| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Tess of the d'Urbervilles, A Pure Woman by Thomas Hardy: from his weekly booze at Rolliver's Inn. No parson
should come inside his door, he declared, prying into
his affairs, just then, when, by her shame, it had
become more necessary than ever to hide them. He locked
the door and put the key in his pocket.
The household went to bed, and, distressed beyond
measure, Tess retired also. She was continually waking
as she lay, and in the middle of the night found that
the baby was still worse. It was obviously
dying--quietly and painlessly, but none the less
surely.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles, A Pure Woman |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from La Grenadiere by Honore de Balzac: only a harsh return, a hideous ingratitude which shows how difficult
it is to lay down hard-and-fast rules in matters of feeling.
Here, not one of all the thousand heart ties that bind child and
mother had been broken. The three were alone in the world; they lived
one life, a life of close sympathy. If Mme. Willemsens was silent in
the morning, Louis and Marie would not speak, respecting everything in
her, even those thoughts which they did not share. But the older boy,
with a precocious power of thought, would not rest satisfied with his
mother's assertion that she was perfectly well. He scanned her face
with uneasy forebodings; the exact danger he did not know, but dimly
he felt it threatening in those purple rings about her eyes, in the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Vision Splendid by William MacLeod Raine: hers. He understood that she was throwing out her wiles,
consciously or unconsciously, to strike out from him a denial that
would convince her. His mounting vanity drove away his anger. He
forgot everything but her sheathed loveliness, the enticement of
this lovely creature whose smoldering eyes invited. Crossing the
room, he stood behind her divan and looked down at her with his
hands on the back of it.
"Can a man care much for two women at the same time?" he asked in
a low voice.
She laughed with slow mockery.
Her faint perfume was wafted to his brain. He knew a besieging of
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