| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Amazing Interlude by Mary Roberts Rinehart: they can come quickly."
Henri turned to the boy and sent him off with a rapid order. Then:
"May I come in?" he said.
Sara Lee cast an uneasy glance over the room. It was extremely tidy,
and unmistakably it was a bedroom. But though her color rose she asked
him in. After all, what did it matter? To have refused would have
looked priggish, she said to herself. And as a matter of fact one of
the early lessons she learned in France was learned that morning - that
though convention had had to go, like many other things in the war, men
who were gentlemen ignored its passing.
Henri came in and stood by the center table.
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Call of the Canyon by Zane Grey: spreading gnarled arms and webs of green needles belonged to her, as also
the tiny brook, the blue bells smiling out of the ferns, the single stalk
of mescal on a rocky ledge.
Never had sun and earth, tree and rock, seemed a part of her being until
then. She would become a sun-worshiper and a lover of the earth. That
canyon had opened there to sky and light for millions of years; and
doubtless it had harbored sheep herders, Indians, cliff dwellers,
barbarians. She was a woman with white skin and a cultivated mind, but the
affinity for them existed in her. She felt it, and that an understanding of
it would be good for body and soul.
Another day she found a little grove of jack pines growing on a flat mesa-
The Call of the Canyon |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry: and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they
are wisest. They are the magi.
End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of THE GIFT OF THE MAGI.
The Gift of the Magi |
