Silence is unnatural to man. He begins life______a cry and ends it in stillness. In the interval he does all he can to make a noise in the world, and there are few things of which he stands in more fear than of the absence of noise. Even his conversation is in great measure a desperate attempt to prevent a dreadful silence. If he is introduced to a fellow mortal and a number of pauses occur in the conversation, he regards himself as a failure, a______person, and is full of envy of the emptiest-headed chatterbox. He knows that ninety-nine percent of human conversation means______the buzzing of a fly, but he longs to join in the buzz and to prove that he is man and not a wax-work figure.
(4)

A. for
B. in
C. as
D. with