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(单词翻译:双击或拖选)
Tender Is the Night - Book Two
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Chapter 14
Dick awoke at five after a long dream of war, walked to the window and stared out it at the Zugersee. His dream had begun in sombre majesty1; navy blue uniforms crossed a dark plaza2 behind bands playing the second movement of Prokofieff's "Love of Three Oranges." Presently there were fire engines, symbols of disaster, and a ghastly uprising of the mutilated in a dressing3 station. He turned on his bed-lamp light and made a thorough note of it ending with the half-ironic phrase: "Non-combatant's shell-shock."
As he sat on the side of his bed, he felt the room, the house and the night as empty. In the next room Nicole muttered something desolate4 and he felt sorry for whatever loneliness she was feeling in her sleep. For him time stood still and then every few years accelerated in a rush, like the quick re-wind of a film, but for Nicole the years slipped away by clock and calendar and birthday, with the added poignance5 of her perishable6 beauty.
Even this past year and a half on the Zugersee seemed wasted time for her, the seasons marked only by the workmen on the road turning pink in May, brown in July, black in September, white again in Spring. She had come out of her first illness alive with new hopes, expecting so much, yet deprived of any subsistence except Dick, bringing up children she could only pretend gently to love, guided orphans7. The people she liked, rebels mostly, disturbed her and were bad for her—she sought in them the vitality8 that had made them independent or creative or rugged9, sought in vain—for their secrets were buried deep in childhood struggles they had forgotten. They were more interested in Nicole's exterior10 harmony and charm, the other face of her illness. She led a lonely life owning Dick who did not want to be owned.
Many times he had tried unsuccessfully to let go his hold on her. They had many fine times together, fine talks between the loves of the white nights, but always when he turned away from her into himself he left her holding Nothing in her hands and staring at it, calling it many names, but knowing it was only the hope that he would come back soon.
He scrunched11 his pillow hard, lay down, and put the back of his neck against it as a Japanese does to slow the circulation, and slept again for a time. Later, while he shaved, Nicole awoke and marched around, giving abrupt12, succinct13 orders to children and servants. Lanier came in to watch his father shave—living beside a psychiatric clinic he had developed an extraordinary confidence in and admiration14 for his father, together with an exaggerated indifference15 toward most other adults; the patients appeared to him either in their odd aspects, or else as devitalized, over-correct creatures without personality. He was a handsome, promising16 boy and Dick devoted17 much time to him, in the relationship of a sympathetic but exacting18 officer and respectful enlisted19 man.
"Why," Lanier asked, "do you always leave a little lather20 on the top of your hair when you shave?"
Cautiously Dick parted soapy lips: "I have never been able to find out. I've often wondered. I think it's because I get the first finger soapy when I make the line of my side-burn, but how it gets up on top of my head I don't know."
"I'm going to watch it all to-morrow."
"That's your only question before breakfast?"
"I don't really call it a question."
"That's one on you."
Half an hour later Dick started up to the administration building. He was thirty-eight—still declining a beard he yet had a more medical aura about him than he had worn upon the Riviera. For eighteen months now he had lived at the clinic—certainly one of the best-appointed in Europe. Like Dohmler's it was of the modern type—no longer a single dark and sinister21 building but a small, scattered22, yet deceitfully integrated village—Dick and Nicole had added much in the domain23 of taste, so that the plant was a thing of beauty, visited by every psychologist passing through Zurich. With the addition of a caddy house it might very well have been a country club. The Eglantine and the Beeches24, houses for those sunk into eternal darkness, were screened by little copses from the main building, camouflaged25 strong-points. Behind was a large truck farm, worked partly by the patients. The workshops for ergo-therapy were three, placed under a single roof and there Doctor Diver began his morning's inspection26. The carpentry shop, full of sunlight, exuded27 the sweetness of sawdust, of a lost age of wood; always half a dozen men were there, hammering, planing, buzzing—silent men, who lifted solemn eyes from their work as he passed through. Himself a good carpenter, he discussed with them the efficiency of some tools for a moment in a quiet, personal, interested voice. Adjoining was the book-bindery, adapted to the most mobile of patients who were not always, however, those who had the greatest chance for recovery. The last chamber28 was devoted to beadwork, weaving and work in brass29. The faces of the patients here wore the expression of one who had just sighed profoundly, dismissing something insoluble—but their sighs only marked the beginning of another ceaseless round of ratiocination30, not in a line as with normal people but in the same circle. Round, round, and round. Around forever. But the bright colors of the stuffs they worked with gave strangers a momentary31 illusion that all was well, as in a kindergarten. These patients brightened as Doctor Diver came in. Most of them liked him better than they liked Doctor Gregorovius. Those who had once lived in the great world invariably liked him better. There were a few who thought he neglected them, or that he was not simple, or that he posed. Their responses were not dissimilar to those that Dick evoked32 in non-professional life, but here they were warped33 and distorted.
