3. Mrs. Speers knew too that Rosemary, for all her delicate surface, was a young mustang, perceptibly by Captain Doctor Hoyt, U.S.A. Cross-sectioned, Rosemary would have displayed an enormous heart, liver and soul, all crammed close together under the lovely shell. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
4. The proprietor of the hotel, Mr McBeth, was to be the three Chinese monkeys. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
5. It would be hundreds of years before any emergent Amazons would ever grasp the fact that a man is vulnerable only in his pride, but delicate as Humpty-Dumpty once that is meddled with – through some of them paid the fact a cautious lip service. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
6. Secretly she ran and secretly he followed. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
7. “We’re going home.”
“Home!” she roared in a voice so abandoned that its louder tones wavered and cracked. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
8. The air was full of politics and the slap of cards. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
9. It was an escape story in the best tradition – an aristocrat hiding nine years with a former servant and working in a government bakery; the eighteen-year-old daughter in Paris who knew Tommy Barban. … During the narrative Dick decided that this parched papier mache relic of the past was scarcely worth the lives of three young men. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
10.Holding himself erect, holding his breath, Dick turned to her. As she came across the lobby, her beauty all groomed, like a young horse dosed with Black-seed oil, and hoops varnished, shocked him awake; but it all came too quick for him to do anything except conceal his fatigue as best he could. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
11.I know a dove of a house in Talbot Square you could get, furnished.
(F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
12.“But some day I’m going to find somebody and love him and love him and never let him go.” (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
13.I like France, where everybody thinks he’s Napoleon – down here everybody thinks he’s Christ. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
14.“The girl I was dancing with. Su’nly disappeared. Must be in the building.” (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
15.On an upper landing, just aroused from sleep and wrapped in a white embroidered Persian robe, stood a singular young man. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
Test XIII
1. Nicole and Baby are rich as Croesus but I haven’t managed to get my hands on any of it yet. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
2. It accused him in no uncertain terms of having seduced her daughter, who had been at her mother’s side during the crucial stage of the illness.
(F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
3. He and Nicole looked at each other directly, their eyes like blazing windows across a court of the same house. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
4. England was like a rich man after a disastrous orgy who makes up to the household by chatting with them individually, when it is obvious to them that he is only trying to get back his respect in order to usurp his former power. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
5. Dick pictured the jammed Packard pounding toward Innsbruck with the McKibbens and their children and their baggage and yapping dogs – and the governess. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
6. “Oh, such a shame, such a shame. Oh, such a shame. What’s it all anyhow?” (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
7. “I guess I’m the Black Death,” he said slowly. “I don’t seem to bring people happiness any more.” (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
8. “She certainly musta got a good look at me.” (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
9. My son is corrupt. He was corrupt at Harrow; he was corrupt at King’s College, Cambridge. He’s incorrigibly corrupt. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
10. Only now, Doctor Diver, do I realize what it was all about.
(F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
11. He got afraid, and off he went. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
12. “It was instinct,” Dick said finally. “He was really dying, but he tried to get a resumption of rhythm – he’s not the first person that ever walked off his death-bed – like an old clock – you know, you shake it and somehow from sheer habit it gets going again. Now your father –” (F.Sc. Fitzgerald)
13. Not without desperation he had long felt the ethics of his profession dissolving into a lifeless mass. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
14. He would suddenly unroll a scroll of contempt for some person, race, class, way of life, way of thinking. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
15. There were a white, a red, a blurred dress, the laundered chests of several men, of whom one, detaching and identifying himself, brought from Nicole a rare little cry of delight. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
Test XIV
1. But the meanings are different – in French you can be heroic and gallant with dignity, and you know it. But in English you can’t be heroic and gallant without being a little absurd, and you know that too. That gives me an advantage. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
2. She heard Dick grow silent at her side; she took a step off from him and waved as the car drove off with Tommy and the special camphor rub. Then she turned to take her own medicine. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
3. She hated the beach, resented the places where she had played planet to Dick’s sun. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
4. “Why this is a wonderful room, Tommy – like the bare tables in so many Cezannes and Picassos.” (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
5. “Kwee wave off your porch?” implored the other in passionate American. “Kwee please? Wave at the boy friend? Kwee, please. The other rooms is all locked.” (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
6. “I didn’t come over here to be disagreeable.”
