| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Silas Marner by George Eliot: dress up and magnify to the admiration of a select circle at the
Rainbow. When a young gentleman like Dunsey is reduced to so
exceptional a mode of locomotion as walking, a whip in his hand is a
desirable corrective to a too bewildering dreamy sense of
unwontedness in his position; and Dunstan, as he went along through
the gathering mist, was always rapping his whip somewhere. It was
Godfrey's whip, which he had chosen to take without leave because it
had a gold handle; of course no one could see, when Dunstan held it,
that the name _Godfrey Cass_ was cut in deep letters on that gold
handle--they could only see that it was a very handsome whip.
Dunsey was not without fear that he might meet some acquaintance in
Silas Marner |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Wife, et al by Anton Chekhov: begins to go round. . . . To conceal my condition from my
audience I continually drink water, cough, often blow my nose as
though I were hindered by a cold, make puns inappropriately, and
in the end break off earlier than I ought to. But above all I am
ashamed.
My conscience and my intelligence tell me that the very best
thing I could do now would be to deliver a farewell lecture to
the boys, to say my last word to them, to bless them, and give up
my post to a man younger and stronger than me. But, God, be my
judge, I have not manly courage enough to act according to my
conscience.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Cousin Pons by Honore de Balzac: place. My man found the fan in the drawer of an inlaid what-not, which
I should certainly have bought if I were collecting things of the
kind, but it is quite out of the question--a single piece of
Riesener's furniture is worth three or four thousand francs! People
here in Paris are just beginning to find out that the famous French
and German marquetry workers of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and
eighteenth centuries composed perfect pictures in wood. It is a
collector's business to be ahead of the fashion. Why, in five years'
time, the Frankenthal ware, which I have been collecting these twenty
years, will fetch twice the price of Sevres /pata tendre/."
"What is Frankenthal ware?" asked Cecile.
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