3. Inside the long room there was only one example of Breasley’s own work, but plenty else to admire. The landscape was indeed a Derain, as David had guessed. Three very fine Permeke drawings. The Ensor and the Marquet. An early Bonnard. A characteristically febrile pencil sketch, unsigned, but unmistakably Dufy. Then a splendid Jawlensky (how on earth had he got his hands on that?), an Otto Dix signed proof nicely juxtaposed with a Nevinson drawing. Two Matthew Smiths, a Picabia, a little flower painting that must be an early Matisse, though it didn’t look quite right … (J. Fowles)
4. Realize with sinking humiliation that reason have been feeling smug about Peter all these years was that I finished with him and now he is effectively finishing with me by marrying Mrs. Giant Valkyrie Bottom. (H. Fielding)
5. Was bloody good fun, actually. Even started to see the funny side of being stood up by Mr. Perfect Pants Mark Darcy. (H. Fielding)
6. How does Mrs. Smug Married-at-twenty-two think she knows, thank you very much? (H. Fielding)
7. I remember a Monet of people rowing on a river, a Pissaro of a quay and a bridge on the Seine, a Tahitian landscape by Gauguin, and a charming Renoir of a young girl in profile with long yellow hair hanging down her back. (W.S. Maugham)
8. “You’ve got a Titian, haven’t you?” (W.S. Maugham)
9. So I assumed an air that mingled Solomon’s with that of the general passenger agent of the Long Island Railroad. (O Henry)
10. “Well,” he inquired, blinking cheerily, “How’s Carmen from the South?” (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
11. John lay quietly as his pajamas were removed – he was amused and delighted; he expected to be lifted like a child by this black Gargantua who was tending him, but nothing of the sort happened.
(F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
12. In the proper land and century he might have been a Richelieu – at present he was a very moral, very religious (if not particularly pious) clergyman, making a great mystery about pulling rusty wires, and appreciating life to the fullest, if not entirely enjoying it. (F.Sc. Fitzgerald)
13. “Did you ever read Stephen Phillips, or do you like poetry?”
“Yes, indeed”, Armory affirmed eagerly. “I’ve never read much of Phillips, though.” (He had never heard of any Phillips except the late David Graham.) (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
14. This called mild twitters among the other freshmen, who called them ‘Doctor Johnson and Boswell.’ (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
15. “Wake up, Original Sin, and scrape yourself together!” (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
16. Burne left in a quietly dramatic manner a week later. He sold all his possessions and came down to the room to say good-bye, with a battered old bicycle, on which he intended to ride his home in Pennsylvania.
“Peter the Hermit bidding farewell to Cardinal Richelieu,” suggested Alec, who was lounging in the window-seat as Burne and Amory shook hands. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
17. Roxanne Milbank was a Venus of the hansom cab, the Gibson girl in her glorious prime. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
18. I might be a really great dictator or writer or religious or political leader – and now even a Leonardo da Vinci or Lorenzo de Medici couldn’t be a real old-fashioned bolt in the world. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
19. You, Tom d’Invilliers, a blighted Shelley, changing, shifting, clever, unscrupulous, represent the critical consciousness of the race.
(F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
20. “Miss Television,” he said with a lightness he did not feel.
(F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
Exercise XII. State the structural and semantic type of epithets in the following examples. Define their function:
1. We passed Port Roosevelt, where there was a glimpse of red-belted ocean-going ships, and sped along a cobbled slum lined with the dark, undeserted saloons of the faded-gilt nineteen-hundreds. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
2. “Perhaps you know that lady,” Gatsby indicated a gorgeous, scarcely human orchid of a woman who sat in state under a white-plum tree.
(F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
3. Then she remembered the heat and sat down guiltily on the couch just as a freshly laundered nurse leading a little girl came into the room.
(F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
4. On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer, I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
5. She hesitated a moment, as if she knew she was being too cool and sibylline. There was even a faint hint of diffidence, a final poor shadow of a welcoming smile. (J. Fowles)
6. Again the Freak talked most, she was funny about her hair-raisingly bigoted parents, her variously rebellious brothers and a younger sister, the hell of a childhood and adolescence in the back streets of Acton.