“Then why did you come, Nicole? I can’t do anything for you any more. I’m trying of save myself.” (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
7. On an almost parallel occasion, back in Dohmler’s clinic on the Zurichsee, realizing this power, he had made his choice, chosen Ophelia, chosen the sweet poison and drunk it. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
8. “I have never seen women like this sort of women. I have known many of the great courtesans of the world, and for them I have much respect often, but women like these women I have never seen before.” (F.Sc. Fitzgerald)
9. “Got everything here, Buddies,” he announced. “Been here long?”
(F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
10. To begin with I wasn’t working today. The old car, in which I ‘cover’ my district (I ought to tell you that I’m in the insurance business. The Flying Salamander. Life, fire, burglary, twins, shipwreck - everything), was temporarily in dock, and though I’d got to look in at the London office to drop some papers, I was really taking the day off to go and fetch my new false teeth. (G. Orwell)
11. You know how these streets fester all over the inner-outer suburbs. Always the same. Long, long rows of little semi-detached houses – the numbers in Ellesmere Road run to 212 and ours is 191 – as much alike as council houses and generally uglier. The stucco front, the creosoted gate, the privet hedge, the green front door. The Laurels, the Myrtles, the Hawthorns, Mon Abri, Mon Repos, Belle Vue. (G. Orwell)
12. A platoon of soldiers comes marching up the street. The sergeant’s got corkscrew moustaches and holds himself like a ramrod, but he’s thin too and he’s got a cough that almost tears him open. Between his coughs he’s trying to bawl at them in the old parade-ground style. “Nah then, Jones. Lift yer ‘ed up! What yer keep starin’ at the ground for? All them fag-ends was picked up years ago.” (G. Orwell)
13. Shooter had a kind of desperate, agonized bellow, as though someone had a knife at his throat and he was just letting out his last yell for help. But Wetherall had a tremendous, churning, rumbling noise that happened deep down inside him, like enormous barrels being rolled to and fro underground. However much noise he let out, you always knew he’d got plenty more in reserve. The kids nicknamed him Rumbletummy.
(G. Orwell)
14. It was a wonderful June morning. The buttercups were up to my knees. There was a breath of wind just stirring the tops of the elms, and the great green clouds of leaves were sort of soft and rich like silk. And it was nine in the morning and I was eight years old, and all round me it was early summer, with great tangled hedges where the wild roses were still in bloom, and bits of soft white cloud drifting overhead, and in the distance the low hills and the dim blue masses of the woods round Upper Binfield. And I didn’t give a damn for any of it. (G. Orwell)
15. Joe turned and saw me. “Christ!” he said. “It’s the kid.” He walked up to me like a tom-cat that’s going to start a fight. “Now then, you! What’d I tell you? You get back ‘ome double quick.” (G. Orwell)
Test XV
1. “G’day,” he said, his mouth opening in a grin. (D. du Maurier)
2. “I do like you,” said Rosemary, “but I don’t think you ought to fight a duel.” (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
3. You’re their ideal of all that’s graceful and beautiful and wonderful. (W.S. Maugham)
4. Barny did not reply. He looked at Krendler as though the left and right hemispheres of Krendler’s brain were two dogs stuck together. (Th. Harris)
5. “When someone loves you it’s like having a blanket all round your heart,” he said, “and then when it’s taken away …” and burst into tears.
(H. Fielding)
6. Daniel kept sending me computer messages at work. The more he sent the more I got carried away, imagining that the self-reinvention was working, that he realized he had made a terrible, terrible mistake, had only now understood how much he truly loved me, and that the rooftop giantess was history. (H. Fielding)
7. “Bridget,” he muttered nervously as we walked into the white hole and sea of grunge youths. (H. Fielding)
8. It’s not an unattractive trait. (W.S. Maugham)
9. He who only five months before had sought her so eagerly with his eyes and intriguing smile. The liar! The brute! The monster! (Th. Dreiser)
10. A man who can dominate a London dinner table can dominate the world. The future belongs to the dandy. It is the exquisites who are going to rule. (O. Wilde)
11. “They don’t want wit. They don’t want a man to be funny; they think he’s not serious. They don’t want a man who’s too handsome; they think he’s not serious either. That’s what they want, they want a man who’s serious. Safety first. And then – attention. I may not be handsome and I may not be amusing, but believe me, I’ve got what every woman wants. Poise. And the proof is, I’ve made every one of my wives happy.”