"Have we got music to-night?"
"I don't know," he answered. "I haven't seen Doctor Ladislau. How did you enjoy the music that Mrs. Sachs and Mr. Longstreet gave us last night?"
"It was so-so."
"I thought it was fine—especially the Chopin."
"I thought it was so-so."
"When are you going to play for us yourself?"
"Some time. But I only play so-so."
They knew that she did not play at all—she had had two sisters who were brilliant musicians, but she had never been able to learn the notes when they had been young together.
From the workshop Dick went to visit the Eglantine and the Beeches. Exteriorly36 these houses were as cheerful as the others; Nicole had designed the decoration and the furniture on a necessary base of concealed37 grills38 and bars and immovable furniture. She had worked with so much imagination—the inventive quality, which she lacked, being supplied by the problem itself—that no instructed visitor would have dreamed that the light, graceful39 filagree work at a window was a strong, unyielding end of a tether, that the pieces reflecting modern tubular tendencies were stancher than the massive creations of the Edwardians—even the flowers lay in iron fingers and every casual ornament40 and fixture41 was as necessary as a girder in a skyscraper42. Her tireless eyes had made each room yield up its greatest usefulness. Complimented, she referred to herself brusquely as a master plumber43.
For those whose compasses were not depolarized there seemed many odd things in these houses. Doctor Diver was often amused in the Eglantine, the men's building—here there was a strange little exhibitionist who thought that if he could walk unclothed and unmolested from the Êtoile to the Place de la Concorde he would solve many things—and, perhaps, Dick thought, he was quite right.
His most interesting case was in the main building. The patient was a woman of thirty who had been in the clinic six months; she was an American painter who had lived long in Paris. They had no very satisfactory history of her. A cousin had happened upon her all mad and gone and after an unsatisfactory interlude at one of the whoopee cures that fringed the city, dedicated44 largely to tourist victims of drug and drink, he had managed to get her to Switzerland. On her admittance she had been exceptionally pretty—now she was a living agonizing45 sore. All blood tests had failed to give a positive reaction and the trouble was unsatisfactorily catalogued as nervous eczema. For two months she had lain under it, as imprisoned46 as in the Iron Maiden47. She was coherent, even brilliant, within the limits of her special hallucinations.
She was particularly his patient. During spells of overexcitement he was the only doctor who could "do anything with her." Several weeks ago, on one of many nights that she had passed in sleepless48 torture Franz had succeeded in hypnotizing her into a few hours of needed rest, but he had never again succeeded. Hypnosis was a tool that Dick had distrusted and seldom used, for he knew that he could not always summon up the mood in himself—he had once tried it on Nicole and she had scornfully laughed at him.
The woman in room twenty could not see him when he came in—the area about her eyes was too tightly swollen49. She spoke in a strong, rich, deep, thrilling voice.
"How long will this last? Is it going to be forever?"
"It's not going to be very long now. Doctor Ladislau tells me there are whole areas cleared up."
"If I knew what I had done to deserve this I could accept it with equanimity50."
"It isn't wise to be mystical about it—we recognize it as a nervous phenomenon. It's related to the blush—when you were a girl, did you blush easily?"
She lay with her face turned to the ceiling.
"I have found nothing to blush for since I cut my wisdom teeth."
"Haven't you committed your share of petty sins and mistakes?"
"I have nothing to reproach myself with."
"You're very fortunate."
The woman thought a moment; her voice came up through her bandaged face afflicted51 with subterranean52 melodies:
"I'm sharing the fate of the women of my time who challenged men to battle."
"To your vast surprise it was just like all battles," he answered, adopting her formal diction.
"Just like all battles." She thought this over. "You pick a set-up, or else win a Pyrrhic victory, or you're wrecked53 and ruined—you're a ghostly echo from a broken wall."