(J. Fowles)
7. The dew was heavy and pearled. (J. Fowles)
8. She gave him another stab of a look. (J. Fowles)
9. They heard Michael come whistling along the passage, and when he came into the room Dolly turned to him with her great eyes misty with tears. (W.S. Maugham)
10. At dinner Magda had placed me, in an incestuous-sex-sandwich sort of way, between Cosmo and Jeremy’s crashing bore of a brother. (Helen Fielding)
11. It was a disaster of a trip, anyway. (H. Fielding)
12. Daniel stared at me, ashen-faced. (H. Fielding)
13. Then suddenly as I glanced across at the divine young whippersnappers, with the cashpoint machine in the background, the germ of an extremely morally suspect idea began to form itself in my mind. (H. Fielding)
14. Blimey, must hurry. About to go on date with Diet Coke-esque young whippersnapper. (H. Fielding)
15. The testosterone-crazed fans do not wish themselves on the pitch, instead seeing their team as their chosen representatives, rather like parliament. (H. Fielding)
16. Returned from work to icy answer phone message. (H. Fielding)
17. I quickly told Shazzer about pre-law party programme, but when told her about fitness assessment she seemed to spit down the telephone:
“Don’t do it,” she warned in a sepulchral whisper. (H. Fielding)
18. Actually really think whole personality is undergoing seismic change.
(H. Fielding)
19.“Thank you, but I have my own mobile, Brough,” Kelly told him frostily. (P. Jordan)
21. “If I find out you’ve so much as even tried to speak to her again, I promise you you’re going to regret it,” he told Julian in a steely voice.
(P. Jordan)
22. “What are you wearing?” “I’m having it made. Abe Hamilton! Lace and lots of cleavage.” “What cleavage?” muttered Shaz murderously.
(H. Fielding)
23. There was a cavernous silence round the table. (H. Fielding)
24. Mark listened quietly and thoughtfully. “I take your point, Bridget,” he said. “But this is the nursery slope. It’s practically horizontal.”
(H. Fielding)
25. “Okey-dokey, whatever, have a fun time,” she said, flashed the toothpaste advert smile, then put her goggles on and skied off with a flourish towards the town. (H. Fielding)
26. It was a dream of a dress, she acknowledged ten minutes later as she carefully hung it on a padded hanger. A dream of a dress for what could turn out to be a nightmare of an evening. (P. Jordan)
27. Before the nurse could ring, or reach for medication, the first coarse bristles of Mason’s revenge brushed his pale and seeking, ghost crab of a hand, and began to calm him. (Th. Harris)
28. When he returns to the boat, water streaming off his dive skin (which shows all the muscles in his body, including his washboard stomach), Dianna and I are laughing and drinking champagne as if nothing in the world is wrong. (C. Bushnell)
29. Krendler was the icon of failure and frustration. He could be blamed. But what could he be defied? Or was Krendler, and every other authority and taboo, empowered to box Starling into what was, in Dr Lecter’s view, her little low-ceiling life? (Th. Harris)
30. He came several times and he thought it quite an adventure when they asked him to have a luncheon with them which was cooked and served by a scarecrow of a woman whom they called Evie. (W.S. Maugham)
31. We boarded with a snuff-brown lady named Chica, who kept a rum-shop and a ladies’ and gents’ restaurant. (O Henry)
Exercise XIII. Comment on the structural peculiarities of simile in the following examples:
1. A mistress should be like a little country retreat near the town, not to dwell in constantly, but only for a night and away. (W. Wycherley)
2. How marriage ruins a man! It’s as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive. (O. Wilde)
3. “Mark!” said Una, as if she was one of Santa Claus’s fairies. “I’ve got someone nice for you to meet.” (H. Fielding)
4. His features had a worn distinction. He reminded you of a head on an old coin that had been in circulation too long. (W.S. Maugham)
5. For the first two hours this morning I kept staring at my handbag as if it were an unexploded bomb. (H. Fielding)
6. I thought Daniel was going to hit him. I found myself stroking his arm murmuring, “Ok now, easy, easy,” as if he were a racehorse that had been frightened by a van. (H. Fielding)
7. Her painting was vaporous and unsubstantial, but it had a flowerlike grace and even a certain careless elegance. (W.S. Maugham)
8. He was that kind of man – solid, dependable, reassuring, as comfortable as a familiar solid arm-chair, with the kind of down-to earth, healthy good looks that typified a certain type of very English male. (P. Jordan)
9. “Bridget, self-help books are not a religion.”
