Material for reading and discussion

I had never seen a picture of the `Mona Lisa' and (it's true but you

Now let’s check up whether you know all the names mentioned in the letter.

II. Give definitions according to the model:

· David Copperfield - a novel written by a famous English writer Charles Dickens.

Ivanhoe –

Cinderella –

Blue Beard –

Robinson Crusoe –

Jane Eyre –

Alice in Wonderland –

Rudyard Kipling –

Henry the Eighth –

Shelley -

Robert Louis Stevenson –

George Eliot -

Mona Lisa -

Tennyson -

Vanity Fair -

Kipling -

Little Women -

III. Now let’s get acquainted with Jean Webster and her heroine Jerusha.

Jerusha’s rules, mottoes and attitude towards education and life.

Jean Webster

Jean Websterwas the pen name of Alice Jane Chandler Webster (1876-1916), who was born and lived most of her life in New York State. Perhaps it was in her blood that she would write one of the best-loved books of all time, because her great-uncle was Mark Twain. (She also counted among her ancestors the famous frontiersman Daniel Boone.) However, she was a notoriouosly bad speller at school. A teacher once asked her, “On what authority do you spell thus?”

Young Jean replied simply, “Webster,” punning her name with that of the great American dictionary-writer.

Jean Webster had a privileged upbringing and graduated from Vassar College in 1901. Through making charity visits to the poor, she became convinced that less well-off children could indeed succeed in life. This idea is developed with humor and style in “Daddy-Long-Legs”. A young orphan, Jerusha (Judy) Abbott, is sent to college by a kindly but anonymous benefactor, to whom she gives the nickname “Daddy-Long-Legs.” Her letters to him paint a moving picture of orphanage life and an unforgettable portrait of a child’s mind.

Daddy-Long-Legs was not Jean Webster’s first book, but it is the one for which she is chiefly remembered. It was first published in 1912, and its sequel, “Dear Enemy”, was published in 1914. It continues to attract new readers and has been made into a play, several movies (the 1955 version starred Fred Astaire), and a musical comedy in England, called “Love from Judy”.

In 1915, Jean Webster married Glenn Ford McKinney and divided her time between their apartment in New York City overlooking Central Park and their estate in the Berkshire Hills.

Tragically, she died the following year, the day after giving birth to a daughter.

UNIT 2

Material for reading and discussion

1. Read the introduction to the novel called “Blue Wednesday” and explain the meaning of the title. Give possible ways of the translation of the title into Russian.

· Look up in the dictionary the meaning of the word “blue” and pick up the expressions with it, which will help you to translate the title.

Blue Wednesday

The first Wednesday in every month was a Perfectly Awful Day – a day to be awaited with dread, endured with courage and forgotten with haste. Every floor must be spotless, every chair dustless, and every bed without a wrinkle. Ninety-seven squirming little orphans must be scrubbed and combed and buttoned into freshly starched ginghams; and all ninety-seven reminded of their manners, and told to say, 'Yes, sir,' 'No, sir,' whenever a Trustee spoke.

It was a distressing time; and poor Jerusha Abbott, being the oldest orphan, had to bear the brunt of it. But this particular first Wednesday, like its predecessors, finally dragged itself to a close. Jerusha escaped from the pantry where she had been making sandwiches for the asylum's guests, and turned upstairs to accomplish her regular work. Her special care was room F, where eleven little tots, from four to seven, occupied eleven little cots set in a row. Jerusha assembled her charges, straightened their rumpled frocks, wiped their noses, and started them in an orderly and willing line towards the dining-room to engage themselves for a blessed half hour with bread and milk and prune pudding.

Then she dropped down on the window seat and leaned throbbing temples against the cool glass. She had been on her feet since five that morning, doing everybody's bidding, scolded and hurried by a nervous matron. Mrs. Lippett, behind the scenes, did not always maintain that calm and pompous dignity with which she faced an audience of Trustees and lady visitors. Jerusha gazed out across a broad stretch of frozen lawn, beyond the tall iron paling that marked the confines of the asylum, down undulating ridges sprinkled with country estates, to the spires of the village rising from the midst of bare trees.

The day was ended – quite successfully, so far as she knew. The Trustees and the visiting committee had made their rounds, and read their reports, and drunk their tea, and now were hurrying home to their own cheerful firesides, to forget their bothersome little charges for another month. Jerusha leaned forward watching with curiosity – and a touch of wistfulness the stream of carriages and automobiles that rolled out of the asylum gates. In imagination she followed first one equipage, then another, to the big houses dotted along the hillside. She pictured herself in a fur coat and a velvet hat trimmed with feathers leaning back in the seat and nonchalantly murmuring 'Home' to the driver. But on the door-sill of her home the picture grew blurred.

