| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Simple Soul by Gustave Flaubert: parlour (always closed), filled with furniture covered with sheets.
Then a hall, which led to the study, where books and papers were piled
on the shelves of a book-case that enclosed three quarters of the big
black desk. Two panels were entirely hidden under pen-and-ink
sketches, Gouache landscapes and Audran engravings, relics of better
times and vanished luxury. On the second floor, a garret-window
lighted Felicite's room, which looked out upon the meadows.
She arose at daybreak, in order to attend mass, and she worked without
interruption until night; then, when dinner was over, the dishes
cleared away and the door securely locked, she would bury the log
under the ashes and fall asleep in front of the hearth with a rosary
A Simple Soul |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett: each other which Mrs. Fosdick could not have understood, being the
latest comer to the house.
XIII
Poor Joanna
ONE EVENING my ears caught a mysterious allusion which Mrs. Todd
made to Shell-heap Island. It was a chilly night of cold
northeasterly rain, and I made a fire for the first time in the
Franklin stove in my room, and begged my two housemates to come in
and keep me company. The weather had convinced Mrs. Todd that it
was time to make a supply of cough-drops, and she had been bringing
forth herbs from dark and dry hiding-places, until now the pungent
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Red Inn by Honore de Balzac: noise, and went to bed at once. His moral and physical lassitude was
certain to bring him sleep. In a very short time after laying his head
on his mattress, he fell into that first fantastic somnolence which
precedes the deepest sleep. The senses then grew numb, and life is
abolished by degrees; thoughts are incomplete, and the last quivering
of our consciousness seems like a sort of reverie. "How heavy the air
is!" he thought; "I seem to be breathing a moist vapor." He explained
this vaguely to himself by the difference which must exist between the
atmosphere of the close room and the purer air by the river. But
presently he heard a periodical noise, something like that made by
drops of water falling from a robinet into a fountain. Obeying a
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