| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton: world would have seen in Violet Melrose a baleful enchantress,
in Nat Fulmer her helpless victim. Susy knew better. Violet,
poor Violet, was not even that. The insignificant Ellie
Vanderlyn, with her brief trivial passions, her artless mixture
of amorous and social interests, was a woman with a purpose, a
creature who fulfilled herself; but Violet was only a drifting
interrogation.
And what of Fulmer? Mustering with new eyes his short sturdily-
built figure, his nondescript bearded face, and the eyes that
dreamed and wandered, and then suddenly sank into you like
claws, Susy seemed to have found the key to all his years of
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Pierre Grassou by Honore de Balzac: heard and recognized the step of a man who had upon his life the
influence such men have on the lives of nearly all artists,--the step
of Elie Magus, a picture-dealer, a usurer in canvas. The next moment
Elie Magus entered and found the painter in the act of beginning his
work in the tidy studio.
"How are you, old rascal?" said the painter.
Fougeres had the cross of the Legion of honor, and Elie Magus bought
his pictures at two and three hundred francs apiece, so he gave
himself the airs of a fine artist.
"Business is very bad," replied Elie. "You artists have such
pretensions! You talk of two hundred francs when you haven't put six
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling: spun round Pinecoffin.
Pinecoffin made a colored Pig-population map, and collected
observations on the comparative longevity of the Pig (a) in the sub-
montane tracts of the Himalayas, and (b) in the Rechna Doab.
Nafferton filed that, and asked what sort of people looked after
Pig. This started an ethnological excursus on swineherds, and drew
from Pinecoffin long tables showing the proportion per thousand of
the caste in the Derajat. Nafferton filed that bundle, and
explained that the figures which he wanted referred to the Cis-
Sutlej states, where he understood that Pigs were very fine and
large, and where he proposed to start a Piggery. By this time,
|
