| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Modeste Mignon by Honore de Balzac: family life, observing Vilquin, irritating Vilquin,--in short, the
gadfly of all the Vilquins. Every morning, when he looked out of his
window, Vilquin felt a violent shock of annoyance as his eye lighted
on the little gem of a building, the Chalet, which had cost sixty
thousand francs and sparkled like a ruby in the sun. That comparison
is very nearly exact. The architect has constructed the cottage of
brilliant red brick pointed with white. The window-frames are painted
of a lively green, the woodwork is brown verging on yellow. The roof
overhangs by several feet. A pretty gallery, with open-worked
balustrade, surmounts the lower floor and projects at the centre of
the facade into a veranda with glass sides. The ground-floor has a
Modeste Mignon |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Case of the Golden Bullet by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner: went away on business."
"It wasn't business this time, at least not professional business.
But before that he did have to go away frequently for weeks at a
time."
"And it was then that your mistress was most interested in her
lonely walks, eh?"
"Yes." Nanette's voice was so low as to be scarcely heard.
"Well, and this time?" continued the peddler. "Why did he go
away this time?"
"He went to the capital on private business of his own."
"Are you sure of that?"
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: enemy out of mere spite, or the sense in which it is used is neutral.
Plato, Xenophon, Isocrates, Aristotle, all give a bad import to the word;
and the Sophists are regarded as a separate class in all of them. And in
later Greek literature, the distinction is quite marked between the
succession of philosophers from Thales to Aristotle, and the Sophists of
the age of Socrates, who appeared like meteors for a short time in
different parts of Greece. For the purposes of comedy, Socrates may have
been identified with the Sophists, and he seems to complain of this in the
Apology. But there is no reason to suppose that Socrates, differing by so
many outward marks, would really have been confounded in the mind of
Anytus, or Callicles, or of any intelligent Athenian, with the splendid
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