“But they are! They are a new form of religion. It’s almost as if human beings are like streams of water so when an obstacle is put in their way, they bubble up and surge around to find another path.” (H. Fielding)
10. I poured him a glass of Chardonnay and brought it to him in manner of James Bond-style hostess saying, with a calming smile, “Supper won’t be long.”
“Oh my God,” he said, looking around terrified as if there might be Far Eastern militia hiding in the microwave. “Have you cooked?”
(H. Fielding)
11. I am not going to spend another evening being danced about in front of Mark Darcy like a spoonful of pureed turnip in front of a baby.
(H. Fielding)
12. His America will be as remote from your America as the Gobi desert. (W.S. Maugham)
13. When finally arrived at Guildhall, Mark was pacing up and down outside in black tie and big overcoat.
“Sorry, I’m late,” I said breathlessly.
“You’re not,” he said, “I lied about the kick-off.” He looked at me again in a strange way.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing, nothing,” he said over-calmly and pleasantly, as if I were a lunatic standing on a car holding an axe in one hand and his wife’s head in the other. (H. Fielding)
14. I am aging prematurely, I realized. Like a time-release film of a plum turning into a prune. (H. Fielding)
15. On top of everything else, hair has gone mad as if in sympathy. Bizarre the way that hair is normal for weeks on end then suddenly in space of five minutes goes berserk, announcing it is time to cut in manner of baby starting yelling to be fed. (H. Fielding)
16. Marriage is supposed to make you happy, not make you feel like a rat trapped in a very glamorous cage with twenty-thousand-dollar silk draperies. (C. Bushnell)
17. Hubert looks at me, but somehow, miraculously, I don’t react (much as a prisoner brought into an enemy camp knows not to react), and Hubert reaches out and takes my hand… (C. Bushnell)
18. She gave me the rather absurd notion of a pear, golden and luscious, perfectly ripe and simply asking to be eaten. (W.S. Maugham)
19. Then the spring came… It was spring all right, but it seemed to come shyly in that grim and sordid landscape as though unsure of a welcome. It was like a flower, a daffodil or a lily, growing in a pot on the window-sill of a slum dwelling and you wondered what it did there. (W.S. Maugham)
20. Afterwards I thought I’d better go home: what with Natasha watching my every move as if she were a crocodile and I was getting a bit near to her eggs, and me having given Mark Darcy my address and phone number and having fixed to see him next Tuesday. (H. Fielding)
21. He accepted the bill the way a hungry tiger accepts a chunk of meat, then he stared blankly at me, shifted his gaze to door 28, then softly backed away. (J.H. Chase)
Exercise XIV. Differentiate between cases of simile and logical comparison in the following fragments:
1. She looks like an edition de luxe of a wicked French novel meant specially for the English market. (O. Wilde)
2. A communist is like a crocodile: when it opens its mouth you cannot tell whether it is trying to smile or preparing to eat you up. (W. Churchill)
3. Children in a family are like flowers in a bouquet: there’s always one determined to face in an opposite direction from the way the arranger desires. (M. Cox)
4. It is typical of the new louche health club culture that personal trainers are allowed to behave like doctors without any sort of Hippocratic oath.
