitudinous confusion out of hand, came to me. One always of course simplifies these things in the telling, but I do not think I ever saw the world at large in any other terms. I never at any stage entertained the idea which sustained my mother, and which sustains so many people in the world,--the idea that the universe, whatever superficial discords201 it may present, is as a matter of fact "all right," is being steered202 to definite ends by a serene203 and unquestionable God. My mother thought that Order prevailed, and that disorder200 was just incidental and foredoomed rebellion; I feel and have always felt that order rebels against and struggles against disorder, that order has an up-hill job, in gardens, experiments, suburbs, everything alike; from the very beginnings of my experience I discovered hostility204 to order, a constant escaping from control.
The current of living and contemporary ideas in which my mind was presently swimming made all in the same direction; in place of my mother's attentive205, meticulous206 but occasionally extremely irascible Providence207, the talk was all of the Struggle for Existence and the survival not of the Best--that was nonsense, but of the fittest to survive.
The attempts to rehabilitate208 Faith in the form of the Individualist's LAISSEZ FAIRE never won upon me. I disliked Herbert Spencer all my life until I read his autobiography209, and then I laughed a little and loved him. I remember as early as the City Merchants' days how Britten and I scoffed210 at that pompous211 question-begging word "Evolution," having, so to speak, found it out. Evolution, some illuminating212 talker had remarked at the Britten lunch table, had led not only to man, but to the liver-fluke and skunk213, obviously it might lead anywhere; order came into things only through the struggling mind of man. That lit things wonderfully for us. When I went up to Cambridge I was perfectly214 clear that life was a various and splendid disorder of forces that the spirit of man sets itself to tame. I have never since fallen away from that persuasion215.
I do not think I was exceptionally precocious216 in reaching these conclusions and a sort of religious finality for myself by eighteen or nineteen. I know men and women vary very much in these matters, just as children do in learning to talk. Some will chatter217 at eighteen months and some will hardly speak until three, and the thing has very little to do with their subsequent mental quality. So it is with young people; some will begin their religious, their social, their sexual interests at fourteen, some not until far on in the twenties. Britten and I belonged to one of the precocious types, and Cossington very probably to another. It wasn't that there was anything priggish about any of us; we should have been prigs to have concealed218 our spontaneous interests and ape the theoretical boy.
The world of man centred for my imagination in London, it still centres there; the real and present world, that is to say, as distinguished220 from the wonder-lands of atomic and microscopic221 science and the stars and future time. I had travelled scarcely at all, I had never crossed the Channel, but I had read copiously222 and I had formed a very good working idea of this round globe with its mountains and wildernesses223 and forests and all the sorts and conditions of human life that were scattered224 over its surface. It was all alive, I felt, and changing every day; how it was changing, and the changes men might bring about, fascinated my mind beyond measure.
I used to find a charm in old maps that showed The World as Known to the Ancients, and I wish I could now without any suspicion of self-deception write down compactly the world as it was known to me at nineteen. So far as extension went it was, I fancy, very like the world I know now at forty-two; I had practically all the mountains and seas, boundaries and races, products and possibilities that I have now. But its intension was very different. All the interval225 has been increasing and deepening my social knowledge, replacing crude and second-hand226 impressions by felt and realised distinctions.
In 1895--that was my last year with Britten, for I went up to Cambridge in September--my vision of the world had much the same relation to the vision I have to-day that an ill-drawn daub of a mask has to the direct vision of a human face. Britten and I looked at our world and saw--what did we see? Forms and colours side by side that we had no suspicion were interdependent. We had no conception of the roots of things nor of the reaction of things. It did not seem to us, for example, that business had anything to do with government, or that money and means affected the heroic issues of war. There were no wagons227 in our war game, and where there were guns, there it was assumed the ammunition228 was gathered together. Finance again was a sealed book to us; we did not so much connect it with the broad aspects of human affairs as regard it as a sort of intrusive229 nuisance to be earnestly ignored by all right-minded men. We had no conception of the quality of politics, nor how "interests" came into such affairs; we believed men were swayed by purely230 intellectual convictions and were either right or wrong, honest or dishonest (in which case they deserved to be shot), good or bad. We knew nothing of mental inertia231, and could imagine the opinion of a whole nation changed by one lucid85 and convincing exposition. We were capable of the most incongruous transfers from the scroll232 of history to our own times, we could suppose Brixton ravaged233 and Hampstead burnt in civil wars for the succession to the throne, or Cheapside a lane of death and the front of the Mansion234 House set about with guillotines in the course of an accurately235 transposed French Revolution. We rebuilt London by Act of Parliament, and once in a mood of hygienic enterprise we transferred its population EN MASSE to the North Downs by an order of the Local Government Board. We thought nothing of throwing religious organisations out of employment or superseding236 all the newspapers by freely distributed bulletins. We could contemplate237 the possibility of laws abolishing whole classes; we were equal to such a dream as the peaceful and orderly proclamation of Communism from the steps of St. Paul's Cathedral, after the passing of a simply worded bill,--a close and not unnaturally238 an exciting division carrying the third reading. I remember quite distinctly evolving that vision. We were then fully122 fifteen and we were perfectly serious about it. We were not fools; it was simply that as yet we had gathered no experience at all of the limits and powers of legislation and conscious collective intention....
I think this statement does my boyhood justice, and yet I have my doubts. It is so hard now to say what one understood and what one did not understand. It isn't only that every day changed one's general outlook, but also that a boy fluctuates between phases of quite adult understanding and phases of tawdrily magnificent puerility239. Sometimes I myself was in those tumbrils that went along Cheapside to the Mansion House, a Sydney Cartonesque figure, a white defeated Mirabean; sometimes it was I who sat judging and condemning240 and ruling (sleeping in my clothes and feeding very simply) the soul and autocrat241 of the Provisional Government, which occupied, of all inconvenient242 places! the General Post Office at St. Martin's-le-Grand!...
I cannot trace the development of my ideas at Cambridge, but I believe the mere243 physical fact of going two hours' journey away from London gave that place for the first time an effect of unity244 in my imagination. I got outside London. It became tangible245 instead of being a frame almost as universal as sea and sky.
At Cambridge my ideas ceased to live in a duologue; in exchange for Britten, with whom, however, I corresponded lengthily246, stylishly247 and self-consciously for some years, I had now a set of congenial friends. I got talk with some of the younger dons, I learnt to speak in the union, and in my little set we were all pretty busily sharpening each other's wits and correcting each other's interpretations248. Cambridge made politics personal and actual. At City Merchants' we had had no sense of effective contact; we boasted, it is true, an under secretary and a colonial governor among our old boys, but they were never real to us; such distinguished sons as returned to visit the old school were allusive249 and pleasant in the best Pinky Dinky style, and pretended to be in earnest about nothing but our football and cricket, to mourn the abolition of "water," and find a shuddering250 personal interest in the ancient swishing block. At Cambridge I felt for the first time that I touched the thing that was going on. Real living statesmen came down to debate in the union, the older dons had been their college intimates, their sons and nephews expounded252 them to us and made them real to us. They invited us to entertain ideas; I found myself for the first time in my life expected to read and think and discuss, my secret vice69 had become a virtue.
That combination-room world is at last larger and more populous253 and various than the world of schoolmasters. The Shoesmiths and Naylors who had been the aristocracy of City Merchants' fell into their place in my mind; they became an undistinguished mass on the more athletic254 side of Pinky Dinkyism, and their hostility to ideas and to the expression of ideas ceased to limit and trouble me. The brighter men of each generation stay up; these others go down to propagate their tradition, as the fathers of families, as mediocre professional men, as assistant masters in schools. Cambridge which perfects them is by the nature of things least oppressed by them,--except when it comes to a vote in Convocation.
We were still in those days under the shadow of the great Victorians. I never saw Gladstone (as I never set eyes on the old Queen), but he had resigned office only a year before I went up to Trinity, and the Combination Rooms were full of personal gossip about him and Disraeli and the other big figures of the gladiatorial stage of Parlimentary history, talk that leaked copiously into such sets as mine. The ceiling of our guest chamber at Trinity was glorious with the arms of Sir William Harcourt, whose Death Duties had seemed at first like a socialist dawn. Mr. Evesham we asked to come to the union every year, Masters, Chamberlain and the old Duke of Devonshire; they did not come indeed, but their polite refusals brought us all, as it were, within personal touch of them. One heard of cabinet councils and meetings at country houses. Some of us, pursuing such interests, went so far as to read political memoirs255 and the novels of Disraeli and Mrs. Humphry Ward8. From gossip, example and the illustrated256 newspapers one learnt something of the way in which parties were split, coalitions257 formed, how permanent officials worked and controlled their ministers, how measures were brought forward and projects modified.
And while I was getting the great leading figures on the political stage, who had been presented to me in my schooldays not so much as men as the pantomimic monsters of political caricature, while I was getting them reduced in my imagination to the stature258 of humanity, and their motives260 to the quality of impulses like my own, I was also acquiring in my Tripos work a constantly developing and enriching conception of the world of men as a complex of economic, intellectual and moral processes....
5
Socialism is an intellectual Proteus, but to the men of my generation it came as the revolt of the workers. Rodbertus we never heard of and the Fabian Society we did not understand; Marx and Morris, the Chicago Anarchists261, JUSTICE and Social Democratic Federation262 (as it was then) presented socialism to our minds. Hatherleigh was the leading exponent263 of the new doctrines264 in Trinity, and the figure upon his wall of a huge-muscled, black-haired toiler266 swaggering sledgehammer in hand across a revolutionary barricade, seemed the quintessence of what he had to expound251. Landlord and capitalist had robbed and enslaved the workers, and were driving them quite automatically to inevitable268 insurrection. They would arise and the capitalist system would flee and vanish like the mists before the morning, like the dews before the sunrise, giving place in the most simple and obvious manner to an era of Right and Justice and Virtue and Well Being, and in short a Perfectly Splendid Time.
I had already discussed this sort of socialism under the guidance of Britten, before I went up to Cambridge. It was all mixed up with ideas about freedom and natural virtue and a great scorn for kings, titles, wealth and officials, and it was symbolised by the red ties we wore. Our simple verdict on existing arrangements was that they were "all wrong." The rich were robbers and knew it, kings and princes were usurpers and knew it, religious teachers were impostors in league with power, the economic system was an elaborate plot on the part of the few to expropriate the many. We went about feeling scornful of all the current forms of life, forms that esteemed269 themselves solid, that were, we knew, no more than shapes painted on a curtain that was presently to be torn aside....
It was Hatherleigh's poster and his capacity for overstating things, I think, that first qualified270 my simple revolutionary enthusiasm. Perhaps also I had met with Fabian publications, but if I did I forget the circumstances. And no doubt my innate271 constructiveness272 with its practical corollary of an analytical treatment of the material supplied, was bound to push me on beyond this melodramatic interpretation of human affairs.
I compared that Working Man of the poster with any sort of working man I knew. I perceived that the latter was not going to change, and indeed could not under any stimulus274 whatever be expected to change, into the former. It crept into my mind as slowly and surely as the dawn creeps into a room that the former was not, as I had at first rather glibly275 assumed, an "ideal," but a complete misrepresentation of the quality and possibilities of things.
I do not know now whether it was during my school-days or at Cambridge that I first began not merely to see the world as a great contrast of rich and poor, but to feel the massive effect of that multitudinous majority of people who toil267 continually, who are for ever anxious about ways and means, who are restricted, ill clothed, ill fed and ill housed, who have limited outlooks and continually suffer misadventures, hardships and distresses276 through the want of money. My lot had fallen upon the fringe of the possessing minority; if I did not know the want of necessities I knew shabbiness, and the world that let me go on to a university education intimated very plainly that there was not a thing beyond the primary needs that my stimulated277 imagination might demand that it would not be an effort for me to secure. A certain aggressive radicalism278 against the ruling and propertied classes followed almost naturally from my circumstances. It did not at first connect itself at all with the perception of a planless disorder in human affairs that had been forced upon me by the atmosphere of my upbringing, nor did it link me in sympathy with any of the profounder realities of poverty. It was a personal independent thing. The dingier279 people one saw in the back streets and lower quarters of Bromstead and Penge, the drift of dirty children, ragged280 old women, street loafers, grimy workers that made the social background of London, the stories one heard of privation and sweating, only joined up very slowly with the general propositions I was making about life. We could become splendidly eloquent281 about the social revolution and the triumph of the Proletariat after the Class war, and it was only by a sort of inspiration that it came to me that my bedder, a garrulous282 old thing with a dusty black bonnet283 over one eye and an ostentatiously clean apron284 outside the dark mysteries that clothed her, or the cheeky little ruffians who yelled papers about the streets, were really material to such questions.
