| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde: ask her?
LADY CHILTERN. [Rising.] Mrs. Cheveley! Coming to see me?
Impossible!
MABEL CHILTERN. I assure you she is coming upstairs, as large as
life and not nearly so natural.
LADY CHILTERN. You need not wait, Mabel. Remember, Lady Basildon is
expecting you.
MABEL CHILTERN. Oh! I must shake hands with Lady Markby. She is
delightful. I love being scolded by her.
[Enter MASON.]
MASON. Lady Markby. Mrs. Cheveley.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne: the arrival of the steamer Mongolia.
"So you say, consul," asked he for the twentieth time, "that this steamer
is never behind time?"
"No, Mr. Fix," replied the consul. "She was bespoken yesterday at Port Said,
and the rest of the way is of no account to such a craft. I repeat that
the Mongolia has been in advance of the time required by the company's
regulations, and gained the prize awarded for excess of speed."
"Does she come directly from Brindisi?"
"Directly from Brindisi; she takes on the Indian mails there,
and she left there Saturday at five p.m. Have patience, Mr. Fix;
she will not be late. But really, I don't see how, from the
Around the World in 80 Days |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner: kind of dreamy beauty, and quite etherealized the low brick wall that ran
before the house, and which inclosed a bare patch of sand and two
straggling sunflowers. On the zinc roof of the great open wagon-house, on
the roofs of the outbuildings that jutted from its side, the moonlight
glinted with a quite peculiar brightness, till it seemed that every rib in
the metal was of burnished silver.
Sleep ruled everywhere, and the homestead was not less quiet than the
solitary plain.
In the farmhouse, on her great wooden bedstead, Tant Sannie, the Boer-
woman, rolled heavily in her sleep.
She had gone to bed, as she always did, in her clothes, and the night was
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