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The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Chapter 3 - Part 3
The reluctance1 to go home was not confined to wayward men. The hall was at present occupied by two deplorably sober men and their highly indignant wives. The wives were sympathizing with each other in slightly raised voices.
“Whenever he sees I’m having a good time he wants to go home.”
“Never heard anything so selfish in my life.”
“We’re always the first ones to leave.”
“So are we.”
“Well, we’re almost the last to-night,” said one of the men sheepishly. “The orchestra left half an hour ago.”
In spite of the wives’ agreement that such malevolence2 was beyond credibility, the dispute ended in a short struggle, and both wives were lifted, kicking, into the night.
As I waited for my hat in the hall the door of the library opened and Jordan Baker3 and Gatsby came out together. He was saying some last word to her, but the eagerness in his manner tightened4 abruptly5 into formality as several people approached him to say good-bye.
Jordan’s party were calling impatiently to her from the porch, but she lingered for a moment to shake hands.
“I’ve just heard the most amazing thing,” she whispered. “How long were we in there?”
“Why, about an hour.” “It was—simply amazing,” she repeated abstractedly. “But I swore I wouldn’t tell it and here I am tantalizing6 you.” She yawned gracefully7 in my face: “Please come and see me. . . . Phone book . . . Under the name of Mrs. Sigourney Howard . . . My aunt . . .” She was hurrying off as she talked—her brown hand waved a jaunty8 salute9 as she melted into her party at the door.
Rather ashamed that on my first appearance I had stayed so late, I joined the last of Gatsby’s guests, who were clustered around him. I wanted to explain that I’d hunted for him early in the evening and to apologize for not having known him in the garden.
“Don’t mention it,” he enjoined10 me eagerly. “Don’t give it another thought, old sport.” The familiar expression held no more familiarity than the hand which reassuringly11 brushed my shoulder. “And don’t forget we’re going up in the hydroplane to-morrow morning, at nine o’clock.”
Then the butler, behind his shoulder: “Philadelphia wants you on the ‘phone, sir.”
“All right, in a minute. Tell them I’ll be right there. . . . good night.”
“Good night.”
“Good night.” He smiled—and suddenly there seemed to be a pleasant significance in having been among the last to go, as if he had desired it all the time. “Good night, old sport. . . . good night.”
But as I walked down the steps I saw that the evening was not quite over. Fifty feet from the door a dozen headlights illuminated12 a bizarre and tumultuous scene. In the ditch beside the road, right side up, but violently shorn of one wheel, rested a new coupe which had left Gatsby’s drive not two minutes before. The sharp jut13 of a wall accounted for the detachment of the wheel, which was now getting considerable attention from half a dozen curious chauffeurs14. However, as they had left their cars blocking the road, a harsh, discordant15 din16 from those in the rear had been audible for some time, and added to the already violent confusion of the scene.
A man in a long duster had dismounted from the wreck17 and now stood in the middle of the road, looking from the car to the tire and from the tire to the observers in a pleasant, puzzled way.
“See!” he explained. “It went in the ditch.”
The fact was infinitely18 astonishing to him, and I recognized first the unusual quality of wonder, and then the man—it was the late patron of Gatsby’s library.
“How’d it happen?”
“I know nothing whatever about mechanics,” he said decisively.
“But how did it happen? Did you run into the wall?” “Don’t ask me,” said Owl20 Eyes, washing his hands of the whole matter. “I know very little about driving—next to nothing. It happened, and that’s all I know.”
“Well, if you’re a poor driver you oughtn’t to try driving at night.”
“But I wasn’t even trying,” he explained indignantly, “I wasn’t even trying.”
“Do you want to commit suicide?”
“You’re lucky it was just a wheel! A bad driver and not even TRYing!”
“You don’t understand,” explained the criminal. “I wasn’t driving. There’s another man in the car.”
The shock that followed this declaration found voice in a sustained “Ah-h-h!” as the door of the coupe swung slowly open. The crowd—it was now a crowd—stepped back involuntarily, and when the door had opened wide there was a ghostly pause. Then, very gradually, part by part, a pale, dangling23 individual stepped out of the wreck, pawing tentatively at the ground with a large uncertain dancing shoe.
Blinded by the glare of the headlights and confused by the incessant24 groaning25 of the horns, the apparition26 stood swaying for a moment before he perceived the man in the duster.
“Wha’s matter?” he inquired calmly. “Did we run outa gas?”
“Look!”
Half a dozen fingers pointed27 at the amputated wheel—he stared at it for a moment, and then looked upward as though he suspected that it had dropped from the sky.
“It came off,” some one explained.
He nodded.
“At first I din’ notice we’d stopped.”
