Unit 1: Vocabulary from Readings 1

“My aunt will be down presently, Mr. Nuttel,” said a very self-possessed young lady of fifteen; “in the meantime you must try and put up with me.”

Framton Nuttel endeavored to say the correct something which should duly flatter the niece of the moment without unduly discounting the aunt that was to come.

In crossing the moor to their favorite snipe-shooting ground they were all three engulfed in a treacherous piece of bog.

Here the child’s voice lost its self-possessed note and became falteringly human.

He made a desperate but only partially successful effort to turn the talk on to a less ghastly topic; he was conscious that his hostess was giving him only a fragment of her attention, and her eyes were constantly straying past him to the open window and the lawn beyond.

“The doctors agree in ordering me complete rest, an absence of mental excitement, and avoidance of anything in the nature of violent physical exercise,” announced Framton, who labored under the tolerably widespread delusion that total strangers and chance acquaintances are hungry for the least detail of one’s ailments and infirmities, their cause and cure.

Framton shivered slightly and turned towards the niece with a look intended to convey sympathetic comprehension.

A cyclist coming along the road had to run into the hedge to avoid imminent collision.

“Hark at the wind,” said Mr. White, who, having seen a fatal mistake after it was too late, was amiably desirous of preventing his son from seeing it.

The soldier regarded him in the way that middle age is wont to regard presumptuous youth.

He darted round the table, pursued by the maligned Mrs. White armed with an antimacassar.

Mr. White took the paw from his pocket and eyed it dubiously.

There was an air of prosaic wholesomeness about the room that it had lacked on the previous night, and the dirty, shrivelled little paw was pitched on the sideboard with a carelessness which betokened no great belief in its virtues.

“Morris said the things happened so naturally,” said his father, “that you might if you so wished attribute it to coincidence.”

“I’m afraid it’ll turn you into a mean, avaricious man, and we shall have to disown you.”

She broke off suddenly as the sinister meaning of the assurance dawned upon her, and she saw the awful confirmation of her fears in the other’s averted face.

There was no reply. The old woman’s face was white, her eyes staring, and her breath inaudible.

But the days passed, and expectation gave place to resignation—the hopeless resignation of the old, sometimes miscalled apathy.