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Read the following passage carefully before you choose your answers
In this excerpt from a short story published in 1933, the narrator is reminiscing with some of his cousins.
We talk about cousins like these for a while, but we go on finally to people we knew more intimately, people whose characters have left us, even after all these years, something to wonder about. We speculate
on how and when Robert Allard began taking morphine, and what induced Maggie McLean to turn Jim Crenfew down for a nincompoop like Edward Brewer. Somebody has seen the notice of Maggie's death
in a New Orleans paper. We think of it, but we cannot take it in. We see her as she was when she first came to Merry Point to visit, a frail, high-spirited girl who made us all indignant with her outrageous
treatment of Jim Crefew. We talk on like that until we have called to mind almost all the people who ever came here in the old days. We hold them in our minds until they seem to live again. I look up through
the branches of the sugar tree to where a light burns dimly in one of the upstairs rooms. Girls might be dressing there for a party. At any moment, I may hear the rumbling. explosive laugh of Jim Crenfew.
At such a time, none of us three will stop talking We keep up the illusion, with a name has a name there. Seeking to make the scene more complete, we cast about on the fringes of our enormous family
connection What ever became of this cousin, or how was that person connected? It is then that Tom Rivers's name will be mentioned. Infrequently, I say. One or two summers will go by, and I may not hear his
name. And then it will be spoken, and I have always that start, half pleasure, half pride, and I realize that no matter whether I hear his name or not he is never out of my memory
There is a curious thing I have observed. If you sit day after day, summer after summer, in a chair under the same tree, you will notice how the light falls under and through the boughs to strike always in the
same pattern. You notice how it falls that way year after year, changing only with the seasons, and you think how you might go away and suffer death or torture by fire or flood, and the light always at the same
hour in that season will be creeping around the bolel of that beech tree
It is like that with me when I think about Tom Rivers. I cannot understand how it was that he disappeared, leaving nowhere any trace of his going. I sit here in the late afternoon, and the long lances of shadow
start from the garden fence and move slowly on, past the big sugar tree and past the beech tree, to halt for a moment at the little sugar tree that stands not fifty yards from my chair
When they have moved past. I see that the hunched, dark shadow that seemed to me a rooster standing with his back to the western light is really only a clump of dog fennel. I see it happen like that almost
every afternoon, and with it comes always a fresh wonder at the restless, hurried movements of human beings. The light can fall like that evening after evening on some tree or flower, and yet a man that one
has known intimately can vanish as we always say of Tom Rivers, off the face of the earth
Uned by permission
Toward the end of the first paragraph, the references to what goes on "in one of the upstairs rooms and to Jim Crenfew's explosive laugh suggest which of the following about the narrator?
А
He wishes to alter the past
B
The past is very vivid to him
c
He cannot tell reality from unality
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