Test III

1. “Sorry. I got lost.”

“Lost? Durr! What are we going to do with you? Come on in!”

(H. Fielding)

2. She did what she liked, she lived as she liked. (D. du Maurier)

3. Mr Sloane wanted nothing. A lemonade? No, thanks. A little champagne? Nothing at all, thanks … I’m sorry -

“Did you have a nice ride?”

“Very good roads around here.”

“I suppose the automobiles –”

“Yeah.” (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)

4. “I’m being honest with you – I don’t know. I’d help Starling if I could. Why wouldn’t I? I kind of liked her and she was getting me expunged. Look in her reports or notes or –”

“I have. I want you to understand something, Barney.” (Th. Harris)

5. He thought he was magnanimous; he was only vain. (W.S. Maugham)

6. Massive relief to be back in own home where am adult lord of castle instead of pawn in other people’s games. (H. Fielding)

7. An additional two miles of manicured roadway brought her to the farm. (Th. Harris)

8. That’s why women are foolish to make a song and dance if their husbands have an occasional flutter when the time and the place are propitious. (W.S. Maugham)

9. You learn more quickly under the guidance of experienced teachers. You waste a lot of time going blind alleys if you have no one to lead you. (W.S. Maugham)

10. A virtue is like a city set upon a hill – it cannot be hid. We can conceal our vices if we care to – for a time at least – but a virtue will out.

(O. Wilde)

7. Oh, God, I hate it when Tom is happy, confident and getting on well with Jerome, much preferring it when he is miserable, insecure and neurotic. As he himself never tires of saying, “It’s always so nice when things go badly for other people.” (H. Fielding)

8. “Well, I’ll leave you two young people together,” said Una. “Durr! I expect you’re sick to death of us old fuddy-duddies.” (H. Fielding)

9. “But someone was saying he was the best barman in town. I just wondered what was so special about him.”

“I bet a lady told you that,” Slim said, his face registering contempt. “The best barman in town! That’s rich. Why, he’s just an amateur. The martinis he throws together would make a cat puke. I’ll tell you what he’s got: looks.” (J.H. Chase)

7. She was no longer young nor fresh nor beautiful. She looked older, defeated and trapped. (J.H. Chase)

8. They both looked hard, tough and ruthless, and they both looked very, very lethal. (J.H. Chase)

Test IV

1. “I didn’t want to think it over,” I said, “There was no other choice. You don’t understand, Maxim. When one loves a person…” (D. du Maurier)

2. “Now you’re being co-dependent, darling,” said Giles, putting his hand towards her waist.

“I’m not!” said Rebecca, brushing his hand away crossly, then putting back the smile. “Mark!” she cried. She looked at him as if she thought the crowd had parted, time had stopped still and the Glen Miller Band was going to strike up with ‘It Had to be You’. (H. Fielding)

3. “I keep telling you nobody wants legs like a stick insect. They want a bottom they can park a bike in and balance a pint of beer on.”

(H. Fielding)

4. Oh God, feel guilty with Jude and Sharon now I have boyfriend, almost like traitorous double-crossing side-switching guerrilla. (H. Fielding)

5. Kelly froze in mid-step and then collapsed back onto the bed, groaning. What on earth had she done? She would have to telephone Dee straight away and tell her that she had changed her mind, that there was totally, absolutely, completely and utterly no way she could go through with the ludicrous plan she had agreed to last night. (P. Jordan)

6. Left a message for Mum yesterday to tell her all about my scoop so when she rang tonight I assumed it would be to congratulate me, but no, she was just going on about the party… Temptation to tell her what happened almost overwhelming but managed to control myself by envisaging consequences: screaming ecstasy at the making of the date and brutal murder of only daughter when she heard the actual outcome. (H. Fielding)

7. “Now if you had said he had broken his neck…” Joe began, then broke off to gape. “You kidding?” (J.H. Chase)