Directly any of us young socialists285 of Trinity found ourselves in immediate286 contact with servants or cadgers or gyps or bedders or plumbers287 or navvies or cabmen or railway porters we became unconsciously and unthinkingly aristocrats288. Our voices altered, our gestures altered. We behaved just as all the other men, rich or poor, swatters or sportsmen or Pinky Dinkys, behaved, and exactly as we were expected to behave. On the whole it is a population of poor quality round about Cambridge, rather stunted289 and spiritless and very difficult to idealise. That theoretical Working Man of ours!--if we felt the clash at all we explained it, I suppose, by assuming that he came from another part of the country; Esmeer, I remember, who lived somewhere in the Fens290, was very eloquent about the Cornish fishermen, and Hatherleigh, who was a Hampshire man, assured us we ought to know the Scottish miner. My private fancy was for the Lancashire operative because of his co-operative societies, and because what Lancashire thinks to-day England thinks to-morrow.... And also I had never been in Lancashire.
By little increments291 of realisation it was that the profounder verities292 of the problem of socialism came to me. It helped me very much that I had to go down to the Potteries293 several times to discuss my future with my uncle and guardian294; I walked about and saw Bursley Wakes and much of the human aspects of organised industrialism at close quarters for the first time. The picture of a splendid Working Man cheated out of his innate glorious possibilities, and presently to arise and dash this scoundrelly and scandalous system of private ownership to fragments, began to give place to a limitless spectacle of inefficiency295, to a conception of millions of people not organised as they should be, not educated as they should be, not simply prevented from but incapable296 of nearly every sort of beauty, mostly kindly297 and well meaning, mostly incompetent298, mostly obstinate299, and easily humbugged and easily diverted. Even the tragic300 and inspiring idea of Marx, that the poor were nearing a limit of painful experience, and awakening301 to a sense of intolerable wrongs, began to develop into the more appalling302 conception that the poor were simply in a witless uncomfortable inconclusive way--"muddling along"; that they wanted nothing very definitely nor very urgently, that mean fears enslaved them and mean satisfactions decoyed them, that they took the very gift of life itself with a spiritless lassitude, hoarding303 it, being rather anxious not to lose it than to use it in any way whatever.
The complete development of that realisation was the work of many years. I had only the first intimations at Cambridge. But I did have intimations. Most acutely do I remember the doubts that followed the visit of Chris Robinson. Chris Robinson was heralded304 by such heroic anticipations305, and he was so entirely what we had not anticipated.
Hatherleigh got him to come, arranged a sort of meeting for him at Redmayne's rooms in King's, and was very proud and proprietorial306. It failed to stir Cambridge at all profoundly. Beyond a futile attempt to screw up Hatherleigh made by some inexpert duffers who used nails instead of screws and gimlets, there was no attempt to rag. Next day Chris Robinson went and spoke307 at Bennett Hall in Newnham College, and left Cambridge in the evening amidst the cheers of twenty men or so. Socialism was at such a low ebb308 politically in those days that it didn't even rouse men to opposition309.
And there sat Chris under that flamboyant310 and heroic Worker of the poster, a little wrinkled grey-bearded apologetic man in ready-made clothes, with watchful311 innocent brown eyes and a persistent312 and invincible air of being out of his element. He sat with his stout313 boots tucked up under his chair, and clung to a teacup and saucer and looked away from us into the fire, and we all sat about on tables and chair-arms and windowsills and boxes and anywhere except upon chairs after the manner of young men. The only other chair whose seat was occupied was the one containing his knitted woollen comforter and his picturesque314 old beach-photographer's hat. We were all shy and didn't know how to take hold of him now we had got him, and, which was disconcertingly unanticipated, he was manifestly having the same difficulty with us. We had expected to be gripped.
"I'll not be knowing what to say to these Chaps," he repeated with a north-country quality in his speech.
We made reassuring315 noises.
The Ambassador of the Workers stirred his tea earnestly through an uncomfortable pause.
"I'd best tell 'em something of how things are in Lancashire, what with the new machines and all that," he speculated at last with red reflections in his thoughtful eyes.
We had an inexcusable dread116 that perhaps he would make a mess of the meeting.
But when he was no longer in the unaccustomed meshes316 of refined conversation, but speaking with an audience before him, he became a different man. He declared he would explain to us just exactly what socialism was, and went on at once to an impassioned contrast of social conditions. "You young men," he said "come from homes of luxury; every need you feel is supplied--"
We sat and stood and sprawled317 about him, occupying every inch of Redmayne's floor space except the hearthrug-platform, and we listened to him and thought him over. He was the voice of wrongs that made us indignant and eager. We forgot for a time that he had been shy and seemed not a little incompetent, his provincial318 accent became a beauty of his earnest speech, we were carried away by his indignations. We looked with shining eyes at one another and at the various dons who had dropped in and were striving to maintain a front of judicious319 severity. We felt more and more that social injustice320 must cease, and cease forthwith. We felt we could not sleep upon it. At the end we clapped and murmured our applause and wanted badly to cheer.
Then like a lancet stuck into a bladder came the heckling. Denson, that indolent, liberal-minded sceptic, did most of the questioning. He lay contorted in a chair, with his ugly head very low, his legs crossed and his left boot very high, and he pointed his remarks with a long thin hand and occasionally adjusted the unstable321 glasses that hid his watery322 eyes. "I don't want to carp," he began. "The present system, I admit, stands condemned323. Every present system always HAS stood condemned in the minds of intelligent men. But where it seems to me you get thin, is just where everybody has been thin, and that's when you come to the remedy."
"Socialism," said Chris Robinson, as if it answered everything, and Hatherleigh said "Hear! Hear!" very resolutely324.
"I suppose I OUGHT to take that as an answer," said Denson, getting his shoulder-blades well down to the seat of his chair; "but I don't. I don't, you know. It's rather a shame to cross-examine you after this fine address of yours"--Chris Robinson on the hearthrug made acquiescent325 and inviting326 noises--"but the real question remains327 how exactly are you going to end all these wrongs? There are the administrative328 questions. If you abolish the private owner, I admit you abolish a very complex and clumsy way of getting businesses run, land controlled and things in general administered, but you don't get rid of the need of administration, you know."
"Democracy," said Chris Robinson.
"Organised somehow," said Denson. "And it's just the How perplexes me. I can quite easily imagine a socialist state administered in a sort of scrambling329 tumult330 that would be worse than anything we have got now.
"Nothing could be worse than things are now," said Chris Robinson. "I have seen little children--"
"I submit life on an ill-provisioned raft, for example, could easily be worse--or life in a beleagured town."
Murmurs331.
They wrangled332 for some time, and it had the effect upon me of coming out from the glow of a good matinee performance into the cold daylight of late afternoon. Chris Robinson did not shine in conflict with Denson; he was an orator333 and not a dialectician, and he missed Denson's points and displayed a disposition to plunge52 into untimely pathos334 and indignation. And Denson hit me curiously hard with one of his shafts335. "Suppose," he said, "you found yourself prime minister--"
I looked at Chris Robinson, bright-eyed and his hair a little ruffled336 and his whole being rhetorical, and measured him against the huge machine of government muddled337 and mysterious. Oh! but I was perplexed!
And then we took him back to Hatherleigh's rooms and drank beer and smoked about him while he nursed his knee with hairy wristed hands that protruded339 from his flannel340 shirt, and drank lemonade under the cartoon of that emancipated341 Worker, and we had a great discursive342 talk with him.
"Eh! you should see our big meetings up north?" he said.
Denson had ruffled him and worried him a good deal, and ever and again he came back to that discussion. "It's all very easy for your learned men to sit and pick holes," he said, "while the children suffer and die. They don't pick holes up north. They mean business."
He talked, and that was the most interesting part of it all, of his going to work in a factory when he was twelve--"when you Chaps were all with your mammies "--and how he had educated himself of nights until he would fall asleep at his reading.
"It's made many of us keen for all our lives," he remarked, "all that clemming for education. Why! I longed all through one winter to read a bit of Darwin. I must know about this Darwin if I die for it, I said. And I could no' get the book."
Hatherleigh made an enthusiastic noise and drank beer at him with round eyes over the mug.
"Well, anyhow I wasted no time on Greek and Latin," said Chris Robinson. "And one learns to go straight at a thing without splitting straws. One gets hold of the Elementals."
(Well, did they? That was the gist343 of my perplexity.)
"One doesn't quibble," he said, returning to his rankling344 memory of Denson, "while men decay and starve."
"But suppose," I said, suddenly dropping into opposition, "the alternative is to risk a worse disaster--or do something patently futile."
"I don't follow that," said Chris Robinson. "We don't propose anything futile, so far as I can see."
6
The prevailing345 force in my undergraduate days was not Socialism but Kiplingism. Our set was quite exceptional in its socialistic professions. And we were all, you must understand, very distinctly Imperialists also, and professed a vivid sense of the "White Man's Burden."
It is a little difficult now to get back to the feelings of that period; Kipling has since been so mercilessly and exhaustively mocked, criticised and torn to shreds;--never was a man so violently exalted347 and then, himself assisting, so relentlessly348 called down. But in the middle nineties this spectacled and moustached little figure with its heavy chin and its general effect of vehement349 gesticulation, its wild shouts of boyish enthusiasm for effective force, its lyric350 delight in the sounds and colours, in the very odours of empire, its wonderful discovery of machinery351 and cotton waste and the under officer and the engineer, and "shop" as a poetic352 dialect, became almost a national symbol. He got hold of us wonderfully, he filled us with tinkling353 and haunting quotations354, he stirred Britten and myself to futile imitations, he coloured the very idiom of our conversation. He rose to his climax355 with his "Recessional," while I was still an undergraduate.
What did he give me exactly?
He helped to broaden my geographical356 sense immensely, and he provided phrases for just that desire for discipline and devotion and organised effort the Socialism of our time failed to express, that the current socialist movement still fails, I think, to express. The sort of thing that follows, for example, tore something out of my inmost nature and gave it a shape, and I took it back from him shaped and let much of the rest of him, the tumult and the bullying357, the hysteria and the impatience358, the incoherence and inconsistency, go uncriticised for the sake of it:--
"Keep ye the Law--be swift in all obedience--Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford138, Make ye sure to each his own That he reap where he hath sown; By the peace among Our peoples let men know we serve the Lord!"
And then again, and for all our later criticism, this sticks in my mind, sticks there now as quintessential wisdom:
"The 'eathen in 'is blindness bows down to wood an' stone;
'E don't obey no orders unless they is 'is own;
'E keeps 'is side-arms awful: 'e leaves 'em all about
An' then comes up the regiment359 an' pokes360 the 'eathen out.
All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess,
All along o' doin' things rather-more-or-less,
All along of abby-nay, kul, an' hazar-ho,
Mind you keep your rifle an' yourself jus' so!"
It is after all a secondary matter that Kipling, not having been born and brought up in Bromstead and Penge, and the war in South Africa being yet in the womb of time, could quite honestly entertain the now remarkable delusion361 that England had her side-arms at that time kept anything but "awful." He learnt better, and we all learnt with him in the dark years of exasperating362 and humiliating struggle that followed, and I do not see that we fellow learners are justified363 in turning resentfully upon him for a common ignorance and assumption....
South Africa seems always painted on the back cloth of my Cambridge memories. How immense those disasters seemed at the time, disasters our facile English world has long since contrived in any edifying364 or profitable sense to forget! How we thrilled to the shouting newspaper sellers as the first false flush of victory gave place to the realisation of defeat. Far away there our army showed itself human, mortal and human in the sight of all the world, the pleasant officers we had imagined would change to wonderful heroes at the first crackling of rifles, remained the pleasant, rather incompetent men they had always been, failing to imagine, failing to plan and co-operate, failing to grip. And the common soldiers, too, they were just what our streets and country-side had made them, no sudden magic came out of the war bugles365 for them. Neither splendid nor disgraceful were they,--just ill-trained and fairly plucky366 and wonderfully good-tempered men--paying for it. And how it lowered our vitality367 all that first winter to hear of Nicholson's Nek, and then presently close upon one another, to realise the bloody368 waste of Magersfontein, the shattering retreat from Stormberg, Colenso--Colenso, that blundering battle, with White, as it seemed, in Ladysmith near the point of surrender! and so through the long unfolding catalogue of bleak369 disillusionments, of aching, unconcealed anxiety lest worse should follow. To advance upon your enemy singing about his lack of cleanliness and method went out of fashion altogether! The dirty retrogressive Boer vanished from our scheme of illusion.
All through my middle Cambridge period, the guns boomed and the rifles crackled away there on the veldt, and the horsemen rode and the tale of accidents and blundering went on. Men, mules370, horses, stores and money poured into South Africa, and the convalescent wounded streamed home. I see it in my memory as if I had looked at it through a window instead of through the pages of the illustrated papers; I recall as if I had been there the wide open spaces, the ragged hillsides, the open order attacks of helmeted men in khaki, the scarce visible smoke of the guns, the wrecked371 trains in great lonely places, the burnt isolated372 farms, and at last the blockhouses and the fences of barbed wire uncoiling and spreading for endless miles across the desert, netting the elusive373 enemy until at last, though he broke the meshes again and again, we had him in the toils374. If one's attention strayed in the lecture-room it wandered to those battle-fields.
And that imagined panorama375 of war unfolds to an accompaniment of yelling newsboys in the narrow old Cambridge streets, of the flicker376 of papers hastily bought and torn open in the twilight, of the doubtful reception of doubtful victories, and the insensate rejoicings at last that seemed to some of us more shameful than defeats....
