B. Sum up the nuns, specify their best features. Speak of the underlying motive of their behaviour, their mode of life. Use the idioms given in Unit 11.

" They are wonderful, those nuns. They make me feel utterly worthless. They give up everything, their home, their country, love, children, freedom; and all the little things which I sometimes think must be harder still to give up, flowers and green fields, going for a walk on an autumn day, books and music, comfort, everything they give up, everything. And they do it so that they may devote them­selves to a life of sacrifice and poverty, obedience, killing work and prayer. To all of them this world is really and truly a place of exile. Life is a cross which they willingly bear, but in their hearts all the time is the desire – oh, its so much stronger than desire, it's a long­ing, an eager, passionate longing for the death which shall lead them to life everlasting... Supposing there is no life everlasting? Think what it means if death is really the end of all things. They've given up all for nothing. They've been cheated. They're dupes."

" I wonder if it matters that what they have aimed at is illusion. Their lives are in themselves beautiful. 1 have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead, of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art."

(From The Painted Veil by W. S. Maugham)

C. Comment on Martha's behaviour which implies that she is not as pious and righteous as she believes she is. Use the idioms given in Unit 11.

Martha grudged Herbert even the two pence... Her economies were mostly on the food, and their justification was always spiritual. Eating was gross; high living was incompatible with high thinking... Meals would come to consist more and more exclusively of porridge, potatoes, cabbages, bread... In a mild and spiritual way Herbert was very fond of his food. So was Martha – darkly and violently fond of it. That was why she had become a vegetarian, why her economies were always at the expense of the stomach – precisely because she liked food so much... There were occasions when, overcome by a sudden irresistible desire, Martha would buy and, in a single day, secretly consume a whole pound of chocolate creams...

Martha dismissed her two servants, she reduced the family food supply to a prison ration.

" After all, " she argued, " it's really not pleasant to have strangers in the house to serve you. And then, why should they serve us? They who are just as good as we are." It was a hypocritical tribute to Christian doctrine; they were really immeasurably inferior...

With every rise in prices Martha's enthusiasm for ascetic spiritu­ality became more than ever fervid and profound. So too did her con­viction that the children would be spoilt and turned into worldlings if she sent them to an expensive boarding-school... Home education without a governess, insisted Martha... On Sylvia, her mother had to admit to herself, this art of education was hard to practise... Aesthetic and intellectual beauty seemed to mean as little to Sylvia as moral beauty...

" It's really rather a blessing not to be rich, " insisted Martha. She would develop her theme; being able to afford luxuries and actually indulging in them had a certain coarsening, despiritualizing effect. It was so easy to become worldly... Poverty had happily preserved the Claxtons from the danger... Sylvia's father... was one who worked without thought of the public, only for the sake of creating truth and beauty.

(From The Claxtons by A. Huxley)