| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart: next I feared that it had been Gertrude herself, that night alone
on the circular staircase. And then the mother of Lucien Wallace
would obtrude herself, and an almost equally good case might be
made against her. There were times, of course, when I was
disposed to throw all those suspicions aside, and fix definitely
on the unknown, whoever that might be.
I had my greatest disappointment when it came to tracing Nina
Carrington. The woman had gone without leaving a trace. Marked
as she was, it should have been easy to follow her, but she was
not to be found. A description to one of the detectives, on my
arrival at home, had started the ball rolling. But by night she
The Circular Staircase |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Gorgias by Plato: been any the better for the medical skill of either of us, then, by Heaven,
Callicles, what an absurdity to think that we or any human being should be
so silly as to set up as state-physicians and advise others like ourselves
to do the same, without having first practised in private, whether
successfully or not, and acquired experience of the art! Is not this, as
they say, to begin with the big jar when you are learning the potter's art;
which is a foolish thing?
CALLICLES: True.
SOCRATES: And now, my friend, as you are already beginning to be a public
character, and are admonishing and reproaching me for not being one,
suppose that we ask a few questions of one another. Tell me, then,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson: not much better. But painting, on the contrary, is often
highly sedative; because so much of the labour, after your
picture is once begun, is almost entirely manual, and of that
skilled sort of manual labour which offers a continual series
of successes, and so tickles a man, through his vanity, into
good humour. Alas! in letters there is nothing of this sort.
You may write as beautiful a hand as you will, you have always
something else to think of, and cannot pause to notice your
loops and flourishes; they are beside the mark, and the first
law stationer could put you to the blush. Rousseau, indeed,
made some account of penmanship, even made it a source of
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