| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Breaking Point by Mary Roberts Rinehart: report like that once or twice before, and I set a watch. I
put Ben Haggerty at the kitchen wing with a gun, and I took
up a stand on the porch. Before I did that I told Judson,
but I don't think he took it in. He'd been lit up like a
house afire all evening. I asked for his gun, but he said
he didn't know where it was, and I went back to my house and
got my own. Along about eight o'clock I thought I saw some
one in the shrubbery, and I went out as quietly as I could.
But it was a woman, Hattie Thorwald, who was working at the
ranch.
"When I left the men were playing roulette. I looked in as
The Breaking Point |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Padre Ignacio by Owen Wister: plaintive call reached something in the Padre's memory. Softly, absently,
he began to sing. He took up the slow strain not quite correctly, and
dropped it, and took it up again, always in cadence with the bell.
[musical score appears here]
At length he heard himself, and, glancing at the belfry, smiled a little.
"It is a pretty tune," he said, "and it always made me sorry for poor Fra
Diavolo. Auber himself confessed to me that he had made it sad and put
the hermitage bell to go with it, because he too was grieved at having to
kill his villain, and wanted him, if possible, to die in a religious
frame of mind. And Auber touched glasses with me and said--how well I
remember it!--'Is it the good Lord, or is it merely the devil, that makes
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Duchesse de Langeais by Honore de Balzac: objectless triumphs, and the transient loves that spring up and
die in an evening's space. All eyes were turned on her when she
entered a room; she reaped her harvest of flatteries and some few
words of warmer admiration, which she encouraged by a gesture or
a glance, but never suffered to penetrate deeper than the skin.
Her tone and bearing and everything else about her imposed her
will upon others. Her life was a sort of fever of vanity and
perpetual enjoyment, which turned her head. She was daring
enough in conversation; she would listen to anything, corrupting
the surface, as it were, of her heart. Yet when she returned
home, she often blushed at the story that had made her laugh; at
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