| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Contrast by Royall Tyler: me indelicate,--but I asked him, I believe, to sit
down, or pointed to a chair. He sat down, and, in-
stead of having recourse to observations upon the
weather, or hackneyed criticisms upon the theatre, he
entered readily into a conversation worthy a man of
sense to speak, and a lady of delicacy and sentiment
to hear. He was not strictly handsome, but he spoke
the language of sentiment, and his eyes looked tender-
ness and honour.
CHARLOTTE
Oh! [eagerly] you sentimental, grave girls, when
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Voice of the City by O. Henry: tache, squinting eyes and ready-made cheviot suit.
"What business are you in now?" asked Woods.
"You know you left Saint Jo a year before I did."
"I'm selling shares in a copper mine," said Ker-
nan. "I may establish an office here. Well, well!
and so old Barney is a New York detective. You
always had a turn that way. You were on the po-
lice in Saint Jo after I left there, weren't you?"
"Six months," said Woods. "And now there's one
more question, Johnny. I've followed your record
pretty close ever since you did that hotel job in Sara-
The Voice of the City |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy: Had she watched she would have been surprised. She would
have seen that the pedestrian on coming up made straight for
the arched doorway: that as he paused with his hand upon the
latch the lamplight fell upon the face of Henchard.
But Elizabeth-Jane clung so closely to her nook that she
discerned nothing of this. Henchard passed in, as ignorant
of her presence as she was ignorant of his identity, and
disappeared in the darkness. Elizabeth came out a second
time into the alley, and made the best of her way home.
Henchard's chiding, by begetting in her a nervous fear of
doing anything definable as unladylike, had operated thus
The Mayor of Casterbridge |