A pause. Then, taking a long breath and straightening his shoulders, he remarked in a determined28 voice:
“Wonder’ff tell me where there’s a gas’line station?”
At least a dozen men, some of them little better off than he was, explained to him that wheel and car were no longer joined by any physical bond.
“Back out,” he suggested after a moment. “Put her in reverse.”
“But the WHEEL’S off!”
He hesitated.
“No harm in trying,” he said.
The caterwauling horns had reached a crescendo29 and I turned away and cut across the lawn toward home. I glanced back once. A wafer of a moon was shining over Gatsby’s house, making the night fine as before, and surviving the laughter and the sound of his still glowing garden. A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation30 the figure of the host, who stood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell.
Reading over what I have written so far, I see I have given the impression that the events of three nights several weeks apart were all that absorbed me. On the contrary, they were merely casual events in a crowded summer, and, until much later, they absorbed me infinitely less than my personal affairs.
Most of the time I worked. In the early morning the sun threw my shadow westward31 as I hurried down the white chasms32 of lower New York to the Probity33 Trust. I knew the other clerks and young bond-salesmen by their first names, and lunched with them in dark, crowded restaurants on little pig sausages and mashed34 potatoes and coffee. I even had a short affair with a girl who lived in Jersey35 City and worked in the accounting36 department, but her brother began throwing mean looks in my direction, so when she went on her vacation in July I let it blow quietly away.
I took dinner usually at the Yale Club—for some reason it was the gloomiest event of my day—and then I went up-stairs to the library and studied investments and securities for a conscientious37 hour. There were generally a few rioters around, but they never came into the library, so it was a good place to work. After that, if the night was mellow38, I strolled down Madison Avenue past the old Murray Hill Hotel, and over 33rd Street to the Pennsylvania Station.
I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous39 feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker40 of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove41. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted42 metropolitan43 twilight44 I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others—poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary45 restaurant dinner—young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant46 moments of night and life.
Again at eight o’clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were five deep with throbbing47 taxi-cabs, bound for the theatre district, I felt a sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes outlined unintelligible48 70 gestures inside. Imagining that I, too, was hurrying toward gayety and sharing their intimate excitement, I wished them well.
For a while I lost sight of Jordan Baker, and then in midsummer I found her again. At first I was flattered to go places with her, because she was a golf champion, and every one knew her name. Then it was something more. I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity. The bored haughty49 face that she turned to the world concealed51 something—most affectations conceal50 something eventually, even though they don’t in the beginning—and one day I found what it was. When we were on a house-party together up in Warwick, she left a borrowed car out in the rain with the top down, and then lied about it—and suddenly I remembered the story about her that had eluded52 me that night at Daisy’s. At her first big golf tournament there was a row that nearly reached the newspapers—a suggestion that she had moved her ball from a bad lie in the semi-final round. The thing approached the proportions of a scandal—then died away. A caddy retracted53 his statement, and the only other witness admitted that he might have been mistaken. The incident and the name had remained together in my mind.
Jordan Baker instinctively54 avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence55 from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably56 dishonest. She wasn’t able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness57, I suppose she had begun dealing58 in subterfuges59 when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent60 smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body.
It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply—I was casually61 sorry, and then I forgot. It was on that same house party that we had a curious conversation about driving a car. It started because she passed so close to some workmen that our fender flicked62 a button on one man’s coat.
“You’re a rotten driver,” I protested. “Either you ought to be more careful, or you oughtn’t to drive at all.”
“I am careful.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Well, other people are,” she said lightly.
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“They’ll keep out of my way,” she insisted. “It takes two to make an accident.”
“Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.”
“I hope I never will,” she answered. “I hate careless people. That’s why I like you.”
Her gray, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately63 shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle64 back home. I’d been writing letters once a week and signing them: “Love, Nick,” and all I could think of was how, when that certain girl played tennis, a faint mustache of perspiration65 appeared on her upper lip. Nevertheless there was a vague understanding that had to be tactfully broken off before I was free.