(H. Fielding)
5. Wellington, far from being a tragic victim of cultural imperialism, looked coolly at home in one of Dad’s 1950s suits as if he might have been one of the waiters from the Met Bar on his night off, responding with dignified graciousness while Mum and Una twittered around him like groupies. (H. Fielding)
6. Then she allowed herself to smile. Her smile was like a child’s that knows it’s been naughty, but thinks it can wheedle you but its ingenuous charm not to be cross. (W.S. Maugham)
7. That evening I went to dine at a great stone house on Lake Shore Drive which looked as though the architect had started to build a medieval castle and then, changing his mind in the middle, had decided to turn it into a Swiss chalet. (W.S. Maugham)
8. When the pathologist spotted Starling over the shoulder of his assistant, he dumped the brain into the open chest cavity of the corpse, shot his rubber gloves into a bin like a boy shooting rubber bands and came around the table to her. (Th. Harris)
9. I so wish that we could talk about these things openly. I really did believe, when we first got married, that we would talk about everything honestly, but the opposite has occurred: We’re like two people on separate islands, with only tin cans and string as a means of communication. (C. Bushnell)
10. “Girls,” said Jude over-pleasantly, like a gym mistress about to make us stand in the corridor in our gym knickers, “can we get on?” (H. Fielding)
11. Natasha was so tall and thin she hadn’t felt the need to put heels on, so could walk easily across the lawn without sinking, as if designed for it, like camel in the desert. (H. Fielding)
12. One of the men was talking with curious intensity to a young actress, and his wife, after attempting to laugh at the situation in a dignified and indifferent way, broke down entirely and resorted to flank attacks – at intervals she appeared suddenly at his side like an angry diamond, and hissed: “You promised!” into his ear. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
13. An evening with Rebecca is like swimming in sea with jellyfish: all will be going along perfectly pleasantly then suddenly you get painful lashing, destroying confidence at stroke. Trouble is, Rebecca’s strings are aimed so subtly at one’s Achilles’ heels, like Gulf War missiles going ‘Fzzzzzz whoossssh’ through Baghdad hotel corridors, that never see them coming. (H. Fielding)
14. It was all new to me and I was confused and excited. I was like someone who’s lain awake in a darkened room and suddenly a chink of light shoots through the curtains and he knows he only has to draw them and there the country will be spread before him in the glory of the dawn.
(W.S. Maugham)
15. Margot was putting up the currycombs and some hackamores. Her hair was paler than the hay, her eyes as blue as the inspection stamp on meat. (Th. Harris)
16. I forced a smile, and did not answer him, aware now of a stab of panic, an uneasy sickness that could not be controlled. Gone was my glad excitement, vanished my happy pride. I was like a child brought to her first school, or a little untrained maid who has never left home before, seeking a situation. (D. du Maurier)
17. “You look like a five-year-old in your mother’s make-up,” he said. “Look.” (H. Fielding)
18. Was my mother, walking into my café bold as brass in a Country Casuals pleated skirt and apple-green blazer with shiny gold buttons, like a spaceman turning up in the House of Commons squirting slime and sitting itself down calmly on the front bench. (H. Fielding)
19. While I drove, fear like a misshapen gnome, sat silently on my shoulder. (J.H. Chase)
20. A little after midnight, Dolores Lane came in and stood holding a microphone the way a drowning man hangs on to a lifebelt. (J.H. Chase)
21. They stared at me the way a Masonic gathering would stare if a bubble dancer had dropped into the middle of one of their most mystic rituals. (J.H. Chase)
22. They eased me through as if I were a millionaire invalid with four days to live and who hadn’t as yet paid his doctor’s bill. (J.H. Chase)
Exercise XV. Indicate the type (trite, genuine) and the functions of simile in the following examples:
1. Women are like minors, they live upon their expectations. (O. Wilde)
2. Faith is the most plural thing I know. We are all supposed to believe in the same thing in different ways. It is like eating out of the same dish with different coloured spoons. (O. Wilde)
3. A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. (G. Steinem)
4. I was a bridesmaid. I came into her room half an hour before the bridal dinner, and found her lying on her bed as lovely as the June night in her flowered dress – and as drunk as a monkey. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
5. Traffic is like a bad dog. It isn’t important to look both ways when crossing the street. It’s important to not show fear. (P. J. O’Rourke)
6. They were gone, without a word, snapped out, made accidental, isolated, like ghosts, even from our pity. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
7. Picking up Wilson like a doll, Tom carried him into the office, set him down in a chair, and came back. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
8. ‘He was a god, my dear,’ she told me. ‘He was immensely tall, as tall as the Eiffel Tower, with great broad shoulders and a magnificent chest… ’ (W.S. Maugham)
9. Christmas is like war. Going down to Oxford street is hanging over me like going over the top. Wish that the Red Cross or Germans would come and find me. (H. Fielding)
10. I stood there frozen to the spot, feeling like an enormous pudding in the bridesmaid dress. (H. Fielding)
11. English society is as dead as the dodo. (W.S. Maugham)
12. One’s having fun, and one thinks he’s just like on of us, just like everybody else, and then suddenly you have the feeling that he’s escaped you like a smoke ring that you try to catch in your hands.