(W.S. Maugham)
12. Magda looked up at Jude like Piglet hoping to be included on an outing with Pooh and Tigger. (H. Fielding)
13. “People will shout,” said Alec quietly, “but Goethe’s on his same old shelf in the library – to bore anyone that wants to read him!”
(F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
14. “- So you love me?”
“Oh, do I!” (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
15. His eyes rested in a melancholy way on his boots, which were sadly in need of repair. (W.S. Maugham)
Test XVI
1. They looked a bit ill as if they’d been surviving on nothing more substantial than cigarettes, coffee and exam pressure for some time.
(M. Gayle)
2. While we waited for the coffee to arrive, Gershwin and I exchanged a brief lift of the eyebrows in salute to a random act of senseless beauty clearing the table behind us. (M. Gayle)
3. “I dunno,” said Gershwin, “but I suppose we’ll both find out soon enough.” (M. Gayle)
4. “They must be nearly a million years old now because they were half a million when we were there.” (M. Gayle)
5. “My mum was standing at the top of the stairs wearing her nightie, her dressing-gown and an uncompromising frown.” (M. Gayle)
6. “So come on, Mr. Misery, why was tonight so awful for you?” (M. Gayle)
7. “I’ve been dying to ask you about her for ages and it’s only now that I’m trying to get you drunk that I feel able to.” (M. Gayle)
8. “But don’t you think the jacket goes with the Birkenstocks? I think the Birkenstocks need the jacket.” She said it as though her footwear was going to suffer from severe depression without the jacket. (M. Gayle)
9. Our readers don’t love music they live it – eat it, breathe it. Just as I do. (M. Gayle)
10. Only my wife has the power to utter the phrase I fear so much, and then only when some catastrophe has befallen the house – like, for example, last Saturday when the kitchen radiator precipitated a scale version of Lake Windermere across the kitchen floor… I had to take on the mantle of Mr Fix-it. (M. Gayle)
11. We’ve been talking about life at Teen Scene for the previous half an hour and just as my vegetable tempura and chicken ramen arrives she drops this bombshell. (M. Gayle)
12. … I look around me. There are girls with nose-rings, girls with purple hair, tall girls, short girls, girls with skateboards, hard girls, posh girls, rude girls, and girls whose jeans are so baggy I can’t understand why they don’t fall over – they are girls of every variety and yet they all have one thing in common: they’re wearing clothes that make them look older than their years. (M. Gayle)
13. When the doctor told me it was positive I cried and cried. I was so scared. Absolutely terrified. (M. Gayle)
14. You must know that I didn’t do this to hurt you. I acted stupidly. I acted carelessly. I acted hurtfully. But I never did any of it to hurt you. (M. Gayle)
15. “You don’t have to tell me that,” says Izzy. “I wake up every day and you’re not there. I come home to an empty flat because you’re not there. I sit alone in the home we made feeling desperate for you to hold me and tell me everything’s going to be all right.” (M. Gayle)
Test XVII
1. It was the man who had been watching her. He was a compelling mixture of soulful and powerful: finely drawn features, a straight nose, fine, arched brows, hooded brown eyes. (H. Fielding)
2. It was Barry. “And this other ‘fantastic news story’ you’ve found. What might that be? Miami invaded by walking dolphins, perhaps? The Iraqi information minister spinning vinyl in the lobby?”
“Well, actually it’s something I’ve just started working on. I’ll tell you more in a couple of -”
“Shut up. How are we getting along with the story we are supposed to be doing? The story we’ve been sent out to Miami, at considerable expense, to cover? Any chance of us turning our attention to that at some point? At all?”
“Oh, yes, yes. I’m doing that. It’s all fine. But I’m onto some really good leads for another story. I promise you, it’s really good. If I could just stay one more night and go to this party, then...” “No. En. Oh. No.” (H. Fielding)
3. The lady was a charming mix of elegant looks and broad Yorkshire accent. (H. Fielding)
4. “Well, here we are. We was married two weeks ago and we’ve got a lot of missed time to make up for.”
