乱世佳人（飘）——第 1 章（英文原版）- 3

Between the hounds and the horses and the twins there was a kinship deeper than that of their constant companionship. They were all healthy, thoughtless young animals, sleek, graceful, high-spirited, the boys as mettlesome as horses they rode, mettlesome and dangerous but, withal，sweet-tempered to those who knew how to handle them.

thoughless: 粗心
mettlesome: 精神抖擞的
sweet-tempered: 性情温和的

Although born to the ease of plantation life, waited on hand and foot since infancy, the faces of the three on the porch were neither slack nor soft. They had the vigor and alertness of country people who have spent all their lives in the open and troubled their heads very little with dull things in books. Life in the north Georgia county of Clayton was still new and, according to the stardards of Augusta, Savannah and Chareston, a little crude. The more sedate and older sections of the South looked down their noses at the up-country Georigians, but here in north Georgia, a lack of the niceties of classical education carried no shame, provided a man was smart in the things that mattered. And raising good cooton, riding well, shooting straight, dancing lightly, squiring the ladies with elegance and carrying one's liquor like a gentleman were the things that mattered.

infancy: 孩童期
slack: 松弛
vigor: 精力
sedate: 稳重
niceties: 细微
squiring: accompany or escort women

In these accomplishments the twins excelled, and they were equally outstanding in their notorious inability to learn anything contained between the covers of books. Their family had more money, more horses, more slaves than any one else in the County, but the boys had less grammar than most of theri poor Cracker neighbors.

excelled: 出色
notorious: famous and well known
inability: 无力

It was for this precise reason that Stuart and Brent were idling on the porch of Tara this April afternoon. They had just been expelled from the University of Georgia, the fourth university that had thrown them out in two years; and their older brothers, Tom and Boyd, had come home with them, because they refused to remain at an institution where the twins were not welcome. Stuart and Brent considered their latest expulsion a fine joke, and Scarlett, who had not willingly opened a book since leaving the Fayetteville Female Academy the year before, thought it just as amusing as they did.

idling: 空转