Jerusha had an imagination – an imagination, Mrs. Lippett told her, that would get her into trouble if she didn't take care – but keen as it was, it could not carry her beyond the front porch of the houses she would enter. Poor, eager, adventurous little Jerusha, in all her seventeen years, had never stepped inside an ordinary house; she could not picture the daily routine of those other human beings who carried on their lives undiscommoded by orphans.

Je-ru-sha Ab-bott

You are wan-ted

In the of-fice,

And I think you'd

Better hurry up!

Tommy Dillon, who had joined the choir, came singing up the stairs and down the corridor, his chant growing louder as he approached room F. Jerusha wrenched herself from the window and refaced the troubles of life.

'Who wants me?' she cut into Tommy's chant with a note of sharp anxiety.

Mrs. Lippett in the office,

And I think she's mad.

Ah-a-men!

Tommy piously intoned, but his accent was not entirely malicious. Even the most hardened little orphan felt sympathy for an erring sister who was summoned to the office to face an annoyed matron; and Tommy liked Jerusha even if she did sometimes jerk him by the arm and nearly scrub his nose off.

Jerusha went without comment, but with two parallel lines on her brow. What could have gone wrong, she wondered. Were the sandwiches not thin enough? Were there shells in the nut cakes? Had a lady visitor seen the hole in Susie Hawthorn's stocking? Had – O horrors! – one of the cherubic little babes in her own room F 'sauced' a Trustee?

The long lower hall had not been lighted, and as she came downstairs, a last Trustee stood, on the point of departure, in the open door that led to the porte-cochere. Jerusha caught only a fleeting impression of the man–and the impression consisted entirely of tallness. He was waving his arm towards an automobile waiting in the curved drive. As it sprang into motion and approached, head on for an instant, the glaring headlights threw his shadow sharply against the wall inside. The shadow pictured grotesquely elongated legs and arms that ran along the floor and up the wall of the corridor. It looked, for all the world, like a huge, wavering daddy-long-legs.

Jerusha's anxious frown gave place to quick laughter. She was by nature a sunny soul, and had always snatched the tiniest excuse to be amused. If one could derive any sort of entertainment out of the oppressive fact of a Trustee, it was something unexpected to the good. She advanced to the office quite cheered by the tiny episode, and presented a smiling face to Mrs. Lippett. To her surprise the matron was also, if not exactly smiling, at least appreciably affable; she wore an expression almost as pleasant as the one she donned for visitors.

'Sit down, Jerusha, I have something to say to you.' Jerusha dropped into the nearest chair and waited with a touch of breathlessness. An automobile flashed past the window; Mrs. Lippett glanced after it.

'Did you notice the gentleman who has just gone?'

'I saw his back.'

'He is one of our most affluential Trustees, and has given large sums of money towards the asylum's support. I am not at liberty to mention his name; he expressly stipulated that he was to remain unknown.'

Jerusha's eyes widened slightly; she was not accustomed to being summoned to the office to discuss the eccentricities of Trustees with the matron.

'This gentleman has taken an interest in several of our boys. You remember Charles Benton and Henry Freize? They were both sent through college by Mr. – er – this Trustee, and both have repaid with hard work and success the money that was so generously expended. Other payment the gentleman does not wish. Heretofore his philanthropies have been directed solely towards the boys; I have never been able to interest him in the slightest degree in any of the girls in the institution, no matter how deserving. He does not, I may tell you, care for girls.'

'No, ma'am,' Jerusha murmured, since some reply seemed to be expected at this point.

'To-day at the regular meeting, the question of your future was brought up.'

Mrs. Lippett allowed a moment of silence to fall, then resumed in a slow, placid manner extremely trying to her hearer's suddenly tightened nerves.

'Usually, as you know, the children are not kept after they are sixteen, but an exception was made in your case. You had finished our school at fourteen, and having done so well in your studies – not always, I must say, in your conduct – it was determined to let you go on in the village high school. Now you are finishing that, and of course the asylum cannot be responsible any longer for your support. As it is, you have had two years more than most.'

Mrs. Lippett overlooked the fact that Jerusha had worked hard for her board during those two years, that the convenience of the asylum had come first and her education second; that on days like the present she was kept at home to scrub.

'As I say, the question of your future was brought up and your record was discussed – thoroughly discussed.'

Mrs. Lippett brought accusing eyes to bear upon the prisoner in the dock, and the prisoner looked guilty because it seemed to be expected – not because she could remember any strikingly black pages in her record.

'Of course the usual disposition of one in your place would be to put you in a position where you could begin to work, but you have done well in school in certain branches; it seems that your work in English has even been brilliant. Miss Pritchard, who is on our visiting committee, is also on the school board; she has been talking with your rhetoric teacher, and made a speech in your favour. She also read aloud an essay that you had written entitled, "Blue Wednesday".'

Jerusha's guilty expression this time was not assumed.

