2. 职称英语
  3. After breakfast I went out into the garden. Spring had come late that year,

After breakfast I went out into the garden. Spring had come late that year,

游客2025-04-19  52
问题     After breakfast I went out into the garden. Spring had come late that year, making nonsense of last year’s grandiose plans; I was two Sundays of hard digging behind schedule. Harling Crescent was part of a new housing estate off St. Clair Park, or off Earl Road, depending on which way you wanted to look at it.(The estate agents generally called it the Park Development, the word Park having more status than Road.)
    With the exception of a few big houses on Earl Road itself, there’d been no building in the district until after the war. We were the first occupants of Number Seven Harling Crescent, and the garden had been a wilderness when we moved in. Now, after three years during which I seemed to have done little else but weed and dig and add cartloads of lime and manure, it was beginning to look credible that in about ten year’s time it might be remotely like the garden in Hunlitt and Lesper’s brochure. It wouldn’t, I knew, boast quite as many roses and cherry-trees or have such a smoothly green lawn or such agreeably fantastic topiary work, nor could I ever hope for a limousine of anything near the dimensions(the bonnet, according to my calculations, being some fifteen feet long)to stand in the drive. I had few illusions left about my value to my father-in-law’s business. But it would be definitely a garden, and we’d have tea there in the summer and eat our own strawberries and there’d be a play house for Barbara and, as she herself would put it, flowers. Barbara would come home from school and there would be ’pretty’ flowers. Above all, the garden would be something I’d made, something which belonged to me. The poet who wrote about God walking in his garden in the cool of evening had got it all wrong; I valued my garden because it was about the only place in the world in which I, Joe Lampton, could walk as Joe Lampton.
    And, since I’d been thinking of being two Sundays behind schedule, it was the only place where I didn’t live to schedule; in a garden one did things by season and weather, not by clock and calendar.
    The St. Clair mansion stood north of Harling Crescent with the St. Clair Folly on the crest of the hill above it. It was still a pleasure to look at, its proportions of balance and order and simplicity were still acceptable to me; and there had been a time when the fact of my mother-in-law being a St. Clair had given me a feeling of part-ownership of the place; because the St. Clairs were my children’s ancestors they were mine too. If anything I did the family credit; among the more notable St. Clairs were at least two known murderers, three convicted traitors, and one particularly ambitious gentleman who was rumored both to have offered his fifteen-year-old daughter to Edward II and to have helped to arrange Edward’s murder at Berkeley. Heiress-hunting and robbery of one kind or another they all seemed to have taken for granted; Peregrine, who built the Folly in 1810, went through two wives’ fortunes and then made another as colonel of a regiment. He was even supposed to have done a deal with the denture-makers of the time who extracted teeth from the dead on the field of battle; I came across this titbit in an anonymous Chartist pamphlet which Reggie Scurrah showed me at the library.
    Reggie had expected me to be shocked; instead I was mildly titillated. That had been some seven years ago: now the St. Clairs had lost their glamour as far as I was concerned. True, when away from Warley I always managed to bring my wife’s ancestors into the conversation; I had never disliked an association with a name which—all the more so for the family being extinct—was a symbol of doomed aristocracy, pennons against the sunset, trumpets at Rancevallas, and all the rest of it. But now I used this social gambit only when I remembered to. [br] It can be concluded from the passage that the author’s attitude towards the St. Clair family is______.
选项 A、detached
B、positive
C、cynical
D、liberal
答案 C
解析 总结题。根据全文内容可知，作者描写St．Clair家族时是以讽刺的语气讲述的。所以正确答案是C选项。
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