(W.S. Maugham)
13. Any day he may vanish like a shadow when the sun goes in and we may not see him again for years. (W.S. Maugham)
14. To Sally Carrol this shortening of her name was like presenting her to the public half clothed. (F Sc. Fitzgerald)
15. Starling felt pierced and lonesome in this goat smelling surveillance van crowded with men. Chaps, Brut, Old Spice, sweat and leather. She felt some fear, and it tasted like a penny under her tongue. (Th. Harris)
16. The sea’s as flat as the back of my mind. (D. du Maurier)
17. The gulls wheeled overhead, mewing like hungry cats. (D. du Maurier)
18. The fellow lost his head and jumped for it apparently when the ship struck. We found him clinging on to one of the rocks here under the cliff. He was soaked to the skin of course and shaking like a jelly. Couldn’t speak a word of English of course. Maxim went down to him, and found him bleeding like a pig from a scratch on the rocks. (D. du Maurier)
19. I had a growing feeling that her story wasn’t to be trusted. She was frightened out of her wits and, like a trapped animal, she thought only of escape and she would stop at nothing to save herself. (J.H. Chase)
20. When Wiese walked out on the porch an hour later, Henry saw that his pale lips were like chalk. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
Exercise XVI. Define the function of quasi-identity in the following sentences:
1. Courtship to marriage, is a very witty prologue to a very dull play.
(W. Congreve)
2. Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she’s a householder.
(Th. Wilder)
3. Punctuality is the thief of time. (O. Wilde)
4. Circumstances are the lashes laid on to us by life. Some of us have to receive them with bared ivory backs, and others are permitted to keep on a coat – that is the only difference. (O. Wilde)
5. Divorce is to the practice of law what proctology is to the practice of medicine. (S. Sheldon)
6. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. (O. Wilde)
7. Their (gluttons’) kitchen is their shrine, the cook their priest, the table their altar, and their belly their god. (Ch. Buck)
8. Understanding is a two-way street. (E. Roosevelt)
9. A best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent. (L. P. Smith)
10. After 45 minutes of staring blankly at the computer trying to pretend Perpetua was a Mexican cheeseplant whenever she asked me what was the matter, I bolted and went out to a phone booth to ring Sharon.
(H. Fielding)
11. When one is in love, and things go all wrong, one’s terribly unhappy and one thinks one won’t ever get over it. But you’ll be astounded to learn what the sea will do. Love isn’t a good sailor and it languishes on a sea voyage. You’ll be surprised when you have the Atlantic between you and Larry to find how slight the pang is that before you sailed seemed intolerable. (W.S. Maugham)
12. Then I resolved serenely to tell no one, as gossip is a virulent spreading poison. (H. Fielding)
13. Sensations are the details that build up the stories of our lives. (O. Wilde)
14. You should never try to understand women. Women are pictures, men are problems. If you want to know what a woman really means – which, by the way, is always a dangerous thing to do – look at her, don’t listen to her. (O. Wilde)
15. There are not true friends in politics. We are all sharks circling, and waiting, for traces of blood to appear in the water. (A. Clark)
16. Big dictionaries are nothing but storerooms with infrequently visited and dusty corners. (R. W. Bailey)
17. Ice was a ghost, and this mansion of it was surely peopled by those shades of the eighties, with pale faces and blurred snow-filled hair.
(F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
18. But he clearly did not want to talk about them; as if they were mere moths around his candle, a pair of high – class groupies. (J. Fowles)
19. There is nothing so absolutely pathetic as a really fine paradox. The pun is the clown among jokes, the well-turned paradox is the polished comedian, and the highest comedy verges upon tragedy, just as the keenest edge of tragedy is often tempered by a subtle humour. Our minds are shot with moods as a fabric is shot with colours, and our moods often seem inappropriate. Everything that is true is inappropriate. (O. Wilde)
20. Words are chameleons, which reflect the colour of their environment. (Learned Hand)
Exercise XVII. Discriminate between cases of synonymous replacements and synonymous specifiers in the following fragments:
1. There are moments when one has to choose between living one’s own life fully, entirely, completely, or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands. (O. Wilde)
2. The truth isn’t quite the sort of thing that one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl. (O. Wilde)
3. The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society. (O. Wilde)
4. Sharon was on top form. ‘Bastards!’ she was already yelling by 8.35, pouring three-quarters of a glass of Kir Royale straight down her throat. “Stupid, smug, arrogant, manipulative, self-indulgent bastards.”
