| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Coxon Fund by Henry James: Pudneys to a quieter vigilance.
"It's best you should take my view of my safety," I at any rate
soon responded. When I saw she didn't know what I meant by this I
added: "You may turn out to have done, in bringing me this letter,
a thing you'll profoundly regret." My tone had a significance
which, I could see, did make her uneasy, and there was a moment,
after I had made two or three more remarks of studiously
bewildering effect, at which her eyes followed so hungrily the
little flourish of the letter with which I emphasised them that I
instinctively slipped Mr. Pudney's communication into my pocket.
She looked, in her embarrassed annoyance, capable of grabbing it to
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Marie by H. Rider Haggard: Driving this multitude of animals before us--there were over five
thousand head of them--we reached the Great Place on Saturday the 3rd of
February about midday, and forced them through its gates into the cattle
kraals. Then we off-saddled and ate our dinner under those two milk
trees near the gate of the kraal where I had bid good-bye to Dingaan.
After dinner messengers came to ask us to visit the king, and with them
the youth, Thomas Halstead, who told the commandant that all weapons
must be left behind, since it was the Zulu law that no man might appear
before the king armed. To this Retief demurred, whereon the messengers
appealed to me, whom they had recognised, asking if that were not the
custom of their country.
Marie |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan by Honore de Balzac: a great man and a wicked one, just as he can be a fool and a devoted
lover. D'Arthez is one of those privileged beings in whom shrewdness
of mind and a broad expanse of the qualities of the brain do not
exclude either the strength or the grandeur of sentiments. He is, by
rare privilege, equally a man of action and a man of thought. His
private life is noble and generous. If he carefully avoided love, it
was because he knew himself, and felt a premonition of the empire such
a passion would exercise upon him.
For several years the crushing toil by which he prepared the solid
ground of his subsequent works, and the chill of poverty, were
marvellous preservatives. But when ease with his inherited fortune
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