| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Coxon Fund by Henry James: pretended to go to sleep; in fact I really dozed for
discouragement. When I reopened my eyes he was looking at me with
an injured air. He tossed away with some vivacity the remnant of a
cigarette and then said: "If you're not too sleepy I want to put
you a case." I answered that I'd make every effort to attend, and
welcomed the note of interest when he went on: "As I told you a
while ago, Lady Coxon, poor dear, is demented." His tone had much
behind it--was full of promise. I asked if her ladyship's
misfortune were a trait of her malady or only of her character, and
he pronounced it a product of both. The case he wanted to put to
me was a matter on which it concerned him to have the impression--
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Hidden Masterpiece by Honore de Balzac: with the old man, and taking no further notice of him; all the less
perhaps because the neophyte stood still beneath the spell which holds
a heaven-born painter as he sees for the first time an atelier filled
with the materials and instruments of his art. Daylight came from a
casement in the roof and fell, focussed as it were, upon a canvas
which rested on an easel in the middle of the room, and which bore, as
yet, only three or four chalk lines. The light thus concentrated did
not reach the dark angles of the vast atelier; but a few wandering
reflections gleamed through the russet shadows on the silvered
breastplate of a horseman's cuirass of the fourteenth century as it
hung from the wall, or sent sharp lines of light upon the carved and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Chance by Joseph Conrad: added mumbling "I don't want Mrs. Anthony frightened. Don't you
see? . . ."
"She wasn't this time," Powell said innocently: "She lighted the
flare-up for me, sir."
"This time," Captain Anthony exclaimed and turned round. "Mrs.
Anthony lighted the flare? Mrs. Anthony! . . . " Powell explained
that she was in the companion all the time.
"All the time," repeated the captain. It seemed queer to Powell
that instead of going himself to see the captain should ask him:
"Is she there now?"
Powell said that she had gone below after the ship had passed clear
Chance |