'It seemed to me that you showed little gratitude in holding up to ridicule the institution that has done so much for you. Had you not managed to be funny I doubt if you would have been forgiven. But fortunately for you, Mr. –, that is, the gentleman who has just gone – appears to have an immoderate sense of humour. On the strength of that impertinent paper, he has offered to send you to college.'

'To college?' Jerusha's eyes grew big. Mrs. Lippett nodded.

'He waited to discuss the terms with me. They are unusual. The gentleman, I may say, is erratic. He believes that you have originality, and he is planning to educate you to become a writer.'

'A writer?' Jerusha's mind was numbed. She could only repeat Mrs. Lippett's words.

'That is his wish. Whether anything will come of it, the future will show. He is giving you a very liberal allowance, almost, for a girl who has never had any experience in taking care of money, too liberal. But he planned the matter in detail, and I did not feel free to make any suggestions. You are to remain here through the summer, and Miss Pritchard has kindly offered to superintend your outfit. Your board and tuition will be paid directly to the college, and you will receive in addition during the four years you are there, an allowance of thirty-five dollars a month. This will enable you to enter on the same standing as the other students. The money will be sent to you by the gentleman's private secretary once a month, and in return, you will write a letter of acknowledgment once a month. That is–you are not to thank him for the money; he doesn't care to have that mentioned, but you are to write a letter telling of the progress in your studies and the details of your daily life. Just such a letter as you would write to your parents if they were living.

'These letters will be addressed to Mr. John Smith and will be sent in care of the secretary. The gentleman's name is not John Smith, but he prefers to remain unknown. To you he will never be anything but John Smith. His reason in requiring the letters is that he thinks nothing so fosters facility in literary expression as letter-writing. Since you have no family with whom to correspond, he desires you to write in this way; also, he wishes to keep track of your progress. He will never answer your letters, nor in the slightest particular take any notice of them. He detests letter-writing and does not wish you to become a burden. If any point should ever arise where an answer would seem to be imperative–such as in the event of your being expelled, which I trust will not occur – you may correspond with Mr. Griggs, his secretary. These monthly letters are absolutely obligatory on your part; they are the only payment that Mr. Smith requires, so you must be as punctilious in sending them as though it were a bill that you were paying. I hope that they will always be respectful in tone and will reflect credit on your training. You must remember that you are writing to a Trustee of the John Grier Home.'

Jerusha's eyes longingly sought the door. Her head was in a whirl of excitement, and she wished only to escape from Mrs. Lippett's platitudes and think. She rose and took a tentative step backwards. Mrs. Lippett detained her with a gesture; it was an oratorical opportunity not to be slighted.

'I trust that you are properly grateful for this very rare good fortune that has befallen you? Not many girls in your position ever have such an opportunity to rise in the world. You must always remember –'

'I – yes, ma'am, thank you. I think, if that's all, I must go and sew a patch on Freddie Perkins's trousers.'

The door closed behind her, and Mrs. Lippett watched it with dropped jaw, her peroration in mid-air.

TASKS

1. Translate into Russian the passage from “The first Wednesday in every month ... to “… had to bear the brunt of it”. Find the cases of the usage of modality. (“must” and its equivalents: “to be to”, “have to”).

2. Find the words and word combinations in the text and supply them with Russian equivalents:

to endure

distressing

to bear the brunt of it

asylum

to lean against

to lean forward

to lean back

behind the scenes

to gaze

a touch of wistfulness

the picture grew blurred

to feel sympathy for smb or smth.

affluential trustee

erring

hardened

orphan

to give place to

for all the world like….

to snatch the tiniest excuse to be amused

to wear an expression

to be accustomed to smth or doing smth

to bring up a question

to do well in the studies

to be determined

to make an exception

to overlook smth

to make a speech in smb’s favour

to show little gratitude

to ridicule smb or smth

impertinent

to discuss the terms

to give smb a liberal allowance

to superintend

to pay smb’s board and tuition

to keep track of smb’s progress

3. Find English equivalents to the following expressions and words:

напоминать

с сильной тревогой

беглое впечатление

воображение

поддержка

настаивать на чем-либо

характеристика

член школьного совета

хорошее чувство юмора

детально спланировать дело

письмо, подтверждающее получение чего-либо

стать обузой

вихрь волнения

возможность преуспеть

с отвисшей челюстью

избегать, исчезать

быть исключенным

4. Paraphrase the following:

to raise a question

to make fun of smb or smth

to have a certain expression on one’s face

to be thrown out (of school, college, etc.)

necessary according to rules or laws

5. Explain in English the meanings of these:

- a liberal allowance

- not to notice or pretend not to notice

- board and tuition

- behind the scenes

12
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10
• 11
• 12
• 13
• 14
• 15
• 16
• Следующая ⇒