8. I was astonished a week later when I went to lunch with one of my neighbours to find him there. Dressed for a party, he looked like death. (W.S. Maugham)

9. Rachel: “That’s nice” she said, also crying now. “You woke the baby up too. Thanks for a nice, quiet, stressless Sunday morning.” (S. King)

10. I could not bear him. He was blatant and loud. I hated his fluent conversation in perfect but foreign English; I hated the extravagant compliments he paid Rosie; I hated the heartiness with which he treated her friends. (W.S. Maugham)

11. “Listen, bud, this is going to be one of the major sensations of the year. This is going to be something that could get the whole of our beautiful Administration tossed out on its fat neck.” (J.H. Chase)

12. “Fetch Alphonse,” Pop said. “I daresay he wouldn’t say no to a brandy. I want one too.” (H.E. Bates)

13. “Shouldn’t wonder,” Pop said. “She said summat about it.” (H.E. Bates)

14. Percy’s mouth was a half-moon of scorn. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)

15. “Your eyes are like your mother’s,” she said. “I used to have a scrap-book full of pictures of her.”

“Your eyes are like your own and not a bit like any other eyes,” he answered. (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)

Test V

1. He was silent and I guessed at his unutterable depression.

“I feel far away from her,” he said. “It’s hard to make her understand.”

“You mean about the dance?”

“The dance?” He dismissed all the dances he had given with a snap of his fingers. “Old sport, the dance is unimportant.” (F. Sc. Fitzgerald)

2. “Bridget, what’s the matter? It’s only a game. Even I can see that. When you called me during the match I was so caught up in my own feelings that … But it’s only a game.” (H. Fielding)

3. He never spoke to me. He never touched me. (D. du Maurier)

4. “How’s Mum?”

“She’s going to Kenya. With Una.”

“Are you going too?”

“No. Your mother would argue that she is a person in her own right, that our money is her money, and she should be allowed to freely explore the world and her own personality at a whim.” (H. Fielding)

5. People who mean well always do badly. They are like the ladies who wear clothes that don’t fit them in order to show their piety. Good intentions are invariably ungrammatical. (O. Wilde)

6. Her dressing room was like the cabin of a ship. The world seemed a long way off, and she relished her seclusion. She felt an enchanting freedom. (W.S. Maugham)

7. The mood abruptly changed. We all fell silent, trying to absorb this violent, shocking and unthinkable thought. (H. Fielding)

8. “He has a little shack out on Palm Boulevard,” Joe said with a cynical smile. “A twenty-four bedroom job with a lounge big enough to serve as a bus garage; just a throw away: a weekend cabin.” (J.H. Chase)

9. “How is he?”

“As comfortable as can be expected, sir,” he told me in a voice a mortician would have envied. (J.H. Chase)

10. It is difficult not to be unjust to what one loves. (O. Wilde)

11. I was thinking, oh my God, life is over, Daniel is a mad alcoholic and will kill me then chuck me when he finds out. (H. Fielding)

12. “Poor lamb,” she said to herself, “he’s such a hell of a gentleman he doesn’t know what to do about it.” (W.S. Maugham)

13. “I thought you had seen me. Isn’t that Jack Seaborne’s car?”

“Yes, I’ve borrowed it while mine’s in dock.”

“You Chester Scott?” “That’s right.” (J.H. Chase)

14. She was wearing a gold lame dress that fitted her like a second skin, and she looked pretty good as she stood there under a white spotlight.

(J.H. Chase)

15. A big, broad-shouldered man got out of the car just ahead of us. As the cop came up to his car, the big man said in an explosion of rage: “What the hell is this? I’m trying to get to Palm Bay. Can’t you guys keep this goddamn road clear?”

The cop sent his beam over him.

“You can come down to the station and make a complaint if that’s the way you feel about it,” he said in a voice that could have peeled rust off the keel of a ship. “You’ll go when we’re good and ready for you to go, and not before.”

The big man seemed to lose some of his size. (J.H. Chase)