7
A book that stands out among these memories, that stimulated me immensely so that I forced it upon my companions, half in the spirit of propaganda and half to test it by their comments, was Meredith's ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS377. It is one of the books that have made me. In that I got a supplement and corrective of Kipling. It was the first detached and adverse378 criticism of the Englishman I had ever encountered. It must have been published already nine or ten years when I read it. The country had paid no heed379 to it, had gone on to the expensive lessons of the War because of the dull aversion our people feel for all such intimations, and so I could read it as a book justified. The war endorsed380 its every word for me, underlined each warning indication of the gigantic dangers that gathered against our system across the narrow seas. It discovered Europe to me, as watching and critical.
But while I could respond to all its criticisms of my country's intellectual indolence, of my country's want of training and discipline and moral courage, I remember that the idea that on the continent there were other peoples going ahead of us, mentally alert while we fumbled381, disciplined while we slouched, aggressive and preparing to bring our Imperial pride to a reckoning, was extremely novel and distasteful to me. It set me worrying of nights. It put all my projects for social and political reconstruction upon a new uncomfortable footing. It made them no longer merely desirable but urgent. Instead of pride and the love of making one might own to a baser motive259. Under Kipling's sway I had a little forgotten the continent of Europe, treated it as a mere envious382 echo to our own world-wide display. I began now to have a disturbing sense as it were of busy searchlights over the horizon....
One consequence of the patriotic383 chagrin384 Meredith produced in me was an attempt to belittle385 his merit. "It isn't a good novel, anyhow," I said.
The charge I brought against it was, I remember, a lack of unity. It professed to be a study of the English situation in the early nineties, but it was all deflected386, I said, and all the interest was confused by the story of Victor Radnor's fight with society to vindicate387 the woman he had loved and never married. Now in the retrospect388 and with a mind full of bitter enlightenment, I can do Meredith justice, and admit the conflict was not only essential but cardinal389 in his picture, that the terrible inflexibility390 of the rich aunts and the still more terrible claim of Mrs. Burman Radnor, the "infernal punctilio," and Dudley Sowerby's limitations, were the central substance of that inalertness the book set itself to assail391. So many things have been brought together in my mind that were once remotely separated. A people that will not valiantly392 face and understand and admit love and passion can understand nothing whatever. But in those days what is now just obvious truth to me was altogether outside my range of comprehension....
8
As I seek to recapitulate393 the interlacing growth of my apprehension394 of the world, as I flounder among the half-remembered developments that found me a crude schoolboy and left me a man, there comes out, as if it stood for all the rest, my first holiday abroad. That did not happen until I was twenty-two. I was a fellow of Trinity, and the Peace of Vereeniging had just been signed.
I went with a man named Willersley, a man some years senior to myself, who had just missed a fellowship and the higher division of the Civil Service, and who had become an enthusiastic member of the London School Board, upon which the cumulative395 vote and the support of the "advanced" people had placed him. He had, like myself, a small independent income that relieved him of any necessity to earn a living, and he had a kindred craving396 for social theorising and some form of social service. He had sought my acquaintance after reading a paper of mine (begotten by the visit of Chris Robinson) on the limits of pure democracy. It had marched with some thoughts of his own.
We went by train to Spiez on the Lake of Thun, then up the Gemmi, and thence with one or two halts and digressions and a little modest climbing we crossed over by the Antrona pass (on which we were benighted) into Italy, and by way of Domo D'ossola and the Santa Maria Maggiore valley to Cannobio, and thence up the lake to Locarno (where, as I shall tell, we stayed some eventful days) and so up the Val Maggia and over to Airolo and home.
As I write of that long tramp of ours, something of its freshness and enlargement returns to me. I feel again the faint pleasant excitement of the boat train, the trampling398 procession of people with hand baggage and laden399 porters along the platform of the Folkestone pier13, the scarcely perceptible swaying of the moored400 boat beneath our feet. Then, very obvious and simple, the little emotion of standing2 out from the homeland and seeing the long white Kentish cliffs recede401. One walked about the boat doing one's best not to feel absurdly adventurous402, and presently a movement of people directed one's attention to a white lighthouse on a cliff to the east of us, coming up suddenly; and then one turned to scan the little different French coast villages, and then, sliding by in a pale sunshine came a long wooden pier with oddly dressed children upon it, and the clustering town of Boulogne.
One took it all with the outward calm that became a young man of nearly three and twenty, but one was alive to one's finger-tips with pleasing little stimulations. The custom house examination excited one, the strangeness of a babble403 in a foreign tongue; one found the French of City Merchants' and Cambridge a shy and viscous404 flow, and then one was standing in the train as it went slowly through the rail-laid street to Boulogne Ville, and one looked out at the world in French, porters in blouses, workmen in enormous purple trousers, police officers in peaked caps instead of helmets and romantically cloaked, big carts, all on two wheels instead of four, green shuttered casements405 instead of sash windows, and great numbers of neatly406 dressed women in economical mourning.
"Oh! there's a priest!" one said, and was betrayed into suchlike artless cries.
It was a real other world, with different government and different methods, and in the night one was roused from uneasy slumbers407 and sat blinking and surly, wrapped up in one's couverture and with one's oreiller all awry408, to encounter a new social phenomenon, the German official, so different in manner from the British; and when one woke again after that one had come to Bale, and out one tumbled to get coffee in Switzerland....
I have been over that route dozens of times since, but it still revives a certain lingering youthfulness, a certain sense of cheerful release in me.
I remember that I and Willersley became very sociological as we ran on to Spiez, and made all sorts of generalisations from the steeply sloping fields on the hillsides, and from the people we saw on platforms and from little differences in the way things were done.
The clean prosperity of Bale and Switzerland, the big clean stations, filled me with patriotic misgivings409, as I thought of the vast dirtiness of London, the mean dirtiness of Cambridgeshire. It came to me that perhaps my scheme of international values was all wrong, that quite stupendous possibilities and challenges for us and our empire might be developing here--and I recalled Meredith's Skepsey in France with a new understanding.
Willersley had dressed himself in a world-worn Norfolk suit of greenish grey tweeds that ended unfamiliarly at his rather impending410, spectacled, intellectual visage. I didn't, I remember, like the contrast of him with the drilled Swiss and Germans about us. Convict coloured stockings and vast hobnail boots finished him below, and all his luggage was a borrowed rucksac that he had tied askew411. He did not want to shave in the train, but I made him at one of the Swiss stations--I dislike these Oxford slovenlinesses--and then confound him! he cut himself and bled....
Next morning we were breathing a thin exhilarating air that seemed to have washed our very veins412 to an incredible cleanliness, and eating hard-boiled eggs in a vast clear space of rime-edged rocks, snow-mottled, above a blue-gashed glacier413. All about us the monstrous414 rock surfaces rose towards the shining peaks above, and there were winding415 moraines from which the ice had receded416, and then dark clustering fir trees far below.
I had an extraordinary feeling of having come out of things, of being outside.
"But this is the round world!" I said, with a sense of never having perceived it before; "this is the round world!"
9
That holiday was full of big comprehensive effects; the first view of the Rhone valley and the distant Valaisian Alps, for example, which we saw from the shoulder of the mountain above the Gemmi, and the early summer dawn breaking over Italy as we moved from our night's crouching417 and munched418 bread and chocolate and stretched our stiff limbs among the tumbled and precipitous rocks that hung over Lake Cingolo, and surveyed the winding tiring rocky track going down and down to Antronapiano.
And our thoughts were as comprehensive as our impressions. Willersley's mind abounded419 in historical matter; he had an inaccurate abundant habit of topographical reference; he made me see and trace and see again the Roman Empire sweep up these winding valleys, and the coming of the first great Peace among the warring tribes of men....
In the retrospect each of us seems to have been talking about our outlook almost continually. Each of us, you see, was full of the same question, very near and altogether predominant to us, the question: "What am I going to do with my life?" He saw it almost as importantly as I, but from a different angle, because his choice was largely made and mine still hung in the balance.
"I feel we might do so many things," I said, "and everything that calls one, calls one away from something else."
Willersley agreed without any modest disavowals.
"We have got to think out," he said, "just what we are and what we are up to. We've got to do that now. And then--it's one of those questions it is inadvisable to reopen subsequently."
He beamed at me through his glasses. The sententious use of long words was a playful habit with him, that and a slight deliberate humour, habits occasional Extension Lecturing was doing very much to intensify421.
"You've made your decision?"
He nodded with a peculiar forward movement of his head.
"How would you put it?"
"Social Service--education. Whatever else matters or doesn't matter, it seems to me there is one thing we MUST have and increase, and that is the number of people who can think a little--and have"--he beamed again--"an adequate sense of causation."
"You're sure it's worth while."
"For me--certainly. I don't discuss that any more."
"I don't limit myself too narrowly," he added. "After all, the work is all one. We who know, we who feel, are building the great modern state, joining wall to wall and way to way, the new great England rising out of the decaying old... we are the real statesmen--I like that use of 'statesmen.'..."
"Yes," I said with many doubts. "Yes, of course...."
Willersley is middle-aged422 now, with silver in his hair and a deepening benevolence423 in his always amiable424 face, and he has very fairly kept his word. He has lived for social service and to do vast masses of useful, undistinguished, fertilising work. Think of the days of arid425 administrative plodding426 and of contention427 still more arid and unrewarded, that he must have spent! His little affectations of gesture and manner, imitative affectations for the most part, have increased, and the humorous beam and the humorous intonations428 have become a thing he puts on every morning like an old coat. His devotion is mingled429 with a considerable whimsicality, and they say he is easily flattered by subordinates and easily offended into opposition by colleagues; he has made mistakes at times and followed wrong courses, still there he is, a flat contradiction to all the ordinary doctrine265 of motives, a man who has foregone any chances of wealth and profit, foregone any easier paths to distinction, foregone marriage and parentage, in order to serve the community. He does it without any fee or reward except his personal self-satisfaction in doing this work, and he does it without any hope of future joys and punishments, for he is an implacable Rationalist. No doubt he idealises himself a little, and dreams of recognition. No doubt he gets his pleasure from a sense of power, from the spending and husbanding of large sums of public money, and from the inevitable proprietorship431 he must feel in the fair, fine, well-ordered schools he has done so much to develop. "But for me," he can say, "there would have been a Job about those diagrams, and that subject or this would have been less ably taught."...
The fact remains that for him the rewards have been adequate, if not to content at any rate to keep him working. Of course he covets432 the notice of the world he has served, as a lover covets the notice of his mistress. Of course he thinks somewhere, somewhen, he will get credit. Only last year I heard some men talking of him, and they were noting, with little mean smiles, how he had shown himself self-conscious while there was talk of some honorary degree-giving or other; it would, I have no doubt, please him greatly if his work were to flower into a crimson433 gown in some Academic parterre. Why shouldn't it? But that is incidental vanity at the worst; he goes on anyhow. Most men don't.
But we had our walk twenty years and more ago now. He was oldish even then as a young man, just as he is oldish still in middle age. Long may his industrious434 elderliness flourish for the good of the world! He lectured a little in conversation then; he lectures more now and listens less, toilsomely disentangling what you already understand, giving you in detail the data you know; these are things like callosities that come from a man's work.
Our long three weeks' talk comes back to me as a memory of ideas and determinations slowly growing, all mixed up with a smell of wood smoke and pine woods and huge precipices435 and remote gleams of snow-fields and the sound of cascading436 torrents437 rushing through deep gorges438 far below. It is mixed, too, with gossips with waitresses and fellow travellers, with my first essays in colloquial439 German and Italian, with disputes about the way to take, and other things that I will tell of in another section. But the white passion of human service was our dominant420 theme. Not simply perhaps nor altogether unselfishly, but quite honestly, and with at least a frequent self-forgetfulness, did we want to do fine and noble things, to help in their developing, to lessen440 misery441, to broaden and exalt346 life. It is very hard--perhaps it is impossible--to present in a page or two the substance and quality of nearly a month's conversation, conversation that is casual and discursive in form, that ranges carelessly from triviality to immensity, and yet is constantly resuming a constructive273 process, as workmen on a wall loiter and jest and go and come back, and all the while build.
We got it more and more definite that the core of our purpose beneath all its varied442 aspects must needs be order and discipline. "Muddle338," said I, "is the enemy." That remains my belief to this day. Clearness and order, light and foresight443, these things I know for Good. It was muddle had just given us all the still freshly painful disasters and humiliations of the war, muddle that gives us the visibly sprawling444 disorder of our cities and industrial country-side, muddle that gives us the waste of life, the limitations, wretchedness and unemployment of the poor. Muddle! I remember myself quoting Kipling--
"All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess,
All along o' doin' things rather-more-or-less."
"We build the state," we said over and over again. "That is what we are for--servants of the new reorganisation!"
We planned half in earnest and half Utopianising, a League of Social Service.
We talked of the splendid world of men that might grow out of such unpaid445 and ill-paid work as we were setting our faces to do. We spoke of the intricate difficulties, the monstrous passive resistances, the hostilities446 to such a development as we conceived our work subserved, and we spoke with that underlying447 confidence in the invincibility448 of the causes we adopted that is natural to young and scarcely tried men.