“That’s so sad,” said Olivia. “All that time wasted.”
“Aye,” said Edward.
“Nay, lass,” said Elsie. “You can’t go regretting stuff because there wasn’t anything else that could have happened.” (H. Fielding)
5. She sat at the desk and rested her head on her arms. She felt deranged, exhausted, scared and lonely. She wanted comfort. She wanted someone to hold. She reached for a card on the desk and dialed a number. (H. Fielding)
6. He turned back to Olivia. “We can reschedule our meeting perhaps?” a-rrreeeeshedull owah meeting. He so did not sound French. (H. Fielding)
7. “I should have perhaps warned you we would be putting out to sea.”
“To sea?” she said, trying simultaneously to take the wrap, which turned out to be very soft indeed as if made from the feathers of some rare bird, and hide the knife in it.(H. Fielding)
8. She caught herself feeling a stab of Cinderella syndrome and was furious. (H. Fielding)
9. “Weesh tuminall?” yelled the cab driver again. “Tuminall? Internassyunall? Or domestic fly? Weesh airline?” (H. Fielding)
10. She woke to bright sunlight, the chirp of tropical birds and hunger pangs. (H. Fielding)
11. Someone suggested gas.
“Yeah, that went great in Moscow,” murmured Scott. (H. Fielding)
12. But I won’t if you are going to go Joan Collins on me. (M. Gabot)
13. Whadduya say, George? (M. Gabot)
14. The woman is in a COMA. Okay? She is COMATOSE. I think some alternative arrangements for the woman’s pets need to be made. You are a DOORMAT. A COMATOSE woman is using you as a DOORMAT.
(M. Gabot)
15. The driver turned to look at her, flashing a smile and one gold tooth.
“You hwan carrpeet?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Carrpeet. I geeve you verry good price. My brother have carrrpeet shop. Very close by. No go Marrkeeet. In marrrkeet very bad man. My brother carrpeeet verry, verry beautifful.”
“Pyramids. Giza.”
“Pyramid verrry farr. Is no good. Is dark. No see. Better buy carpet.”
(H. Fielding)
Test XVIII
1. But now I find out it’s only because Max Friedlander e-mailed you. But what’s this I hear about him doing in Ethiopia? Max Friedlander would NEVER go to Ethiopia. My God, it’s so …. dusty there. (M. Gabot)
2. Now, listen, about Aaron: I am bound and determined to make him into something I wouldn’t be ashamed to introduce to Stephen. So do you think he’ll resist strongly to my steering him over toward Barney’s? He’s simply got to have some linen pants, don’t you think? He’ll look so devastatingly F. Scott Fitzgerald in linen. (M. Gabot)
3. He was also lucky enough to get you, Stacy. I guess it’s easy for a guy who’s got such a gem for a wife to sit back and criticize the rest of us poor slobs, who can’t even find a geode out there, let alone a jewel. I guess Jason doesn’t remember how hard it was for him to meet a girl who was actually attracted to him, and not the Trent family fortune.
(M. Gabot)
4. I would give anything to find a guy with an uncle Giovanni who’d throw me a pool party and call me a Botticelli Venus. (M. Gabot)
5. PUH-lease tell me. I’m begging you. (M. Gabot)
6. It was as if a proverbial hellhole had opened up, right before that bastion of all that is evil, the illustrious New York Chronicle, and attempted to suck it back down to its creator, Mr. Satan himself. (M. Gabot)
7. Then following the direction of her dazzled gaze, I saw what it was that had brought that beatific look to her face:
An Apollo. I am not exaggerating. An absolutely perfect specimen of manly beauty. (M. Gabot)
8. You know if she wasn’t like a hundred years old, I’d say she has a crush on you, because the whole time we were talking, she just kept looking and looking at you. (M. Gabot)
9. Just promise me you won’t spend a lot. I’m not really a champagne kind of girl. Beer suits me just fine. (M. Gabot)
10. Seriously, darling, it looks as if you were licked on the chin by the one hundred and one Dalmatians. (M. Gabot)
11. He is just so funny and nice and sweet and smart and handsome and tall and everything, you will just DIE when you meet him. (M. Gabot)
12. Supermodels have no body hair, no cellulite and no feelings whatsoever. (M. Gabot)
13. Anyway, finally Mr. Acid-Washed Jeans found him – the doorman, I mean – and got buzzed up. Then the doorman went away again, and right then Max came down, and the two of us left. (M. Gabot)
14. Dress will be informal. Jason, Stacy, the twins, and the newest addition to the family will also be in attendance. (M. Gabot)
15. Just a quick congratulatory note before Aaron and I jet off for Barcelona – yes, I know, I can’t believe he finally gave in, either. Bit I suppose in light of your recent journalistic coup, he is finally admitting defeat … and I’m the consolation prize!
