Unit 7: Vocabulary from Readings 3

While life’s middle summer had set its hardening mark on the mother’s face, her former spring-like specialities were transferred so dexterously by Time to the second figure, her child, that the absence of certain facts within her mother’s knowledge from the girl’s mind would have seemed for the moment, to one reflecting on those facts, to be a curious imperfection in Nature’s powers of continuity.

Reaching the outskirts of the village they pursued the same track as formerly, and ascended to the fair.

Over the pot stooped an old woman haggard, wrinkled, and almost in rags.

The old woman begged for the latter’s custom as soon as she saw her, and responded to Mrs Henchard-Newson’s request for a penny-worth with more alacrity than she had shown in selling six-pennyworths in her younger days....

Mrs Newson would have rewarded the old woman as far as her small means afforded had she not discreetly borne in mind that it was by that unscrupulous person’s liquor her husband had been degraded.

An innocent maiden had thus grown up in the belief that the relations between the genial sailor and her mother were the ordinary ones that they had always appeared to be.

When Newson came home at the end of one winter he saw that the delusion he had so carefully sustained had vanished for ever.

He had a rich complexion, which verged on swarthiness, a flashing black eye, and dark, bushy brows and hair.

Elizabeth, encumbered with no recollections as her mother was, regarded him with nothing more than the keen curiosity and interest which the discovery of such unexpected social standing in the long-sought relative naturally begot.

Elizabeth-Jane had never been so much interested in anything in her life as in their present position, partly from the natural elation she felt at discovering herself akin to a coach; and she gazed again at the scene.