We talked much of the detailed449 life of politics so far as it was known to us, and there Willersley was more experienced and far better informed than I; we discussed possible combinations and possible developments, and the chances of some great constructive movement coming from the heart-searchings the Boer war had occasioned. We would sink to gossip--even at the Suetonius level. Willersley would decline towards illuminating anecdotes that I capped more or less loosely from my private reading. We were particularly wise, I remember, upon the management of newspapers, because about that we knew nothing whatever. We perceived that great things were to be done through newspapers. We talked of swaying opinion and moving great classes to massive action.
Men are egotistical even in devotion. All our splendid projects were thickset with the first personal pronoun. We both could write, and all that we said in general terms was reflected in the particular in our minds; it was ourselves we saw, and no others, writing and speaking that moving word. We had already produced manuscript and passed the initiations of proof reading; I had been a frequent speaker in the union, and Willersley was an active man on the School Board. Our feet were already on the lower rungs that led up and up. He was six and twenty, and I twenty-two. We intimated our individual careers in terms of bold expectation. I had prophetic glimpses of walls and hoardings clamorous450 with "Vote for Remington," and Willersley no doubt saw himself chairman of this committee and that, saying a few slightly ironical451 words after the declaration of the poll, and then sitting friendly beside me on the government benches. There was nothing impossible in such dreams. Why not the Board of Education for him? My preference at that time wavered between the Local Government Board--I had great ideas about town-planning, about revisions of municipal areas and re-organised internal transit--and the War Office. I swayed strongly towards the latter as the journey progressed. My educational bias452 came later.
The swelling453 ambitions that have tramped over Alpine454 passes! How many of them, like mine, have come almost within sight of realisation before they failed?
There were times when we posed like young gods (of unassuming exterior), and times when we were full of the absurdest little solicitudes455 about our prospects. There were times when one surveyed the whole world of men as if it was a little thing at one's feet, and by way of contrast I remember once lying in bed--it must have been during this holiday, though I cannot for the life of me fix where--and speculating whether perhaps some day I might not be a K. C. B., Sir Richard Remington, K. C. B., M. P.
But the big style prevailed....
We could not tell from minute to minute whether we were planning for a world of solid reality, or telling ourselves fairy tales about this prospect16 of life. So much seemed possible, and everything we could think of so improbable. There were lapses456 when it seemed to me I could never be anything but just the entirely unimportant and undistinguished young man I was for ever and ever. I couldn't even think of myself as five and thirty.
Once I remember Willersley going over a list of failures, and why they had failed--but young men in the twenties do not know much about failures.
10
Willersley and I professed ourselves Socialists, but by this time I knew my Rodbertus as well as my Marx, and there was much in our socialism that would have shocked Chris Robinson as much as anything in life could have shocked him. Socialism as a simple democratic cry we had done with for ever. We were socialists because Individualism for us meant muddle, meant a crowd of separated, undisciplined little people all obstinately457 and ignorantly doing things jarringly, each one in his own way. "Each," I said quoting words of my father's that rose apt in my memory, "snarling458 from his own little bit of property, like a dog tied to a cart's tail."
"Essentially459," said Willersley, "essentially we're for conscription, in peace and war alike. The man who owns property is a public official and has to behave as such. That's the gist of socialism as I understand it."
"Or be dismissed from his post," I said, "and replaced by some better sort of official. A man's none the less an official because he's irresponsible. What he does with his property affects people just the same. Private! No one is really private but an outlaw460...."
Order and devotion were the very essence of our socialism, and a splendid collective vigour461 and happiness its end. We projected an ideal state, an organised state as confident and powerful as modern science, as balanced and beautiful as a body, as beneficent as sunshine, the organised state that should end muddle for ever; it ruled all our ideals and gave form to all our ambitions.
Every man was to be definitely related to that, to have his predominant duty to that. Such was the England renewed we had in mind, and how to serve that end, to subdue82 undisciplined worker and undisciplined wealth to it, and make the Scientific Commonweal, King, was the continuing substance of our intercourse.
11
Every day the wine of the mountains was stronger in our blood, and the flush of our youth deeper. We would go in the morning sunlight along some narrow Alpine mule-path shouting large suggestions for national reorganisation, and weighing considerations as lightly as though the world was wax in our hands. "Great England," we said in effect, over and over again, "and we will be among the makers462! England renewed! The country has been warned; it has learnt its lesson. The disasters and anxieties of the war have sunk in. England has become serious.... Oh! there are big things before us to do; big enduring things!"
One evening we walked up to the loggia of a little pilgrimage church, I forget its name, that stands out on a conical hill at the head of a winding stair above the town of Locarno. Down below the houses clustered amidst a confusion of heat-bitten greenery. I had been sitting silently on the parapet, looking across to the purple mountain masses where Switzerland passes into Italy, and the drift of our talk seemed suddenly to gather to a head.
I broke into speech, giving form to the thoughts that had been accumulating. My words have long since passed out of my memory, the phrases of familiar expression have altered for me, but the substance remains as clear as ever. I said how we were in our measure emperors and kings, men undriven, free to do as we pleased with life; we classed among the happy ones, our bread and common necessities were given us for nothing, we had abilities,--it wasn't modesty but cowardice to behave as if we hadn't--and Fortune watched us to see what we might do with opportunity and the world.
"There are so many things to do, you see," began Willersley, in his judicial lecturer's voice.
"So many things we may do," I interrupted, "with all these years before us.... We're exceptional men. It's our place, our duty, to do things."
"Here anyhow," I said, answering the faint amusement of his face; "I've got no modesty. Everything conspires463 to set me up. Why should I run about like all those grubby little beasts down there, seeking nothing but mean little vanities and indulgencies--and then take credit for modesty? I KNOW I am capable. I KNOW I have imagination. Modesty! I know if I don't attempt the very biggest things in life I am a damned shirk. The very biggest! Somebody has to attempt them. I feel like a loaded gun that is only a little perplexed because it has to find out just where to aim itself...."
The lake and the frontier villages, a white puff464 of steam on the distant railway to Luino, the busy boats and steamers trailing triangular465 wakes of foam466, the long vista19 eastward467 towards battlemented Bellinzona, the vast mountain distances, now tinged with sunset light, behind this nearer landscape, and the southward waters with remote coast towns shining dimly, waters that merged468 at last in a luminous golden haze, made a broad panoramic469 spectacle. It was as if one surveyed the world,--and it was like the games I used to set out upon my nursery floor. I was exalted by it; I felt larger than men. So kings should feel.
That sense of largeness came to me then, and it has come to me since, again and again, a splendid intimation or a splendid vanity. Once, I remember, when I looked at Genoa from the mountain crest470 behind the town and saw that multitudinous place in all its beauty of width and abundance and clustering human effort, and once as I was steaming past the brown low hills of Staten Island towards the towering vigour and clamorous vitality of New York City, that mood rose to its quintessence. And once it came to me, as I shall tell, on Dover cliffs. And a hundred times when I have thought of England as our country might be, with no wretched poor, no wretched rich, a nation armed and ordered, trained and purposeful amidst its vales and rivers, that emotion of collective ends and collective purposes has returned to me. I felt as great as humanity. For a brief moment I was humanity, looking at the world I had made and had still to make....
12
And mingled with these dreams of power and patriotic service there was another series of a different quality and a different colour, like the antagonistic471 colour of a shot silk. The white life and the red life, contrasted and interchanged, passing swiftly at a turn from one to another, and refusing ever to mingle430 peacefully one with the other. I was asking myself openly and distinctly: what are you going to do for the world? What are you going to do with yourself? and with an increasing strength and persistence472 Nature in spite of my averted473 attention was asking me in penetrating undertones: what are you going to do about this other fundamental matter, the beauty of girls and women and your desire for them?
I have told of my sisterless youth and the narrow circumstances of my upbringing. It made all women-kind mysterious to me. If it had not been for my Staffordshire cousins I do not think I should have known any girls at all until I was twenty. Of Staffordshire I will tell a little later. But I can remember still how through all those ripening474 years, the thought of women's beauty, their magic presence in the world beside me and the unknown, untried reactions of their intercourse, grew upon me and grew, as a strange presence grows in a room when one is occupied by other things. I busied myself and pretended to be wholly occupied, and there the woman stood, full half of life neglected, and it seemed to my averted mind sometimes that she was there clad and dignified475 and divine, and sometimes Aphrodite shining and commanding, and sometimes that Venus who stoops and allures476.
This travel abroad seemed to have released a multitude of things in my mind; the clear air, the beauty of the sunshine, the very blue of the glaciers477 made me feel my body and quickened all those disregarded dreams. I saw the sheathed478 beauty of women's forms all about me, in the cheerful waitresses at the inns, in the pedestrians479 one encountered in the tracks, in the chance fellow travellers at the hotel tables. "Confound it!" said I, and talked all the more zealously480 of that greater England that was calling us.
I remember that we passed two Germans, an old man and a tall fair girl, father and daughter, who were walking down from Saas. She came swinging and shining towards us, easy and strong. I worshipped her as she approached.
"Gut124 Tag!" said Willersley, removing his hat.
"Morgen!" said the old man, saluting481.
I stared stockishly at the girl, who passed with an indifferent face.
That sticks in my mind as a picture remains in a room, it has kept there bright and fresh as a thing seen yesterday, for twenty years....
I flirted482 hesitatingly once or twice with comely483 serving girls, and was a little ashamed lest Willersley should detect the keen interest I took in them, and then as we came over the pass from Santa Maria Maggiore to Cannobio, my secret preoccupation took me by surprise and flooded me and broke down my pretences484.
The women in that valley are very beautiful--women vary from valley to valley in the Alps and are plain and squat485 here and divinities five miles away--and as we came down we passed a group of five or six of them resting by the wayside. Their burthens were beside them, and one like Ceres held a reaping hook in her brown hand. She watched us approaching and smiled faintly, her eyes at mine.
There was some greeting, and two of them laughed together.
We passed.
"Glorious girls they were," said Willersley, and suddenly an immense sense of boredom486 enveloped487 me. I saw myself striding on down that winding road, talking of politics and parties and bills of parliament and all sorts of dessicated things. That road seemed to me to wind on for ever down to dust and infinite dreariness488. I knew it for a way of death. Reality was behind us.
Willersley set himself to draw a sociological moral. "I'm not so sure," he said in a voice of intense discriminations, "after all, that agricultural work isn't good for women."
"Damn agricultural work!" I said, and broke out into a vigorous cursing of all I held dear. "Fettered489 things we are!" I cried. "I wonder why I stand it!"
"Stand what?"
"Why don't I go back and make love to those girls and let the world and you and everything go hang? Deep breasts and rounded limbs--and we poor emasculated devils go tramping by with the blood of youth in us!..."
"I'm not quite sure, Remington," said Willersley, looking at me with a deliberately quaint397 expression over his glasses, "that picturesque scenery is altogether good for your morals."
That fever was still in my blood when we came to Locarno.
13
Along the hot and dusty lower road between the Orrido of Traffiume and Cannobio Willersley had developed his first blister490. And partly because of that and partly because there was a bag at the station that gave us the refreshment491 of clean linen492 and partly because of the lazy lower air into which we had come, we decided493 upon three or four days' sojourn494 in the Empress Hotel.
We dined that night at a table-d'hote, and I found myself next to an Englishwoman who began a conversation that was resumed presently in the hotel lounge. She was a woman of perhaps thirty-three or thirty-four, slenderly built, with a warm reddish skin and very abundant fair golden hair, the wife of a petulant-looking heavy-faced man of perhaps fifty-three, who smoked a cigar and dozed495 over his coffee and presently went to bed. "He always goes to bed like that," she confided496 startlingly. "He sleeps after all his meals. I never knew such a man to sleep."
Then she returned to our talk, whatever it was.
We had begun at the dinner table with itineraries497 and the usual topographical talk, and she had envied our pedestrian travel. "My husband doesn't walk," she said. "His heart is weak and he cannot manage the hills."
There was something friendly and adventurous in her manner; she conveyed she liked me, and when presently Willersley drifted off to write letters our talk sank at once to easy confidential498 undertones. I felt enterprising, and indeed it is easy to be daring with people one has never seen before and may never see again. I said I loved beautiful scenery and all beautiful things, and the pointing note in my voice made her laugh. She told me I had bold eyes, and so far as I can remember I said she made them bold. "Blue they are," she remarked, smiling archly. "I like blue eyes." Then I think we compared ages, and she said she was the Woman of Thirty, "George Moore's Woman of Thirty."
I had not read George Moore at the time, but I pretended to understand.
That, I think, was our limit that evening. She went to bed, smiling good-night quite prettily499 down the big staircase, and I and Willersley went out to smoke in the garden. My head was full of her, and I found it necessary to talk about her. So I made her a problem in sociology. "Who the deuce are these people?" I said, "and how do they get a living? They seem to have plenty of money. He strikes me as being--Willersley, what is a drysalter? I think he's a retired500 drysalter."
Willersley theorised while I thought of the woman and that provocative501 quality of dash she had displayed. The next day at lunch she and I met like old friends. A huge mass of private thinking during the interval had been added to our effect upon one another. We talked for a time of insignificant502 things.
