| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson: very pink of the proprieties, celebrated too, and (what makes it
worse) one of your fellows who do what they call good. Black mail
I suppose; an honest man paying through the nose for some of the
capers of his youth. Black Mail House is what I call the place
with the door, in consequence. Though even that, you know, is far
from explaining all," he added, and with the words fell into a
vein of musing.
From this he was recalled by Mr. Utterson asking rather
suddenly: "And you don't know if the drawer of the cheque lives
there?"
"A likely place, isn't it?" returned Mr. Enfield. "But I
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Study of a Woman by Honore de Balzac: After that there was silence for some time.
"Does Madame intend to dress?" asked Caroline at last.
"No-- He is certainly a most impertinent man," reflected the marquise.
I request all women to imagine for themselves the reflections of which
this was the first.
Madame de Listomere ended hers by a formal decision to forbid her
porter to admit Monsieur de Rastignac, and to show him, herself,
something more than disdain when she met him in society; for his
insolence far surpassed that of other men which the marquise had ended
by overlooking. At first she thought of keeping the letter; but on
second thoughts she burned it.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: years shone out to him, in reflexion, as a light that coloured and
refined, a light beside which the glow of the East was garish cheap
and thin. The terrible truth was that he had lost--with everything
else--a distinction as well the things he saw couldn't help being
common when he had become common to look at them. He was simply
now one of them himself--he was in the dust, without a peg for the
sense of difference; and there were hours when, before the temples
of gods and the sepulchres of kings, his spirit turned for
nobleness of association to the barely discriminated slab in the
London suburb. That had become for him, and more intensely with
time and distance, his one witness of a past glory. It was all
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