"You are neither wrecked nor ruined," he told her. "Are you quite sure you've been in a real battle?"
"Look at me!" she cried furiously.
"You've suffered, but many women suffered before they mistook themselves for men." It was becoming an argument and he retreated. "In any case you mustn't confuse a single failure with a final defeat."
She sneered54. "Beautiful words," and the phrase transpiring55 up through the crust of pain humbled56 him.
"We would like to go into the true reasons that brought you here—" he began but she interrupted.
"I am here as a symbol of something. I thought perhaps you would know what it was."
"You are sick," he said mechanically.
"Then what was it I had almost found?"
"A greater sickness."
"That's all?"
"That's all." With disgust he heard himself lying, but here and now the vastness of the subject could only be compressed into a lie. "Outside of that there's only confusion and chaos57. I won't lecture to you—we have too acute a realization58 of your physical suffering. But it's only by meeting the problems of every day, no matter how trifling59 and boring they seem, that you can make things drop back into place again. After that—perhaps you'll be able again to examine—"
He had slowed up to avoid the inevitable60 end of his thought: "—the frontiers of consciousness." The frontiers that artists must explore were not for her, ever. She was fine-spun, inbred—eventually she might find rest in some quiet mysticism. Exploration was for those with a measure of peasant blood, those with big thighs61 and thick ankles who could take punishment as they took bread and salt, on every inch of flesh and spirit.
—Not for you, he almost said. It's too tough a game for you.
Yet in the awful majesty of her pain he went out to her unreservedly, almost sexually. He wanted to gather her up in his arms, as he so often had Nicole, and cherish even her mistakes, so deeply were they part of her. The orange light through the drawn62 blind, the sarcophagus of her figure on the bed, the spot of face, the voice searching the vacuity63 of her illness and finding only remote abstractions.
As he arose the tears fled lava-like into her bandages.
"That is for something," she whispered. "Something must come out of it."
He stooped and kissed her forehead.
"We must all try to be good," he said.
Leaving her room he sent the nurse in to her. There were other patients to see: an American girl of fifteen who had been brought up on the basis that childhood was intended to be all fun—his visit was provoked by the fact that she had just hacked64 off all her hair with a nail scissors. There was nothing much to be done for her—a family history of neurosis and nothing stable in her past to build on. The father, normal and conscientious65 himself, had tried to protect a nervous brood from life's troubles and had succeeded merely in preventing them from developing powers of adjustment to life's inevitable surprises. There was little that Dick could say: "Helen, when you're in doubt you must ask a nurse, you must learn to take advice. Promise me you will."
What was a promise with the head sick? He looked in upon a frail66 exile from the Caucasus buckled67 securely in a sort of hammock which in turn was submerged in a warm medical bath, and upon the three daughters of a Portuguese68 general who slid almost imperceptibly toward paresis. He went into the room next to them and told a collapsed69 psychiatrist70 that he was better, always better, and the man tried to read his face for conviction, since he hung on the real world only through such reassurance71 as he could find in the resonance72, or lack of it, in Doctor Diver's voice. After that Dick discharged a shiftless orderly and by then it was the lunch hour.