"What do you do," she asked rather quickly, "after lunch? Take a siesta503?"
"Sometimes," I said, and hung for a moment eye to eye.
We hadn't a doubt of each other, but my heart was beating like a steamer propeller504 when it lifts out of the water.
"Do you get a view from your room?" she asked after a pause.
"It's on the third floor, Number seventeen, near the staircase. My friend's next door."
She began to talk of books. She was interested in Christian505 Science, she said, and spoke of a book. I forget altogether what that book was called, though I remember to this day with the utmost exactness the purplish magenta506 of its cover. She said she would lend it to me and hesitated.
Willersley wanted to go for an expedition across the lake that afternoon, but I refused. He made some other proposals that I rejected abruptly507. "I shall write in my room," I said.
"Why not write down here?"
"I shall write in my room," I snarled508 like a thwarted509 animal, and he looked at me curiously. "Very well," he said; "then I'll make some notes and think about that order of ours out under the magnolias."
I hovered510 about the lounge for a time buying postcards and feverishly511 restless, watching the movements of the other people. Finally I went up to my room and sat down by the windows, staring out. There came a little tap at the unlocked door and in an instant, like the go of a taut512 bowstring, I was up and had it open.
"Here is that book," she said, and we hesitated.
"COME IN!" I whispered, trembling from head to foot.
"You're just a boy," she said in a low tone.
I did not feel a bit like a lover, I felt like a burglar with the safe-door nearly opened. "Come in," I said almost impatiently, for anyone might be in the passage, and I gripped her wrist and drew her towards me.
"What do you mean?" she answered with a faint smile on her lips, and awkward and yielding.
I shut the door behind her, still holding her with one hand, then turned upon her--she was laughing nervously--and without a word drew her to me and kissed her. And I remember that as I kissed her she made a little noise almost like the purring miaow with which a cat will greet one and her face, close to mine, became solemn and tender.
She was suddenly a different being from the discontented wife who had tapped a moment since on my door, a woman transfigured....
That evening I came down to dinner a monster of pride, for behold513! I was a man. I felt myself the most wonderful and unprecedented514 of adventurers. It was hard to believe that any one in the world before had done as much. My mistress and I met smiling, we carried things off admirably, and it seemed to me that Willersley was the dullest old dog in the world. I wanted to give him advice. I wanted to give him derisive515 pokes. After dinner and coffee in the lounge I was too excited and hilarious516 to go to bed, I made him come with me down to the cafe under the arches by the pier, and there drank beer and talked extravagant nonsense about everything under the sun, in order not to talk about the happenings of the afternoon. All the time something shouted within me: "I am a man! I am a man!"...
"What shall we do to-morrow?" said he.
"I'm for loafing," I said. "Let's row in the morning and spend to-morrow afternoon just as we did to-day."
"They say the church behind the town is worth seeing."
"We'll go up about sunset; that's the best time for it. We can start about five."
We heard music, and went further along the arcade517 to discover a place where girls in operatic Swiss peasant costume were singing and dancing on a creaking, protesting little stage. I eyed their generous display of pink neck and arm with the seasoned eye of a man who has lived in the world. Life was perfectly simple and easy, I felt, if one took it the right way.
Next day Willersley wanted to go on, but I delayed. Altogether I kept him back four days. Then abruptly my mood changed, and we decided to start early the following morning. I remember, though a little indistinctly, the feeling of my last talk with that woman whose surname, odd as it may seem, either I never learnt or I have forgotten. (Her christian name was Milly.) She was tired and rather low-spirited, and disposed to be sentimental80, and for the first time in our intercourse I found myself liking518 her for the sake of her own personality. There was something kindly and generous appearing behind the veil of naive and uncontrolled sensuality she had worn. There was a curious quality of motherliness in her attitude to me that something in my nature answered and approved. She didn't pretend to keep it up that she had yielded to my initiative. "I've done you no harm," she said a little doubtfully, an odd note for a man's victim! And, "we've had a good time. You have liked me, haven't you?"
She interested me in her lonely dissatisfied life; she was childless and had no hope of children, and her husband was the only son of a rich meat salesman, very mean, a mighty smoker--"he reeks519 of it," she said, "always"--and interested in nothing but golf, billiards520 (which he played very badly), pigeon shooting, convivial521 Free Masonry522 and Stock Exchange punting. Mostly they drifted about the Riviera. Her mother had contrived her marriage when she was eighteen. They were the first samples I ever encountered of the great multitude of functionless property owners which encumbers523 modern civilisation--but at the time I didn't think much of that aspect of them....
I tell all this business as it happened without comment, because I have no comment to make. It was all strange to me, strange rather than wonderful, and, it may be, some dream of beauty died for ever in those furtive524 meetings; it happened to me, and I could scarcely have been more irresponsible in the matter or controlled events less if I had been suddenly pushed over a cliff into water. I swam, of course--finding myself in it. Things tested me, and I reacted, as I have told. The bloom of my innocence525, if ever there had been such a thing, was gone. And here is the remarkable thing about it; at the time and for some days I was over-weeningly proud; I have never been so proud before or since; I felt I had been promoted to virility526; I was unable to conceal219 my exultation527 from Willersley. It was a mood of shining shameless ungracious self-approval. As he and I went along in the cool morning sunshine by the rice fields in the throat of the Val Maggia a silence fell between us.
"You know?" I said abruptly,--"about that woman?"
Willersley did not answer for a moment. He looked at me over the corner of his spectacles.
"Things went pretty far?" he asked.
"Oh! all the way!" and I had a twinge of fatuous528 pride in my unpremeditated achievement.
"She came to your room?"
I nodded.
"I heard her. I heard her whispering.... The whispering and rustling529 and so on. I was in my room yesterday.... Any one might have heard you."
I went on with my head in the air.
"You might have been caught, and that would have meant endless trouble. You might have incurred530 all sorts of consequences. What did you know about her?... We have wasted four days in that hot close place. When we found that League of Social Service we were talking about," he said with a determined531 eye upon me, "chastity will be first among the virtues532 prescribed."
"I shall form a rival league," I said a little damped. "I'm hanged if I give up a single desire in me until I know why."
He lifted his chin and stared before him through his glasses at nothing. "There are some things," he said, "that a man who means to work--to do great public services--MUST turn his back upon. I'm not discussing the rights or wrongs of this sort of thing. It happens to be the conditions we work under. It will probably always be so. If you want to experiment in that way, if you want even to discuss it,--out you go from political life. You must know that's so.... You're a strange man, Remington, with a kind of kink in you. You've a sort of force. You might happen to do immense things.... Only--"
He stopped. He had said all that he had forced himself to say.
"I mean to take myself as I am," I said. "I'm going to get experience for humanity out of all my talents--and bury nothing."
Willersley twisted his face to its humorous expression. "I doubt if sexual proclivities," he said drily, "come within the scope of the parable26."
I let that go for a little while. Then I broke out. "Sex!" said I, "is a fundamental thing in life. We went through all this at Trinity. I'm going to look at it, experience it, think about it--and get it square with the rest of life. Career and Politics must take their chances of that. It's part of the general English slackness that they won't look this in the face. Gods! what a muffled533 time we're coming out of! Sex means breeding, and breeding is a necessary function in a nation. The Romans broke up upon that. The Americans fade out amidst their successes. Eugenics--"
"THAT wasn't Eugenics," said Willersley.
"It was a woman," I said after a little interval, feeling oddly that I had failed altogether to answer him, and yet had a strong dumb case against him.
点击收听单词发音
1 interpretation | |
n.解释,说明,描述;艺术处理 | |
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2 standing | |
n.持续,地位;adj.永久的,不动的,直立的,不流动的 | |
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3 ted | |
vt.翻晒,撒,撒开 | |
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4 scrap | |
n.碎片;废料;v.废弃,报废 | |
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5 subjective | |
a.主观(上)的,个人的 | |
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6 tapestry | |
n.挂毯,丰富多采的画面 | |
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7 perplexed | |
adj.不知所措的 | |
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8 ward | |
n.守卫,监护,病房,行政区,由监护人或法院保护的人(尤指儿童);vt.守护,躲开 | |
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9 analytical | |
adj.分析的;用分析法的 | |
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10 synthetic | |
adj.合成的,人工的;综合的;n.人工制品 | |
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11 opaque | |
adj.不透光的;不反光的,不传导的;晦涩的 | |
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12 obedience | |
n.服从,顺从 | |
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13 pier | |
n.码头;桥墩,桥柱;[建]窗间壁,支柱 | |
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14 flaring | |
a.火焰摇曳的,过份艳丽的 | |
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15 translucent | |
adj.半透明的;透明的 | |
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16 prospect | |
n.前景,前途;景色,视野 | |
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17 prospects | |
n.希望,前途(恒为复数) | |
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18 vistas | |
长条形景色( vista的名词复数 ); 回顾; 展望; (未来可能发生的)一系列情景 | |
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19 vista | |
n.远景,深景,展望,回想 | |
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20 speculation | |
n.思索,沉思;猜测;投机 | |
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21 receding | |
v.逐渐远离( recede的现在分词 );向后倾斜;自原处后退或避开别人的注视;尤指问题 | |
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22 obliterated | |
v.除去( obliterate的过去式和过去分词 );涂去;擦掉;彻底破坏或毁灭 | |
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23 entangled | |
adj.卷入的;陷入的;被缠住的;缠在一起的v.使某人(某物/自己)缠绕,纠缠于(某物中),使某人(自己)陷入(困难或复杂的环境中)( entangle的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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24 distress | |
n.苦恼,痛苦,不舒适;不幸;vt.使悲痛 | |
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25 irony | |
n.反语,冷嘲;具有讽刺意味的事,嘲弄 | |
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26 parable | |
n.寓言,比喻 | |
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27 permanently | |
adv.永恒地,永久地,固定不变地 | |
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28 tranquillity | |
n. 平静, 安静 | |
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29 quill | |
n.羽毛管;v.给(织物或衣服)作皱褶 | |
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30 secrecies | |
保密(secrecy的复数形式) | |
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31 instinctive | |
adj.(出于)本能的;直觉的;(出于)天性的 | |
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32 irrelevant | |
adj.不恰当的,无关系的,不相干的 | |
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33 alluring | |
adj.吸引人的,迷人的 | |
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34 obsessed | |
adj.心神不宁的,鬼迷心窍的,沉迷的 | |
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35 extravagant | |
adj.奢侈的;过分的;(言行等)放肆的 | |
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36 decency | |
n.体面,得体,合宜,正派,庄重 | |
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37 stimulating | |
adj.有启发性的,能激发人思考的 | |
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38 adorn | |
vt.使美化,装饰 | |
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39 aisle | |
n.(教堂、教室、戏院等里的)过道,通道 | |
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40 sham | |
n./adj.假冒(的),虚伪(的) | |
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41 shameful | |
adj.可耻的,不道德的 | |
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42 curiously | |
adv.有求知欲地;好问地;奇特地 | |
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43 solitary | |
adj.孤独的,独立的,荒凉的;n.隐士 | |
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44 prohibitions | |
禁令,禁律( prohibition的名词复数 ); 禁酒; 禁例 | |
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45 prohibition | |
n.禁止;禁令,禁律 | |
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46 blurred | |
v.(使)变模糊( blur的过去式和过去分词 );(使)难以区分;模模糊糊;迷离 | |
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47 dishonoured | |
a.不光彩的,不名誉的 | |
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48 minatory | |
adj.威胁的;恫吓的 | |
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49 twilight | |
n.暮光,黄昏;暮年,晚期,衰落时期 | |
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50 incarnate | |
adj.化身的,人体化的,肉色的 | |
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51 chamber | |
n.房间,寝室;会议厅;议院;会所 | |
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52 plunge | |
v.跳入,(使)投入,(使)陷入;猛冲 | |
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53 plunged | |
v.颠簸( plunge的过去式和过去分词 );暴跌;骤降;突降 | |
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54 haze | |
n.霾,烟雾;懵懂,迷糊;vi.(over)变模糊 | |
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55 professed | |
公开声称的,伪称的,已立誓信教的 | |
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56 socialist | |
n.社会主义者;adj.社会主义的 | |
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57 anarchistic | |
无政府主义的 | |
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58 barricade | |
n.路障,栅栏,障碍;vt.设路障挡住 | |
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59 affected | |
adj.不自然的,假装的 | |
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60 conscientiously | |
adv.凭良心地;认真地,负责尽职地;老老实实 | |
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61 battered | |
adj.磨损的;v.连续猛击;磨损 | |
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62 flopped | |
v.(指书、戏剧等)彻底失败( flop的过去式和过去分词 );(因疲惫而)猛然坐下;(笨拙地、不由自主地或松弛地)移动或落下;砸锅 | |
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63 audit | |
v.审计;查帐;核对;旁听 | |
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64 premature | |
adj.比预期时间早的;不成熟的,仓促的 | |