(H. Fielding)
5. His great fortune melted and one night he had a heart attack. He was in his sixties; he had always worked hard, played hard, eaten too much, and drunk heavily; after a few hours of agony he died of coronary thrombosis. (W.S. Maugham)
6. In all big cities there are self-contained groups that exist without intercommunication, small worlds within a greater world that lead their lives, their members dependent upon one another for companionship, as though they inhabited islands separated from each other by an unnavigable strait. Of no city, in my experience, is this true than of Paris. There high society seldom admits outsiders into its midst, the politicians live in their own corrupt circle, the bourgeoisie, great and small, frequent one another, writers congregate with writers, painters hobnob with painters and musicians with musicians. (W.S. Maugham)
7. “I don’t need anyone in my life because they owe it to me,” I went on determinedly. “I have got the best, most loyal, wise, witty, caring, supportive friends in the world…” (H: Fielding)
8. There was a stunned silence. Pretentious Jerome had committed a vicious, selfish, unforgivable, ego-destroying crime against all the laws of dating decency. (H: Fielding)
9. “I’ve got a job of work to finish here and then I shall go back to America.”
“What to do?”
“Live.”
“How?”
“With calmness, forbearance, compassion, selflessness, and continence.” (W.S. Maugham)
10. Manderley is no more. It lies like an empty shell amidst the tangle of the deep woods, even as I saw it in my dream. A multitude of weeds, a colony of birds. (D. du Maurier)
11. The smile comprehended Montenegro’s troubled history and sympathized with the brave struggles of the Montenegrin people. It appreciated fully the chain of national circumstances which had elicited this tribute from Montenegro’s warm little heart. My incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
12. Sir Alexander Heathcote, as well as being a gentleman, was an exact man. He was exactly sit-foot-three and a quarter inches tall, rose at seven o’clock every morning, joined his wife at breakfast to eat one boiled egg cooked for precisely four minutes, two pieces of toast with one spoonful of Cooper’s marmalade, and drink one cup of China tea. He would then take a hackney carriage from his home in Cadogan Gardens at exactly eight-twenty and arrive at the Foreign Office at promptly eight-fifty-nine, returning home again on the stroke of six o’clock. (J. Archer)
13. I should never have thought him capable of expressing himself with such dignity, real feeling, and simplicity, had I not long known that notwithstanding his snobbishness and his absurd affectations Elliot was a kindly, affectionate, and honest man. (W.S. Maugham)
14. Dear Daddy, are you still harping on that scholarship? I never knew a man so obstinate and stubborn and unreasonable, and tenacious, and bull-doggish, and unable-to-see-other-people’s-points-of-view as you. (J. Webster)
15. Their great warm faces looked down upon me from the mantelpiece, they floated in a bowl upon the table by the sofa, they stood, lean and graceful, on the writing-desk beside the golden candlesticks. (D. du Maurier)
16. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp joyous moment the centre of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and colour under the constantly changing light. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)
17. That was the thing that kept me from sleeping: the picture of her lifting her thick, chestnut-coloured hair off her white shoulders, the young fresh beauty of her, and the realization that she was Aitken’s wife and the burning need I felt for her. It was that picture that kept my mind feverish and stopped me from sleeping. (J.H. Chase)
18. I think you are a cheat. I know you are a liar. I am equally sure you are in need of money for some reason best known to yourself, and I am certain you’re not going to get it from me. (J.H. Chase)
19. For one thing, it went totally against all her principles and, for another, how on earth was she supposed to give Julian Cox the impression that she found him attractive and desirable enough to want to break up his relationship with someone else when the truth was that she found him loathsome, reptilian and repulsive? (P. Jordan)
20. Doctor Dohmler saw that there were tears in the corners of his eyes and noticed for the first time that there was whiskey on his breath.