Tekst 3: Chocolate Hearts | StudioEindexamen

Het volgende fragment is het begin van het verhaal Chocolate Hearts from the New World uit de verhalenbundel The Apple: Crimson Petal Stories van Michel Faber, 2006

1 In the professional judgement of Dr James Curlew, his unfortunate daughter had, at the very most, five years left before it was all over. Not her life, you understand; her prospects for marriage. The same physical features that made him such a distinguished-looking man ─ tall, rangy build, aquiline nose, long face, strong jaw ─ were a calamitous inheritance for a girl. If she acted quickly, now while she was in her teens, there was still hope.
2 'Oh, but I don't wish to marry, Father,' she told him. 'The world has enough married folk in it. What it hasn't got enough is missionaries.'
3 'In that case,' he joked, 'it's damn naughty of the savages in Africa to keep eating them, isn't it?'
4 'You mustn't call them savages, Father,' Emmeline chided him solemnly. 'Such disparagements are precisely why slavery is still with us.'
5 Dr Curlew clenched his jaw ─ the same jaw he'd passed on to his blameless daughter ─ and did his best not to argue. Rancour between him and Emmeline would have grieved his wife, had she lived to see it.
6 'I don't know why you say "still with us",' he couldn't help remarking. 'We don't have slavery in England.'
7 'We must regard the whole world as our home, Father,' said Emmeline, wiping her fingers on the breakfast napkin. Pale sunlight was shining through the parlour window onto her face and upper body, a cool glow aided by the white tablecloth and the snowy landscape outside. The jingling of horses' harnesses as the nearby shops received their deliveries mingled with the tinkling of Emmeline's spoon in her teacup. 'This is the 1850s,' she reminded her father, as if the modern age had arrived while he'd been occupied elsewhere. 'Every place on Earth is connected by the web of our Empire. I have correspondents as far-flung as Kabool and New York.'

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