| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Glasses by Henry James: convenience on the spot and not having had to come up to town. My
thoughts however were so painfully engaged there that I should in
any case have had little attention for them: the event occurred
that was to bring my series of visits to a close. When this high
tide had ebbed I returned to America and to my interrupted work,
which had opened out on such a scale that, with a deep plunge into
a great chance, I was three good years in rising again to the
surface. There are nymphs and naiads moreover in the American
depths: they may have had something to do with the duration of my
dive. I mention them to account for a grave misdemeanor--the fact
that after the first year I rudely neglected Mrs. Meldrum. She had
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton: dear--Susan--now that by the merciful intervention of Providence
you have become Countess of Altringham in the peerage of Great
Britain, and Baroness Dunsterville and d'Amblay in the peerages
of Ireland and Scotland, I'll thank you to remember that you are
a member of one of the most ancient houses in the United
Kingdom--and not to get found out.'"
Susy laughed. "We know what those warnings mean! I pity my
namesake."
He swung about and gave her a quick look out of his small ugly
twinkling eyes. "Is there any other woman in the world named
Susan?"
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Scenes from a Courtesan's Life by Honore de Balzac: though endowed with powers of mind that ate into his soul, consumed
especially by a fever of vitality, now lived again in the elegant
person of Lucien de Rubempre, whose soul had become his own. He was
represented in social life by the poet, to whom he lent his tenacity
and iron will. To him Lucien was more than a son, more than a woman
beloved, more than a family, more than his life; he was his revenge;
and as souls cling more closely to a feeling than to existence, he had
bound the young man to him by insoluble ties.
After rescuing Lucien's life at the moment when the poet in
desperation was on the verge of suicide, he had proposed to him one of
those infernal bargains which are heard of only in romances, but of
|