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1
majesty
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| n.雄伟，壮丽，庄严，威严；最高权威，王权 | |
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plaza
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| n.广场，市场 | |
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dressing
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| n.(食物)调料；包扎伤口的用品，敷料 | |
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desolate
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| adj.荒凉的，荒芜的；孤独的，凄凉的；v.使荒芜，使孤寂 | |
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poignance
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perishable
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| adj.（尤指食物）易腐的，易坏的 | |
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orphans
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| 孤儿( orphan的名词复数 ) | |
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vitality
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| n.活力，生命力，效力 | |
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rugged
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| adj.高低不平的，粗糙的，粗壮的，强健的 | |
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exterior
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| adj.外部的，外在的；表面的 | |
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scrunched
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| v.发出喀嚓声( scrunch的过去式和过去分词 )；蜷缩；压；挤压 | |
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abrupt
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| adj.突然的，意外的；唐突的，鲁莽的 | |
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succinct
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| adj.简明的，简洁的 | |
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admiration
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| n.钦佩，赞美，羡慕 | |
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indifference
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| n.不感兴趣，不关心，冷淡，不在乎 | |
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promising
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| adj.有希望的，有前途的 | |
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devoted
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| adj.忠诚的，忠实的，热心的，献身于...的 | |
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exacting
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| adj.苛求的，要求严格的 | |
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enlisted
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| adj.应募入伍的v.（使）入伍， （使）参军( enlist的过去式和过去分词 )；获得（帮助或支持） | |
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lather
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| n.(肥皂水的)泡沫，激动 | |
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sinister
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| adj.不吉利的，凶恶的，左边的 | |
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scattered
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| adj.分散的，稀疏的；散步的；疏疏落落的 | |
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23
domain
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| n.(活动等)领域，范围；领地，势力范围 | |
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beeches
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| n.山毛榉( beech的名词复数 )；山毛榉木材 | |
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camouflaged
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| v.隐蔽( camouflage的过去式和过去分词 )；掩盖；伪装，掩饰 | |
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26
inspection
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| n.检查，审查，检阅 | |
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27
exuded
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| v.缓慢流出，渗出，分泌出( exude的过去式和过去分词 )；流露出对（某物）的神态或感情 | |
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28
chamber
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| n.房间，寝室；会议厅；议院；会所 | |
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29
brass
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| n.黄铜；黄铜器，铜管乐器 | |
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ratiocination
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| n.推理；推断 | |
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momentary
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| adj.片刻的，瞬息的；短暂的 | |
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evoked
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| [医]诱发的 | |
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warped
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| adj.反常的；乖戾的；（变）弯曲的；变形的v.弄弯，变歪( warp的过去式和过去分词 )；使（行为等）不合情理，使乖戾， | |
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34
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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35
shrugged
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| vt.耸肩（shrug的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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exteriorly
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| adv.从外部，表面上 | |
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concealed
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| a.隐藏的，隐蔽的 | |
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38
grills
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| n.烤架( grill的名词复数 )；（一盘）烤肉；格板；烧烤餐馆v.烧烤( grill的第三人称单数 )；拷问，盘问 | |
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39
graceful
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| adj.优美的，优雅的；得体的 | |
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ornament
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| v.装饰，美化；n.装饰，装饰物 | |
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41
fixture
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| n.固定设备；预定日期；比赛时间；定期存款 | |
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42
skyscraper
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| n.摩天大楼 | |
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43
plumber
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| n.(装修水管的)管子工 | |
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44
dedicated
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| adj.一心一意的；献身的；热诚的 | |
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45
agonizing
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| adj.痛苦难忍的；使人苦恼的v.使极度痛苦；折磨(agonize的ing形式) | |
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46
imprisoned
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| 下狱，监禁( imprison的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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maiden
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| n.少女，处女；adj.未婚的，纯洁的，无经验的 | |
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sleepless
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| adj.不睡眠的，睡不著的，不休息的 | |
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49
swollen
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| adj.肿大的，水涨的；v.使变大，肿胀 | |
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50
equanimity
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| n.沉着，镇定 | |
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51
afflicted
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| 使受痛苦，折磨( afflict的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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52
subterranean
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| adj.地下的，地表下的 | |
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53
wrecked
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| adj.失事的，遇难的 | |
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54
sneered
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| 讥笑，冷笑( sneer的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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55
transpiring
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| （事实，秘密等）被人知道( transpire的现在分词 )； 泄露； 显露； 发生 | |
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56
humbled
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| adj. 卑下的，谦逊的，粗陋的 vt. 使 ... 卑下，贬低 | |
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57
chaos
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| n.混乱，无秩序 | |
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realization
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| n.实现；认识到，深刻了解 | |
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59
trifling
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| adj.微不足道的；没什么价值的 | |
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inevitable
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| adj.不可避免的，必然发生的 | |
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thighs
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| n.股，大腿( thigh的名词复数 )；食用的鸡（等的）腿 | |
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62
drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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vacuity
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| n.(想象力等)贫乏，无聊，空白 | |
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hacked
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| 生气 | |
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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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frail
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| adj.身体虚弱的；易损坏的 | |
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buckled
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| a. 有带扣的 | |
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Portuguese
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| n.葡萄牙人；葡萄牙语 | |
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69
collapsed
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| adj.倒塌的 | |
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psychiatrist
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| n.精神病专家；精神病医师 | |
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71
reassurance
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| n.使放心，使消除疑虑 | |
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resonance
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| n.洪亮；共鸣；共振 | |
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