As if I care. You know, a hard man really is good to find, and I honestly don’t mind what kind of music he listens to. He’s single, he’s childless, and he can sign a check. What more can a girl ask for? (M. Gabot)
Test XIX
1. There’s Francis Ford Coppola at a table with his wife. There’s an empty chair at Francis Ford Coppola’s table. It’s not just empty: It’s alluringly, temptingly, tauntingly, provocatively empty. It’s so empty that it’s more full than any other chair in the place. (C. Bushnell)
2. “Goddammit!” Ray screamed. She opened her large, red-lipsticked mouth and leaned back precariously in her chair, laughing hysterically.
(C. Bushnell)
3. “I want to be your best friend,” Cici said, in a voice that rubbed up against her like a cat. (C. Bushnell)
4. The cat struggled out of Sam’s arms. It ran across the floor. “Here kitty kitty,” Caroline said. “C’mere kitty. Want some milk?” She heard the TV click on. (C. Bushnell)
5. When Mr. Big is away, the girl comes to play. (C. Bushnell)
6. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been engaged to the wrong person, but once it happens, it’s like being on a freight train you can’t stop.” (C. Bushnell)
7. They drove through the tiny town, which was like a toy town lovingly placed by a child at the base of a Christmas tree. (C. Bushnell)
8. This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.
(H. Walpole)
9. He’s an animal lover…. People he don’t like so much. (T. Stoppard)
10. Of all the cants that are canted in this canting world, - though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst – the cant of criticism is the most tormenting. (L. Sterne)
11. This man (Lord Chesterfield) I thought had been a Lord among wits; but, I find, he is only a wit among Lords. (S. Johnson)
12. I once heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of his calmest moods, that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective. (M. Twain)
13. The play was a great success, but the audience was a total failure.
(O. Wilde)
14. It just goes to show, you can take the girl out of the Midwest, but you can’t take the Midwest out of the girl. (M. Gabot)
15. Justice is the bread of the nation; it is always hungry for it. (François de Chateaubriand)
Extracts for analysis
1. Soul and body, body and soul – how mysterious they are! There is animalism in the soul, and the body has its moments of spirituality. The senses can refine and the intellect can degrade. Who can say where the fleshy impulse ceases or the psychical impulse begins? How shallow are the arbitrary definitions of ordinary psychologists! And yet how difficult to decide between the claims of the various schools! Is the soul a shadow seated in the house of sin? Or is the body really in the soul, as Giordano Bruno thought? The separation of spirit from matter is a mystery, and the unison of spirit with matter is mystery also. (O. Wilde).
2. Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil rather than a mirror. She has flowers that no forests know of, birds that no woodland possesses. She makes and unmakes many worlds, and can draw the moon from heaven with a scarlet thread. Hers are the ‘forms more real than living man,’ and hers the great archetypes, of which things that have existence are but unfinished copies. Nature has, in her eyes, no laws, no uniformity. She can work miracles at her will, and when she calls monsters from the deep they come. She can bid the almond-tree blossom in winter and send the snow upon the ripe cornfield. At her word the frost lays its silver finger on the burning mouth of June, and the winged lions creep out from the hollows of the Lydian hills. The dryads peer from the thicket as she passes by, and the brown fauns smile strangely at her when she comes near them. She has hawk-faced gods that worship her, and the centaurs gallop at her side. (O. Wilde)
3. What man has sought for is, indeed, neither pain nor pleasure, but simply life. Man has sought to live intensely, fully, perfectly. When he can do so without exercising restraint on others, or suffering it ever, and his activities are all pleasurable to him, he will be saner, healthier, more civilized, more himself. Pleasure is nature’s test, her sign of approval. When man is happy he is in harmony with himself and his environment. (O. Wilde)
4. Instead of taking the short cut along the Sound we went down to the road and entered by the big postern. With enchanting murmurs Daisy admired this aspect or that of the feudal silhouette against the sky, admired the gardens, the sparking odour of jonquils and the frothy odour of hawthorn and plum blossoms and the pale gold odour of kiss-me-at-the-gate. It was strange to reach the marble steps and find no stir of bright dresses in and out of the door, and hear no sound but bird voices in the trees… We went upstairs, through period bedrooms swathed in rose and lavender silk and vivid with new flowers, through dressing-rooms and poolrooms, with sunken baths …
“It’s the funniest thing, old sport,” he said hilariously. “I can’t – When I try to –” He (Gatsby) had passed visibly through two states and was entering upon a third. After his embarrassment and his unreasoning joy he was consumed with wonder at her presence. He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald).
