| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Rewards and Fairies by Rudyard Kipling: But when I sent in my last bill for the stables, the gentleman he
paid it 'thout even lookin' at it, and I hadn't forgotten nothin', I do
assure you. More than that, he slips two five-pound notes into my
hand in the library, an'"Ralph, he says - he allers called me by
name - "Ralph," he says, "you've saved me a heap of expense an'
trouble this autumn." I didn't say nothin', o' course. I knowed he
didn't want any haws-haws digged acrost his park no more'n I
did, but I never said nothin'. No more he didn't say nothin' about
my blue-brick stables, which was really the best an' honestest
piece o' work I'd done in quite a while. He give me ten pounds for
savin' him a hem of a deal o' trouble at home. I reckon things are
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Firm of Nucingen by Honore de Balzac: conversation, you give expression to your real feelings, you play when
you are at the card-table, chat while you chat, eat while you eat--
'improper! improper! improper!' Stendhal, one of the cleverest and
profoundest minds of the age, hit off the 'improper' excellently well
when he said that such-and-such a British peer did not dare to cross
his legs when he sat alone before his own hearth for fear of being
improper. An English gentlewoman, were she one of the rabid 'Saints'--
that most straitest sect of Protestants that would leave their whole
family to starve if the said family did anything 'improper'--may play
the deuce's own delight in her own bedroom, and need not be
'improper,' but she would look on herself as lost if she received a
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tess of the d'Urbervilles, A Pure Woman by Thomas Hardy: The wind was so nipping that the ivy-leaves had become
wizened and gray, each tapping incessantly upon its
neighbour with a disquieting stir of her nerves. A
piece of blood-stained paper, caught up from some
meat-buyer's dust-heap, beat up and down the road
without the gate; too flimsy to rest, too heavy to fly
away; and a few straws kept it company.
The second peal had been louder, and still nobody came.
Then she walked out of the porch, opened the gate, and
passed through. And though she looked dubiously at the
house-front as if inclined to return, it was with a
Tess of the d'Urbervilles, A Pure Woman |
