Word: websterisms
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While the students' record remains unstained, the Faculty has one much-publicized ledger, the infamous Webster-Park-man murder case of a century...
Sunday morning John White Webster, Professor of Chemistry and Mineralology at Harvard, appeared at the Parkman identified himself as the visitor who had stopped by Friday morning to remind Parkman of his appointment. The engagement had been kept; Webster said he had paid the good doctor $483.64 for a mortgage Parkman had on his mineral collection. "I told Dr. Parkman," he said, "that he hadn't discharged the mortgage; to which he replied, 'I will see to that. I will see to that.' He then went very rapidly from the room...
...mortgage had been a cause of long bitterness between the two men. Webster had luxurious tastes and lived beyond his means, and he had borrowed heavily from the independently wealthy Parkman. Parkman became furious with his debtor when he found that both he and another creditor had been given the same bill of sale as a security. He pursued Webster relentlessly and finally made an appointment to see the latter at his laboratory to collect the debt...
...Webster found evil more dramatically attractive than good, and his sympathetic characters are hard to play. But Beatrice Paipert (Vittoria's mother) and Bruce Heck (Francisco de Medici) speed those scenes when neither Weston nor Haskell are on stage, expressing their lines and feelings with such specificity that one doesn't long for the protagonists' re-entrance. Tom Griffin draws Marcello's decency well, another bright contrast to the diabolical setting...
When Vittoria and Flamineo are on stage, you hope that Webster will forget how to write an exit line. Particularly in their syncopated death scene, murder is shown to be a business which impoverishes all its entrepreneurs...