Unit 1: Vocabulary from Readings 2

She frowned, conscientiously worrying over what amusements he might secretly be longing for, which she had been too busy or too careless to imagine.

He was very familiar with that anxious, apologetic smile. Contrition sent him running after her.

“Oh, no!” he said quickly, smiling at her out of that unfailing impulse of contrition—a sort of chivalry.

Finally, as he ran sliding and scraping down the last few yards, he saw an edge of white surf and the shallow, luminous movement of water over white sand, and, beyond that, a solid, heavy blue.

When he was so far out that he could look back not only on the little bay but past the promontory that was between it and the big beach, he floated on the buoyant surface and looked for his mother.

Water surged into his mouth; he choked, sank, came up.

“I want some swimming goggles,” he panted, defiant and beseeching.

Fish again—myriads of minute fish, the length of his fingernail, were drifting through the water, and in a moment he could feel the innumerable tiny touches of them against his limbs.

A curious, most unchildlike persistence, a controlled impatience, made him wait.

He sat by the clock in the villa, when his mother was not near, and checked his time. He was incredulous and then proud to find he could hold his breath without strain for two minutes.

An accident, there are accidents with guns every day of the week—children playing a fatal game with a father’s revolver in the cities where guns are domestic objects, nowadays, hunting mishaps like this one, in the country—but these won’t be reported all over the world.

They'll be able to use it in their boycott and divestment campaigns, it’ll be another piece of evidence in their truth about the country.

There will be an inquiry; there had better be, to stop the assumption of yet another case of brutality against farm workers, although there’s nothing in doubt—an accident, and all the facts fully admitted by Van der Vyver.

Marais Van der Vyver left his house at three in the afternoon to cull a buck from the family of kudu he protects in the bush areas of his farm.

The young black callously shot through the negligence of the white man was not the farmer’s boy; he was his son.