| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: earlier feeling seem a mere commotion of the blood. He was like a
child coming back to the sense of an enveloping presence: her
nearness was a breast on which he leaned.
They did not, at first, talk much together, and each beat a
devious track about the outskirts of the subject that lay between
them like a haunted wood. But every word, every action, seemed to
glance at it, to draw toward it, as though a fount of healing
sprang in its poisoned shade. If only they might cut away through
the thicket to that restoring spring!
Glennard, watching his wife with the intentness of a wanderer to
whom no natural sign is negligible, saw that she had taken
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin: very common employment. Several of the men and women
had their faces painted red, but I never saw the horizontal
bands which are so common among the Fuegians. Their
chief pride consists in having everything made of silver; I
have seen a cacique with his spurs, stirrups, handle of his
knife, and bridle made of this metal: the head-stall and reins
being of wire, were not thicker than whipcord; and to see a
fiery steed wheeling about under the command of so light
a chain, gave to the horsemanship a remarkable character of
elegance.
General Rosas intimated a wish to see me; a circumstance
The Voyage of the Beagle |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson: and that in a way which curiously unfitted them to combat Yankee
craft. Suppose they have a paper to sign, they would think it a
reflection on the other party to examine the terms with any great
minuteness; nay, suppose them to observe some doubtful clause, it
is ten to one they would refuse from delicacy to object to it. I
know I am speaking within the mark, for I have seen such a case
occur, and the Mexican, in spite of the advice of his lawyer, has
signed the imperfect paper like a lamb. To have spoken in the
matter, he said, above all to have let the other party guess that
he had seen a lawyer, would have "been like doubting his word."
The scruple sounds oddly to one of ourselves, who have been brought
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