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65 plunging | |
adj.跳进的,突进的v.颠簸( plunge的现在分词 );暴跌;骤降;突降 | |
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66 monologue | |
n.长篇大论,(戏剧等中的)独白 | |
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67 modesty | |
n.谦逊,虚心,端庄,稳重,羞怯,朴素 | |
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68 vices | |
缺陷( vice的名词复数 ); 恶习; 不道德行为; 台钳 | |
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69 vice | |
n.坏事;恶习;[pl.]台钳,老虎钳;adj.副的 | |
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70 seclusion | |
n.隐遁,隔离 | |
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71 inaccurate | |
adj.错误的,不正确的,不准确的 | |
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72 alleged | |
a.被指控的,嫌疑的 | |
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73 doughty | |
adj.勇猛的,坚强的 | |
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74 preposterous | |
adj.荒谬的,可笑的 | |
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75 shrill | |
adj.尖声的;刺耳的;v尖叫 | |
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76 penetrating | |
adj.(声音)响亮的,尖锐的adj.(气味)刺激的adj.(思想)敏锐的,有洞察力的 | |
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77 monasteries | |
修道院( monastery的名词复数 ) | |
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78 refinement | |
n.文雅;高尚;精美;精制;精炼 | |
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79 meekly | |
adv.温顺地,逆来顺受地 | |
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80 sentimental | |
adj.多愁善感的,感伤的 | |
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81 aristocrat | |
n.贵族,有贵族气派的人,上层人物 | |
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82 subdue | |
vt.制服,使顺从,征服;抑制,克制 | |
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83 subdues | |
征服( subdue的第三人称单数 ); 克制; 制服 | |
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84 elucidatory | |
adj.阐释的,阐明的 | |
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85 lucid | |
adj.明白易懂的,清晰的,头脑清楚的 | |
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86 emancipation | |
n.(从束缚、支配下)解放 | |
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87 intemperately | |
adv.过度地,无节制地,放纵地 | |
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88 eminent | |
adj.显赫的,杰出的,有名的,优良的 | |
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89 psychic | |
n.对超自然力敏感的人;adj.有超自然力的 | |
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90 investigator | |
n.研究者,调查者,审查者 | |
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91 elucidation | |
n.说明,阐明 | |
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92 intercourse | |
n.性交;交流,交往,交际 | |
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93 obsolete | |
adj.已废弃的,过时的 | |
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94 mighty | |
adj.强有力的;巨大的 | |
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95 wrangles | |
n.(尤指长时间的)激烈争吵,口角,吵嘴( wrangle的名词复数 )v.争吵,争论,口角( wrangle的第三人称单数 ) | |
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96 spate | |
n.泛滥,洪水,突然的一阵 | |
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97 confession | |
n.自白,供认,承认 | |
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98 destined | |
adj.命中注定的;(for)以…为目的地的 | |
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99 abolition | |
n.废除,取消 | |
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100 seething | |
沸腾的,火热的 | |
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101 projectile | |
n.投射物,发射体;adj.向前开进的;推进的;抛掷的 | |
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102 obstreperously | |
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103 banal | |
adj.陈腐的,平庸的 | |
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104 perennially | |
adv.经常出现地;长期地;持久地;永久地 | |
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105 stark | |
adj.荒凉的;严酷的;完全的;adv.完全地 | |
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106 nude | |
adj.裸体的;n.裸体者,裸体艺术品 | |
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107 engraving | |
n.版画;雕刻(作品);雕刻艺术;镌版术v.在(硬物)上雕刻(字,画等)( engrave的现在分词 );将某事物深深印在(记忆或头脑中) | |
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108 fumed | |
愤怒( fume的过去式和过去分词 ); 大怒; 发怒; 冒烟 | |
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109 residential | |
adj.提供住宿的;居住的;住宅的 | |
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110 virtue | |
n.德行,美德;贞操;优点;功效,效力 | |
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111 differentiated | |
区分,区别,辨别( differentiate的过去式和过去分词 ); 区别对待; 表明…间的差别,构成…间差别的特征 | |
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112 mediocre | |
adj.平常的,普通的 | |
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113 deliberately | |
adv.审慎地;蓄意地;故意地 | |
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114 thereby | |
adv.因此,从而 | |
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115 abhorrence | |
n.憎恶;可憎恶的事 | |
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116 dread | |
vt.担忧,忧虑;惧怕,不敢;n.担忧,畏惧 | |
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117 dreaded | |
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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118 virile | |
adj.男性的;有男性生殖力的;有男子气概的;强有力的 | |
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119 improvised | |
a.即席而作的,即兴的 | |
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120 weird | |
adj.古怪的,离奇的;怪诞的,神秘而可怕的 | |
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121 giggling | |
v.咯咯地笑( giggle的现在分词 ) | |
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122 fully | |
adv.完全地,全部地,彻底地;充分地 | |
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123 frivolous | |
adj.轻薄的;轻率的 | |
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124 gut | |
n.[pl.]胆量;内脏;adj.本能的;vt.取出内脏 | |
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125 guts | |
v.狼吞虎咽,贪婪地吃,飞碟游戏(比赛双方每组5人,相距15码,互相掷接飞碟);毁坏(建筑物等)的内部( gut的第三人称单数 );取出…的内脏n.勇气( gut的名词复数 );内脏;消化道的下段;肠 | |
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126 whimsy | |
n.古怪,异想天开 | |
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127 snobs | |
(谄上傲下的)势利小人( snob的名词复数 ); 自高自大者,自命不凡者 | |
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128 condescended | |
屈尊,俯就( condescend的过去式和过去分词 ); 故意表示和蔼可亲 | |
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129 chapel | |
n.小教堂,殡仪馆 | |
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130 hush | |
int.嘘,别出声;n.沉默,静寂;v.使安静 | |
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131 hesitation | |
n.犹豫,踌躇 | |
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132 horrid | |
adj.可怕的;令人惊恐的;恐怖的;极讨厌的 | |
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133 levity | |
n.轻率,轻浮,不稳定,多变 | |
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134 thoroughly | |
adv.完全地,彻底地,十足地 | |
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135 cowardice | |
n.胆小,怯懦 | |
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136 disposition | |
n.性情,性格;意向,倾向;排列,部署 | |
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137 Oxford | |
n.牛津(英国城市) | |
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138 Ford | |
n.浅滩,水浅可涉处;v.涉水,涉过 | |
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139 organisation | |
n.组织,安排,团体,有机休 | |
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140 eyebrows | |
眉毛( eyebrow的名词复数 ) | |
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141 reconstruction | |
n.重建,再现,复原 | |
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142 consolidated | |
a.联合的 | |
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143 invincible | |
adj.不可征服的,难以制服的 | |
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144 simultaneously | |
adv.同时发生地,同时进行地 | |
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145 faculties | |
n.能力( faculty的名词复数 );全体教职员;技巧;院 | |
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146 subservient | |
adj.卑屈的,阿谀的 | |
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147 contrived | |
adj.不自然的,做作的;虚构的 | |
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148 reek | |
v.发出臭气;n.恶臭 | |
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149 forth | |
adv.向前;向外,往外 | |
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150 moulders | |
v.腐朽( moulder的第三人称单数 );腐烂,崩塌 | |
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151 contagion | |
n.(通过接触的疾病)传染;蔓延 | |
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152 stuffy | |
adj.不透气的,闷热的 | |
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153 villas | |
别墅,公馆( villa的名词复数 ); (城郊)住宅 | |
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154 subdued | |
adj. 屈服的,柔和的,减弱的 动词subdue的过去式和过去分词 | |
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155 prim | |
adj.拘泥形式的,一本正经的;n.循规蹈矩,整洁;adv.循规蹈矩地,整洁地 | |
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156 draught | |
n.拉,牵引,拖;一网(饮,吸,阵);顿服药量,通风;v.起草,设计 | |
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157 peculiar | |
adj.古怪的,异常的;特殊的,特有的 | |
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158 covetous | |
adj.贪婪的,贪心的 | |
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159 delightful | |
adj.令人高兴的,使人快乐的 | |
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160 distinctive | |
adj.特别的,有特色的,与众不同的 | |
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161 futile | |
adj.无效的,无用的,无希望的 | |
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162 absurdity | |
n.荒谬,愚蠢;谬论 | |
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163 braced | |
adj.拉牢的v.支住( brace的过去式和过去分词 );撑牢;使自己站稳;振作起来 | |
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164 naive | |
adj.幼稚的,轻信的;天真的 | |
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165 fluting | |
有沟槽的衣料; 吹笛子; 笛声; 刻凹槽 | |
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166 lucidity | |
n.明朗,清晰,透明 | |
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167 precisely | |
adv.恰好,正好,精确地,细致地 | |
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168 eddies | |
(水、烟等的)漩涡,涡流( eddy的名词复数 ) | |
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169 judicial | |
adj.司法的,法庭的,审判的,明断的,公正的 | |
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170 inscription | |
n.(尤指石块上的)刻印文字,铭文,碑文 | |
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171 limpidly | |
adv.清澈地,透明地 | |
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172 culminated | |
v.达到极点( culminate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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173 brilliance | |
n.光辉,辉煌,壮丽,(卓越的)才华,才智 | |
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174 mannerism | |
n.特殊习惯,怪癖 | |
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175 rubicund | |
adj.(脸色)红润的 | |
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176 pointed | |
adj.尖的,直截了当的 | |
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177 frankly | |
adv.坦白地,直率地;坦率地说 | |
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178 remarkable | |
adj.显著的,异常的,非凡的,值得注意的 | |
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179 tinged | |
v.(使)发丁丁声( ting的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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180 relaxation | |
n.松弛,放松;休息;消遣;娱乐 | |
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181 propound | |
v.提出 | |
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182 bouts | |
n.拳击(或摔跤)比赛( bout的名词复数 );一段(工作);(尤指坏事的)一通;(疾病的)发作 | |
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183 memorable | |
adj.值得回忆的,难忘的,特别的,显著的 | |
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184 lodged | |
v.存放( lodge的过去式和过去分词 );暂住;埋入;(权利、权威等)归属 | |
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185 redoubtable | |
adj.可敬的;可怕的 | |
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186 anecdotes | |
n.掌故,趣闻,轶事( anecdote的名词复数 ) | |
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187 plausible | |
adj.似真实的,似乎有理的,似乎可信的 | |
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188 entirely | |
ad.全部地,完整地;完全地,彻底地 | |
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189 spun | |
v.纺,杜撰,急转身 | |
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190 lusted | |
贪求(lust的过去式与过去分词形式) | |
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191 passionately | |
ad.热烈地,激烈地 | |
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192 iridescent | |
adj.彩虹色的,闪色的 | |
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193 luminous | |
adj.发光的,发亮的;光明的;明白易懂的;有启发的 | |
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194 immortality | |
n.不死,不朽 | |
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195 slung | |
抛( sling的过去式和过去分词 ); 吊挂; 遣送; 押往 | |
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196 patriotism | |
n.爱国精神,爱国心,爱国主义 | |
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197 esthetic | |
adj.美学的,审美的;悦目的,雅致的 | |
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198 protagonist | |
n.(思想观念的)倡导者;主角,主人公 | |
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199 civilisation | |
n.文明,文化,开化,教化 | |
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200 disorder | |
n.紊乱,混乱;骚动,骚乱;疾病,失调 | |
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201 discords | |
不和(discord的复数形式) | |
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202 steered | |
v.驾驶( steer的过去式和过去分词 );操纵;控制;引导 | |
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203 serene | |
adj. 安详的,宁静的,平静的 | |
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204 hostility | |
n.敌对,敌意;抵制[pl.]交战,战争 | |
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205 attentive | |
adj.注意的,专心的;关心(别人)的,殷勤的 | |
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206 meticulous | |
adj.极其仔细的,一丝不苟的 | |
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207 providence | |
n.深谋远虑,天道,天意;远见;节约;上帝 | |
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208 rehabilitate | |
vt.改造(罪犯),修复;vi.复兴,(罪犯)经受改造 | |
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209 autobiography | |
n.自传 | |
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210 scoffed | |
嘲笑,嘲弄( scoff的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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211 pompous | |
adj.傲慢的,自大的;夸大的;豪华的 | |
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212 illuminating | |
a.富于启发性的,有助阐明的 | |
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213 skunk | |
n.臭鼬,黄鼠狼;v.使惨败,使得零分;烂醉如泥 | |
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214 perfectly | |
adv.完美地,无可非议地,彻底地 | |
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215 persuasion | |
n.劝说;说服;持有某种信仰的宗派 | |
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216 precocious | |
adj.早熟的;较早显出的 | |
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217 chatter | |
vi./n.喋喋不休;短促尖叫;(牙齿)打战 | |
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218 concealed | |
a.隐藏的,隐蔽的 | |
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219 conceal | |
v.隐藏,隐瞒,隐蔽 | |
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220 distinguished | |
adj.卓越的,杰出的,著名的 | |
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221 microscopic | |
adj.微小的,细微的,极小的,显微的 | |
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222 copiously | |
adv.丰富地,充裕地 | |
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223 wildernesses | |
荒野( wilderness的名词复数 ); 沙漠; (政治家)在野; 不再当政(或掌权) | |
