| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Breaking Point by Mary Roberts Rinehart: cheerfulness. Only at the house on the hill could she drop her pose.
She waited with a sort of desperate courage for word from Harrison
Miller. What she wanted that word to be she did not know. There
were, of course, times when she had to face the possibility that
Dick had deliberately cut himself off from her. After all, there
had never been any real reason why he should care for her. She was
not clever and not beautiful. Perhaps he had been disappointed in
her, and this was the thing they were concealing. Perhaps he had
gone back to Wyoming and had there found some one more worthy of
im, some one who understood when he talked about the things he did
in his laboratory, and did not just sit and listen with loving,
The Breaking Point |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Thuvia, Maid of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: the temerity that had made him the centre of interested
observation. But at last, seeing no alternative, he spoke.
"It might be tampered with," he said, "by an enemy."
Carthoris drew a small key from his leathern pocket-pouch.
"Look at this," he said, handing it to the man. "If you
know aught of locks, you will know that the mechanism which
this unlooses is beyond the cunning of a picker of locks.
It guards the vitals of the instrument from crafty tampering.
Without it an enemy must half wreck the device to reach its heart,
leaving his handiwork apparent to the most casual observer."
The servant took the key, glanced at it shrewdly, and
Thuvia, Maid of Mars |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Facino Cane by Honore de Balzac: ruin in the ruin of the face before me. I walked to and fro in that
city, so beloved of her citizens; I went from the Rialto Bridge, along
the Grand Canal, and from the Riva degli Schiavoni to the Lido,
returning to St. Mark's, that cathedral so unlike all others in its
sublimity. I looked up at the windows of the Casa Doro, each with its
different sculptured ornaments; I saw old palaces rich in marbles, saw
all the wonders which a student beholds with the more sympathetic eyes
because visible things take their color of his fancy, and the sight of
realities cannot rob him of the glory of his dreams. Then I traced
back a course of life for this latest scion of a race of condottieri,
tracking down his misfortunes, looking for the reasons of the deep
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