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1
reluctance
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| n.厌恶，讨厌，勉强，不情愿 | |
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malevolence
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| n.恶意，狠毒 | |
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baker
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| n.面包师 | |
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tightened
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| 收紧( tighten的过去式和过去分词 )； （使）变紧； （使）绷紧； 加紧 | |
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abruptly
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| adv.突然地，出其不意地 | |
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tantalizing
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| adj.逗人的；惹弄人的；撩人的；煽情的v.逗弄，引诱，折磨( tantalize的现在分词 ) | |
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gracefully
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| ad.大大方方地；优美地 | |
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jaunty
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| adj．愉快的，满足的；adv.心满意足地，洋洋得意地；n.心满意足；洋洋得意 | |
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salute
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| vi.行礼，致意，问候，放礼炮；vt.向…致意，迎接，赞扬；n.招呼，敬礼，礼炮 | |
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enjoined
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| v.命令( enjoin的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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reassuringly
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| ad.安心，可靠 | |
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illuminated
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| adj.被照明的；受启迪的 | |
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jut
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| v.突出；n.突出，突出物 | |
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chauffeurs
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| n.受雇于人的汽车司机( chauffeur的名词复数 ) | |
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discordant
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| adj.不调和的 | |
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din
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| n.喧闹声，嘈杂声 | |
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wreck
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| n.失事，遇难；沉船；vt.(船等)失事，遇难 | |
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infinitely
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| adv.无限地，无穷地 | |
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shrugged
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| vt.耸肩（shrug的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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owl
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| n.猫头鹰，枭 | |
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awed
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| adj.充满敬畏的，表示敬畏的v.使敬畏，使惊惧( awe的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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22
hush
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| int.嘘，别出声；n.沉默，静寂；v.使安静 | |
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dangling
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| 悬吊着( dangle的现在分词 )； 摆动不定； 用某事物诱惑…； 吊胃口 | |
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incessant
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| adj.不停的，连续的 | |
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groaning
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| adj. 呜咽的, 呻吟的 动词groan的现在分词形式 | |
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26
apparition
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| n.幽灵，神奇的现象 | |
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pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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crescendo
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| n.(音乐)渐强，高潮 | |
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30
isolation
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| n.隔离，孤立，分解，分离 | |
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westward
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| n.西方，西部；adj.西方的，向西的；adv.向西 | |
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chasms
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| 裂缝( chasm的名词复数 )； 裂口； 分歧； 差别 | |
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probity
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| n.刚直；廉洁，正直 | |
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mashed
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| a.捣烂的 | |
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jersey
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| n.运动衫 | |
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accounting
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| n.会计，会计学，借贷对照表 | |
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conscientious
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| adj.审慎正直的，认真的，本着良心的 | |
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mellow
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| adj.柔和的；熟透的；v.变柔和；(使)成熟 | |
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adventurous
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| adj.爱冒险的；惊心动魄的，惊险的，刺激的 | |
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flicker
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| vi./n.闪烁，摇曳，闪现 | |
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disapprove
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| v.不赞成，不同意，不批准 | |
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enchanted
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| adj. 被施魔法的，陶醉的，入迷的 动词enchant的过去式和过去分词 | |
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43
metropolitan
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| adj.大城市的，大都会的 | |
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44
twilight
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| n.暮光，黄昏；暮年，晚期，衰落时期 | |
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solitary
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| adj.孤独的，独立的，荒凉的；n.隐士 | |
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poignant
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| adj.令人痛苦的，辛酸的，惨痛的 | |
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throbbing
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| a. 跳动的,悸动的 | |
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48
unintelligible
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| adj.无法了解的，难解的，莫明其妙的 | |
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haughty
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| adj.傲慢的，高傲的 | |
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conceal
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| v.隐藏，隐瞒，隐蔽 | |
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concealed
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| a.隐藏的，隐蔽的 | |
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eluded
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| v.（尤指机敏地）避开( elude的过去式和过去分词 )；逃避；躲避；使达不到 | |
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retracted
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| v.撤回或撤消( retract的过去式和过去分词 )；拒绝执行或遵守；缩回；拉回 | |
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instinctively
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| adv.本能地 | |
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divergence
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| n.分歧，岔开 | |
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incurably
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| ad.治不好地 | |
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unwillingness
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| n. 不愿意，不情愿 | |
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dealing
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| n.经商方法，待人态度 | |
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subterfuges
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| n.（用说谎或欺骗以逃脱责备、困难等的）花招，遁词( subterfuge的名词复数 ) | |
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insolent
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| adj.傲慢的，无理的 | |
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casually
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| adv.漠不关心地，无动于衷地，不负责任地 | |
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flicked
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| （尤指用手指或手快速地）轻击( flick的过去式和过去分词 )； （用…）轻挥； （快速地）按开关； 向…笑了一下（或瞥了一眼等） | |
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deliberately
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| adv.审慎地；蓄意地；故意地 | |
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tangle
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| n.纠缠；缠结；混乱；v.(使)缠绕；变乱 | |
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perspiration
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| n.汗水；出汗 | |
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cardinal
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| n.(天主教的)红衣主教；adj.首要的，基本的 | |
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virtues
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| 美德( virtue的名词复数 )； 德行； 优点； 长处 | |
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