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224 scattered | |
adj.分散的,稀疏的;散步的;疏疏落落的 | |
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225 interval | |
n.间隔,间距;幕间休息,中场休息 | |
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226 second-hand | |
adj.用过的,旧的,二手的 | |
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227 wagons | |
n.四轮的运货马车( wagon的名词复数 );铁路货车;小手推车 | |
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228 ammunition | |
n.军火,弹药 | |
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229 intrusive | |
adj.打搅的;侵扰的 | |
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230 purely | |
adv.纯粹地,完全地 | |
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231 inertia | |
adj.惰性,惯性,懒惰,迟钝 | |
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232 scroll | |
n.卷轴,纸卷;(石刻上的)漩涡 | |
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233 ravaged | |
毁坏( ravage的过去式和过去分词 ); 蹂躏; 劫掠; 抢劫 | |
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234 mansion | |
n.大厦,大楼;宅第 | |
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235 accurately | |
adv.准确地,精确地 | |
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236 superseding | |
取代,接替( supersede的现在分词 ) | |
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237 contemplate | |
vt.盘算,计议;周密考虑;注视,凝视 | |
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238 unnaturally | |
adv.违反习俗地;不自然地;勉强地;不近人情地 | |
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239 puerility | |
n.幼稚,愚蠢;幼稚、愚蠢的行为、想法等 | |
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240 condemning | |
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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241 autocrat | |
n.独裁者;专横的人 | |
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242 inconvenient | |
adj.不方便的,令人感到麻烦的 | |
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243 mere | |
adj.纯粹的;仅仅,只不过 | |
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244 unity | |
n.团结,联合,统一;和睦,协调 | |
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245 tangible | |
adj.有形的,可触摸的,确凿的,实际的 | |
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246 lengthily | |
adv.长,冗长地 | |
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247 stylishly | |
adv.时髦地,新式地 | |
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248 interpretations | |
n.解释( interpretation的名词复数 );表演;演绎;理解 | |
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249 allusive | |
adj.暗示的;引用典故的 | |
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250 shuddering | |
v.战栗( shudder的现在分词 );发抖;(机器、车辆等)突然震动;颤动 | |
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251 expound | |
v.详述;解释;阐述 | |
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252 expounded | |
论述,详细讲解( expound的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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253 populous | |
adj.人口稠密的,人口众多的 | |
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254 athletic | |
adj.擅长运动的,强健的;活跃的,体格健壮的 | |
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255 memoirs | |
n.回忆录;回忆录传( mem,自oir的名词复数) | |
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256 illustrated | |
adj. 有插图的,列举的 动词illustrate的过去式和过去分词 | |
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257 coalitions | |
结合体,同盟( coalition的名词复数 ); (两党或多党)联合政府 | |
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258 stature | |
n.(高度)水平,(高度)境界,身高,身材 | |
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259 motive | |
n.动机,目的;adv.发动的,运动的 | |
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260 motives | |
n.动机,目的( motive的名词复数 ) | |
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261 anarchists | |
无政府主义者( anarchist的名词复数 ) | |
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262 federation | |
n.同盟,联邦,联合,联盟,联合会 | |
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263 exponent | |
n.倡导者,拥护者;代表人物;指数,幂 | |
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264 doctrines | |
n.教条( doctrine的名词复数 );教义;学说;(政府政策的)正式声明 | |
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265 doctrine | |
n.教义;主义;学说 | |
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266 toiler | |
辛劳者,勤劳者 | |
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267 toil | |
vi.辛劳工作,艰难地行动;n.苦工,难事 | |
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268 inevitable | |
adj.不可避免的,必然发生的 | |
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269 esteemed | |
adj.受人尊敬的v.尊敬( esteem的过去式和过去分词 );敬重;认为;以为 | |
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270 qualified | |
adj.合格的,有资格的,胜任的,有限制的 | |
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271 innate | |
adj.天生的,固有的,天赋的 | |
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272 constructiveness | |
组织,构造 | |
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273 constructive | |
adj.建设的,建设性的 | |
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274 stimulus | |
n.刺激,刺激物,促进因素,引起兴奋的事物 | |
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275 glibly | |
adv.流利地,流畅地;满口 | |
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276 distresses | |
n.悲痛( distress的名词复数 );痛苦;贫困;危险 | |
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277 stimulated | |
a.刺激的 | |
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278 radicalism | |
n. 急进主义, 根本的改革主义 | |
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279 dingier | |
adj.暗淡的,乏味的( dingy的比较级 );肮脏的 | |
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280 ragged | |
adj.衣衫褴褛的,粗糙的,刺耳的 | |
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281 eloquent | |
adj.雄辩的,口才流利的;明白显示出的 | |
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282 garrulous | |
adj.唠叨的,多话的 | |
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283 bonnet | |
n.无边女帽;童帽 | |
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284 apron | |
n.围裙;工作裙 | |
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285 socialists | |
社会主义者( socialist的名词复数 ) | |
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286 immediate | |
adj.立即的;直接的,最接近的;紧靠的 | |
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287 plumbers | |
n.管子工,水暖工( plumber的名词复数 );[美][口](防止泄密的)堵漏人员 | |
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288 aristocrats | |
n.贵族( aristocrat的名词复数 ) | |
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289 stunted | |
adj.矮小的;发育迟缓的 | |
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290 fens | |
n.(尤指英格兰东部的)沼泽地带( fen的名词复数 ) | |
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291 increments | |
n.增长( increment的名词复数 );增量;增额;定期的加薪 | |
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292 verities | |
n.真实( verity的名词复数 );事实;真理;真实的陈述 | |
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293 potteries | |
n.陶器( pottery的名词复数 );陶器厂;陶土;陶器制造(术) | |
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294 guardian | |
n.监护人;守卫者,保护者 | |
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295 inefficiency | |
n.无效率,无能;无效率事例 | |
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296 incapable | |
adj.无能力的,不能做某事的 | |
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297 kindly | |
adj.和蔼的,温和的,爽快的;adv.温和地,亲切地 | |
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298 incompetent | |
adj.无能力的,不能胜任的 | |
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299 obstinate | |
adj.顽固的,倔强的,不易屈服的,较难治愈的 | |
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300 tragic | |
adj.悲剧的,悲剧性的,悲惨的 | |
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301 awakening | |
n.觉醒,醒悟 adj.觉醒中的;唤醒的 | |
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302 appalling | |
adj.骇人听闻的,令人震惊的,可怕的 | |
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303 hoarding | |
n.贮藏;积蓄;临时围墙;囤积v.积蓄并储藏(某物)( hoard的现在分词 ) | |
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304 heralded | |
v.预示( herald的过去式和过去分词 );宣布(好或重要) | |
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305 anticipations | |
预期( anticipation的名词复数 ); 预测; (信托财产收益的)预支; 预期的事物 | |
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306 proprietorial | |
adj.所有(权)的 | |
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307 spoke | |
n.(车轮的)辐条;轮辐;破坏某人的计划;阻挠某人的行动 v.讲,谈(speak的过去式);说;演说;从某种观点来说 | |
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308 ebb | |
vi.衰退,减退;n.处于低潮,处于衰退状态 | |
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309 opposition | |
n.反对,敌对 | |
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310 flamboyant | |
adj.火焰般的,华丽的,炫耀的 | |
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311 watchful | |
adj.注意的,警惕的 | |
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312 persistent | |
adj.坚持不懈的,执意的;持续的 | |
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314 picturesque | |
adj.美丽如画的,(语言)生动的,绘声绘色的 | |
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315 reassuring | |
a.使人消除恐惧和疑虑的,使人放心的 | |
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316 meshes | |
网孔( mesh的名词复数 ); 网状物; 陷阱; 困境 | |
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317 sprawled | |
v.伸开四肢坐[躺]( sprawl的过去式和过去分词);蔓延;杂乱无序地拓展;四肢伸展坐着(或躺着) | |
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318 provincial | |
adj.省的,地方的;n.外省人,乡下人 | |
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319 judicious | |
adj.明智的,明断的,能作出明智决定的 | |
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320 injustice | |
n.非正义,不公正,不公平,侵犯(别人的)权利 | |
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321 unstable | |
adj.不稳定的,易变的 | |
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322 watery | |
adj.有水的,水汪汪的;湿的,湿润的 | |
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323 condemned | |
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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324 resolutely | |
adj.坚决地,果断地 | |
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325 acquiescent | |
adj.默许的,默认的 | |
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326 inviting | |
adj.诱人的,引人注目的 | |
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327 remains | |
n.剩余物,残留物;遗体,遗迹 | |
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328 administrative | |
adj.行政的,管理的 | |
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329 scrambling | |
v.快速爬行( scramble的现在分词 );攀登;争夺;(军事飞机)紧急起飞 | |
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330 tumult | |
n.喧哗;激动,混乱;吵闹 | |
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331 murmurs | |
n.低沉、连续而不清的声音( murmur的名词复数 );低语声;怨言;嘀咕 | |
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332 wrangled | |
v.争吵,争论,口角( wrangle的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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333 orator | |
n.演说者,演讲者,雄辩家 | |
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334 pathos | |
n.哀婉,悲怆 | |
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335 shafts | |
n.轴( shaft的名词复数 );(箭、高尔夫球棒等的)杆;通风井;一阵(疼痛、害怕等) | |
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336 ruffled | |
adj. 有褶饰边的, 起皱的 动词ruffle的过去式和过去分词 | |
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337 muddled | |
adj.混乱的;糊涂的;头脑昏昏然的v.弄乱,弄糟( muddle的过去式);使糊涂;对付,混日子 | |
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338 muddle | |
n.困惑,混浊状态;vt.使混乱,使糊涂,使惊呆;vi.胡乱应付,混乱 | |
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339 protruded | |
v.(使某物)伸出,(使某物)突出( protrude的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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340 flannel | |
n.法兰绒;法兰绒衣服 | |
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341 emancipated | |
adj.被解放的,不受约束的v.解放某人(尤指摆脱政治、法律或社会的束缚)( emancipate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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342 discursive | |
adj.离题的,无层次的 | |
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343 gist | |
n.要旨;梗概 | |
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344 rankling | |
v.(使)痛苦不已,(使)怨恨不已( rankle的现在分词 ) | |
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345 prevailing | |
adj.盛行的;占优势的;主要的 | |
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346 exalt | |
v.赞扬,歌颂,晋升,提升 | |
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347 exalted | |
adj.(地位等)高的,崇高的;尊贵的,高尚的 | |
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348 relentlessly | |
adv.不屈不挠地;残酷地;不间断 | |
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349 vehement | |
adj.感情强烈的;热烈的;(人)有强烈感情的 | |
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350 lyric | |
n.抒情诗,歌词;adj.抒情的 | |
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351 machinery | |
n.(总称)机械,机器;机构 | |
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352 poetic | |
adj.富有诗意的,有诗人气质的,善于抒情的 | |
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353 tinkling | |
n.丁当作响声 | |
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354 quotations | |
n.引用( quotation的名词复数 );[商业]行情(报告);(货物或股票的)市价;时价 | |
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355 climax | |
n.顶点;高潮;v.(使)达到顶点 | |
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356 geographical | |
adj.地理的;地区(性)的 | |
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357 bullying | |
v.恐吓,威逼( bully的现在分词 );豪;跋扈 | |
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358 impatience | |
n.不耐烦,急躁 | |
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359 regiment | |
n.团,多数,管理;v.组织,编成团,统制 | |
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360 pokes | |
v.伸出( poke的第三人称单数 );戳出;拨弄;与(某人)性交 | |
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361 delusion | |
n.谬见,欺骗,幻觉,迷惑 | |
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362 exasperating | |
adj. 激怒的 动词exasperate的现在分词形式 | |
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363 justified | |
a.正当的,有理的 | |
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364 edifying | |
adj.有教训意味的,教训性的,有益的v.开导,启发( edify的现在分词 ) | |
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365 bugles | |
妙脆角,一种类似薯片但做成尖角或喇叭状的零食; 号角( bugle的名词复数 ); 喇叭; 匍匐筋骨草; (装饰女服用的)柱状玻璃(或塑料)小珠 | |
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366 plucky | |
adj.勇敢的 | |
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367 vitality | |
n.活力,生命力,效力 | |
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368 bloody | |
adj.非常的的;流血的;残忍的;adv.很;vt.血染 | |
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369 bleak | |
adj.(天气)阴冷的;凄凉的;暗淡的 | |
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370 mules | |
骡( mule的名词复数 ); 拖鞋; 顽固的人; 越境运毒者 | |
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371 wrecked | |
adj.失事的,遇难的 | |
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372 isolated | |
adj.与世隔绝的 | |
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373 elusive | |
adj.难以表达(捉摸)的;令人困惑的;逃避的 | |
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374 toils | |
网 | |
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375 panorama | |
n.全景,全景画,全景摄影,全景照片[装置] | |
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376 flicker | |
vi./n.闪烁,摇曳,闪现 | |
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377 conquerors | |
征服者,占领者( conqueror的名词复数 ) | |
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378 adverse | |
adj.不利的;有害的;敌对的,不友好的 | |
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379 heed | |
v.注意,留意;n.注意,留心 | |
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380 endorsed | |