5. “I’ve got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall.”
He (Gatsby) took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-coloured disarray. While we admired he bought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher – shirts with striped and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.
“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such – such beautiful shirts before.” (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
6. Now I feel empty and bewildered – as if a rug has been pulled from under my feet. Eighteen years – wasted. Eighteen years of calorie and fat-unit-based arithmetic. Eighteen years of buying long shirts and jumpers and leaving the room backwards in intimate situations to hide my bottom. Millions of cheesecakes and tiramisus, tens of millions of Emmental slices left uneaten. Eighteen years of struggle, sacrifice and endeavour – for what? Eighteen years and the result is ‘tired and flat’. I feel like a scientist who discovers that his life’s work has been a total mistake. (H. Fielding)
7. “Hello, darling, guess what?”
“What?” I said, miserably.
“I’m taking you to have your colours done! And don’t keep saying “what”, please, darling. Color Me Beautiful. I’m sick to death of you wandering round in all these dingy slurries and fogs. You look like something out of Chairman Mao.”
“Mum. I can’t really talk, I’m expecting…”
“Now, come along, Bridget. I don’t want any silliness,” she said in her Genghis-Khan-at-height-of-evil voice. “Mavis Enderby used to be all miserable in buffs and mosses, now she’s had hers done she comes out in all these wonderful shocking pinks and bottle greens and looks twenty years younger.”
“But I don’t want to come out in shocking pinks and bottle greens,” I said through clenched teeth.
“Bridget, I’m not listening to any more of this. Auntie Una was just saying the other day: if you’d had something a bit more bright and cheerful on at the turkey curry buffet Mark Darcy might have shown a bit more interest. Nobody wants a girlfriend who wanders round looking like someone from Auschwitz, darling.”
Thought better of boasting to her about having a boyfriend despite being dressed from head to toe in slurry but prospect of Daniel and self becoming hot topic for discussion precipitating relentless stream of feedback folk-wisdom from Mum dissuaded me. Eventually got her to shut up about Color Me Beautiful be telling her I would think about it. (H. Fielding)
8. … I never exactly knew Rosie’s age, but reckoning the years out as well as I can, I think she must have been thirty-five. She did not look anything like it…
“She’s the very devil to paint,” said Hillier, looking at her and at his picture. “You see, she’s all gold, her face and her hair, and yet she doesn’t give you a golden effect, she gives you a silvery effect.”
I knew what he meant. She glowed, but palely, like the moon rather than the sun, or if it was like the sun it was like the sun in the white mist of dawn. Hillier had placed her in the middle of his canvas and she stood, with her arms by her sides, the palms of her hands toward you and her head a little thrown back, in an attitude that gave value to the pearly beauty of her neck and bosom. She stood like an actress taking a call, confused by unexpected applause, but there was something so virginal about her, so exquisitely spring-like, that the comparison was absurd. This actress creature had never known grease paint or footlights. She stood like a maiden apt for love offering herself guilelessly, because she was fulfilling the purposes of Nature, to the embraces of lover. She belonged to a generation that did not fear a certain opulence of line, she was slender, but her breasts were ample and her hips well marked. When, later, Mrs. Barton Trafford saw the picture she said it reminded her of a sacrificial heifer. (W. S. Maugham)