| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy: in the importance--the deadly earnestness--of her journey, to stop and
ponder over trifles of that sort.
The coffee-room--the scene lately of the dastardly outrage on
two English gentlemen--was quite deserted. Mr. Jellyband hastily
relit the lamp, rekindled a cheerful bit of fire in the great hearth,
and then wheeled a comfortable chair by it, into which Marguerite
gratefully sank.
"Will your ladyship stay the night?" asked pretty Miss Sally,
who was already busy laying a snow-white cloth on the table,
preparatory to providing a simple supper for her ladyship.
"No! not the whole night," replied Marguerite. "At any rate,
The Scarlet Pimpernel |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Nana, Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille by Emile Zola: "When one is a good mother anything's excusable," said Mme Maloir
sententiously when left alone with Mme Lerat.
"Four kings," replied this lady, whom the play greatly excited.
And they both plunged into an interminable game.
The table had not been cleared. The smell of lunch and the
cigarette smoke filled the room with an ambient, steamy vapor. The
two ladies had again set to work dipping lumps of sugar in brandy
and sucking the same. For twenty minutes at least they played and
sucked simultaneously when, the electric bell having rung a third
time, Zoe bustled into the room and roughly disturbed them, just as
if they had been her own friends.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Confidence by Henry James: picturesque angle, and near the green tree-tops of the Champs Elysees,
beyond which they caught a broad gleam of the Seine and a glimpse,
blue in the distance, of the great towers of Notre Dame.
The whole vast city lay before them and beneath them, with its ordered
brilliancy and its mingled aspect of compression and expansion;
and yet the huge Parisian murmur died away before it reached
Mrs. Vivian's sky-parlor, which seemed to Bernard the brightest
and quietest little habitation he had ever known.
His hostess came rustling in at last; she seemed agitated;
she knocked over with the skirt of her dress a little gilded
chair which was reflected in the polished parquet as in a sheet
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