vt.& vi.endorse的过去式或过去分词形式v.赞同( endorse的过去式和过去分词 );在(尤指支票的)背面签字;在(文件的)背面写评论;在广告上说本人使用并赞同某产品 | |
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381 fumbled | |
(笨拙地)摸索或处理(某事物)( fumble的过去式和过去分词 ); 乱摸,笨拙地弄; 使落下 | |
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382 envious | |
adj.嫉妒的,羡慕的 | |
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383 patriotic | |
adj.爱国的,有爱国心的 | |
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384 chagrin | |
n.懊恼;气愤;委屈 | |
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385 belittle | |
v.轻视,小看,贬低 | |
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386 deflected | |
偏离的 | |
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387 vindicate | |
v.为…辩护或辩解,辩明;证明…正确 | |
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388 retrospect | |
n.回顾,追溯;v.回顾,回想,追溯 | |
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389 cardinal | |
n.(天主教的)红衣主教;adj.首要的,基本的 | |
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390 inflexibility | |
n.不屈性,顽固,不变性;不可弯曲;非挠性;刚性 | |
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391 assail | |
v.猛烈攻击,抨击,痛斥 | |
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392 valiantly | |
adv.勇敢地,英勇地;雄赳赳 | |
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393 recapitulate | |
v.节述要旨,择要说明 | |
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394 apprehension | |
n.理解,领悟;逮捕,拘捕;忧虑 | |
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395 cumulative | |
adj.累积的,渐增的 | |
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396 craving | |
n.渴望,热望 | |
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397 quaint | |
adj.古雅的,离奇有趣的,奇怪的 | |
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398 trampling | |
踩( trample的现在分词 ); 践踏; 无视; 侵犯 | |
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399 laden | |
adj.装满了的;充满了的;负了重担的;苦恼的 | |
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400 moored | |
adj. 系泊的 动词moor的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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401 recede | |
vi.退(去),渐渐远去;向后倾斜,缩进 | |
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402 adventurous | |
adj.爱冒险的;惊心动魄的,惊险的,刺激的 | |
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403 babble | |
v.含糊不清地说,胡言乱语地说,儿语 | |
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404 viscous | |
adj.粘滞的,粘性的 | |
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405 casements | |
n.窗扉( casement的名词复数 ) | |
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406 neatly | |
adv.整洁地,干净地,灵巧地,熟练地 | |
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407 slumbers | |
睡眠,安眠( slumber的名词复数 ) | |
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408 awry | |
adj.扭曲的,错的 | |
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409 misgivings | |
n.疑虑,担忧,害怕;疑虑,担心,恐惧( misgiving的名词复数 );疑惧 | |
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410 impending | |
a.imminent, about to come or happen | |
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411 askew | |
adv.斜地;adj.歪斜的 | |
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412 veins | |
n.纹理;矿脉( vein的名词复数 );静脉;叶脉;纹理 | |
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413 glacier | |
n.冰川,冰河 | |
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414 monstrous | |
adj.巨大的;恐怖的;可耻的,丢脸的 | |
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415 winding | |
n.绕,缠,绕组,线圈 | |
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416 receded | |
v.逐渐远离( recede的过去式和过去分词 );向后倾斜;自原处后退或避开别人的注视;尤指问题 | |
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417 crouching | |
v.屈膝,蹲伏( crouch的现在分词 ) | |
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418 munched | |
v.用力咀嚼(某物),大嚼( munch的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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419 abounded | |
v.大量存在,充满,富于( abound的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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420 dominant | |
adj.支配的,统治的;占优势的;显性的;n.主因,要素,主要的人(或物);显性基因 | |
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421 intensify | |
vt.加强;变强;加剧 | |
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422 middle-aged | |
adj.中年的 | |
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423 benevolence | |
n.慈悲,捐助 | |
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424 amiable | |
adj.和蔼可亲的,友善的,亲切的 | |
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425 arid | |
adj.干旱的;(土地)贫瘠的 | |
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426 plodding | |
a.proceeding in a slow or dull way | |
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427 contention | |
n.争论,争辩,论战;论点,主张 | |
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428 intonations | |
n.语调,说话的抑扬顿挫( intonation的名词复数 );(演奏或唱歌中的)音准 | |
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429 mingled | |
混合,混入( mingle的过去式和过去分词 ); 混进,与…交往[联系] | |
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430 mingle | |
vt.使混合,使相混;vi.混合起来;相交往 | |
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431 proprietorship | |
n.所有(权);所有权 | |
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432 covets | |
v.贪求,觊觎( covet的第三人称单数 ) | |
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433 crimson | |
n./adj.深(绯)红色(的);vi.脸变绯红色 | |
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434 industrious | |
adj.勤劳的,刻苦的,奋发的 | |
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435 precipices | |
n.悬崖,峭壁( precipice的名词复数 ) | |
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436 cascading | |
流注( cascade的现在分词 ); 大量落下; 大量垂悬; 梯流 | |
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437 torrents | |
n.倾注;奔流( torrent的名词复数 );急流;爆发;连续不断 | |
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438 gorges | |
n.山峡,峡谷( gorge的名词复数 );咽喉v.(用食物把自己)塞饱,填饱( gorge的第三人称单数 );作呕 | |
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439 colloquial | |
adj.口语的,会话的 | |
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440 lessen | |
vt.减少,减轻;缩小 | |
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441 misery | |
n.痛苦,苦恼,苦难;悲惨的境遇,贫苦 | |
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442 varied | |
adj.多样的,多变化的 | |
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443 foresight | |
n.先见之明,深谋远虑 | |
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444 sprawling | |
adj.蔓生的,不规则地伸展的v.伸开四肢坐[躺]( sprawl的现在分词 );蔓延;杂乱无序地拓展;四肢伸展坐着(或躺着) | |
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445 unpaid | |
adj.未付款的,无报酬的 | |
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446 hostilities | |
n.战争;敌意(hostility的复数);敌对状态;战事 | |
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447 underlying | |
adj.在下面的,含蓄的,潜在的 | |
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448 invincibility | |
n.无敌,绝对不败 | |
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449 detailed | |
adj.详细的,详尽的,极注意细节的,完全的 | |
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450 clamorous | |
adj.吵闹的,喧哗的 | |
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451 ironical | |
adj.讽刺的,冷嘲的 | |
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452 bias | |
n.偏见,偏心,偏袒;vt.使有偏见 | |
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453 swelling | |
n.肿胀 | |
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454 alpine | |
adj.高山的;n.高山植物 | |
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455 solicitudes | |
n.关心,挂念,渴望( solicitude的名词复数 ) | |
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456 lapses | |
n.失误,过失( lapse的名词复数 );小毛病;行为失检;偏离正道v.退步( lapse的第三人称单数 );陷入;倒退;丧失 | |
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457 obstinately | |
ad.固执地,顽固地 | |
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458 snarling | |
v.(指狗)吠,嗥叫, (人)咆哮( snarl的现在分词 );咆哮着说,厉声地说 | |
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459 essentially | |
adv.本质上,实质上,基本上 | |
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460 outlaw | |
n.歹徒,亡命之徒;vt.宣布…为不合法 | |
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461 vigour | |
(=vigor)n.智力,体力,精力 | |
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462 makers | |
n.制造者,制造商(maker的复数形式) | |
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463 conspires | |
密谋( conspire的第三人称单数 ); 搞阴谋; (事件等)巧合; 共同导致 | |
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464 puff | |
n.一口(气);一阵(风);v.喷气,喘气 | |
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465 triangular | |
adj.三角(形)的,三者间的 | |
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466 foam | |
v./n.泡沫,起泡沫 | |
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467 eastward | |
adv.向东;adj.向东的;n.东方,东部 | |
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468 merged | |
(使)混合( merge的过去式和过去分词 ); 相融; 融入; 渐渐消失在某物中 | |
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469 panoramic | |
adj. 全景的 | |
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470 crest | |
n.顶点;饰章;羽冠;vt.达到顶点;vi.形成浪尖 | |
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471 antagonistic | |
adj.敌对的 | |
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472 persistence | |
n.坚持,持续,存留 | |
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473 averted | |
防止,避免( avert的过去式和过去分词 ); 转移 | |
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474 ripening | |
v.成熟,使熟( ripen的现在分词 );熟化;熟成 | |
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475 dignified | |
a.可敬的,高贵的 | |
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476 allures | |
诱引,吸引( allure的第三人称单数 ) | |
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477 glaciers | |
冰河,冰川( glacier的名词复数 ) | |
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478 sheathed | |
adj.雕塑像下半身包在鞘中的;覆盖的;铠装的;装鞘了的v.将(刀、剑等)插入鞘( sheathe的过去式和过去分词 );包,覆盖 | |
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479 pedestrians | |
n.步行者( pedestrian的名词复数 ) | |
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480 zealously | |
adv.热心地;热情地;积极地;狂热地 | |
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481 saluting | |
v.欢迎,致敬( salute的现在分词 );赞扬,赞颂 | |
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482 flirted | |
v.调情,打情骂俏( flirt的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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483 comely | |
adj.漂亮的,合宜的 | |
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484 pretences | |
n.假装( pretence的名词复数 );作假;自命;自称 | |
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485 squat | |
v.蹲坐,蹲下;n.蹲下;adj.矮胖的,粗矮的 | |
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486 boredom | |
n.厌烦,厌倦,乏味,无聊 | |
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487 enveloped | |
v.包围,笼罩,包住( envelop的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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488 dreariness | |
沉寂,可怕,凄凉 | |
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489 fettered | |
v.给…上脚镣,束缚( fetter的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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490 blister | |
n.水疱;(油漆等的)气泡;v.(使)起泡 | |
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491 refreshment | |
n.恢复,精神爽快,提神之事物;(复数)refreshments:点心,茶点 | |
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492 linen | |
n.亚麻布,亚麻线,亚麻制品;adj.亚麻布制的,亚麻的 | |
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493 decided | |
adj.决定了的,坚决的;明显的,明确的 | |
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494 sojourn | |
v./n.旅居,寄居;逗留 | |
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495 dozed | |
v.打盹儿,打瞌睡( doze的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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496 confided | |
v.吐露(秘密,心事等)( confide的过去式和过去分词 );(向某人)吐露(隐私、秘密等) | |
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497 itineraries | |
n.旅程,行程( itinerary的名词复数 ) | |
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498 confidential | |
adj.秘(机)密的,表示信任的,担任机密工作的 | |
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499 prettily | |
adv.优美地;可爱地 | |
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500 retired | |
adj.隐退的,退休的,退役的 | |
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501 provocative | |
adj.挑衅的,煽动的,刺激的,挑逗的 | |
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502 insignificant | |
adj.无关紧要的,可忽略的,无意义的 | |
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503 siesta | |
n.午睡 | |
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504 propeller | |
n.螺旋桨,推进器 | |
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505 Christian | |
adj.基督教徒的;n.基督教徒 | |
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506 magenta | |
n..紫红色(的染料);adj.紫红色的 | |
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507 abruptly | |
adv.突然地,出其不意地 | |
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508 snarled | |
v.(指狗)吠,嗥叫, (人)咆哮( snarl的过去式和过去分词 );咆哮着说,厉声地说 | |
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509 thwarted | |
阻挠( thwart的过去式和过去分词 ); 使受挫折; 挫败; 横过 | |
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510 hovered | |
鸟( hover的过去式和过去分词 ); 靠近(某事物); (人)徘徊; 犹豫 | |
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511 feverishly | |
adv. 兴奋地 | |
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512 taut | |
adj.拉紧的,绷紧的,紧张的 | |
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513 behold | |
v.看,注视,看到 | |
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514 unprecedented | |
adj.无前例的,新奇的 | |
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515 derisive | |
adj.嘲弄的 | |
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516 hilarious | |
adj.充满笑声的,欢闹的;[反]depressed | |
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517 arcade | |
n.拱廊;(一侧或两侧有商店的)通道 | |
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518 liking | |
n.爱好;嗜好;喜欢 | |
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519 reeks | |
n.恶臭( reek的名词复数 )v.发出浓烈的臭气( reek的第三人称单数 );散发臭气;发出难闻的气味 (of sth);明显带有(令人不快或生疑的跡象) | |
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520 billiards | |
n.台球 | |
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521 convivial | |
adj.狂欢的,欢乐的 | |
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522 masonry | |
n.砖土建筑;砖石 | |
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523 encumbers | |
v.妨碍,阻碍,拖累( encumber的第三人称单数 ) | |
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524 furtive | |
adj.鬼鬼崇崇的,偷偷摸摸的 | |
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525 innocence | |
n.无罪;天真;无害 | |
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526 virility | |
n.雄劲,丈夫气 | |
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527 exultation | |
n.狂喜,得意 | |
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528 fatuous | |
adj.愚昧的;昏庸的 | |
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529 rustling | |
n. 瑟瑟声,沙沙声 adj. 发沙沙声的 | |
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530 incurred | |
[医]招致的,遭受的; incur的过去式 | |
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531 determined | |
adj.坚定的;有决心的 | |
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532 virtues | |
美德( virtue的名词复数 ); 德行; 优点; 长处 | |
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533 muffled | |
adj.(声音)被隔的;听不太清的;(衣服)裹严的;蒙住的v.压抑,捂住( muffle的过去式和过去分词 );用厚厚的衣帽包着(自己) | |
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