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)