| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from War and the Future by H. G. Wells: stoop, and which has been badly knocked about.... Here we have
to stop. The road to Berlin is not opened up beyond this point.
My companion on this excursion is a man I have admired for years
and never met until I came out to see the war, a fellow writer.
He is a journalist let loose. Two-thirds of the junior British
officers I met on this journey were really not "army men" at all.
One finds that the apparent subaltern is really a musician, or a
musical critic, or an Egyptologist, or a solicitor, or a cloth
manufacturer, or a writer. At the outbreak of the war my guide
dyed his hair to conceal its tell-tale silver, and having been
laughed to scorn by the ordinary recruiting people, enlisted in
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart: and the prospect of the immediate return of the family, things
had become more and more impossible. I gathered that Thomas was
as relieved as I at the turn events had taken. No, she did not
know of either of the deaths in the family.
Taken all around, I had only substituted one mystery for another.
If I knew now why Rosie had taken the basket of dishes, I did not
know who had spoken to her and followed her along the drive. If
I knew that Louise was in the lodge, I did not know why she was
there. If I knew that Arnold Armstrong had spent some time
in the lodge the night before he was murdered, I was no nearer
the solution of the crime. Who was the midnight intruder who had
The Circular Staircase |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Glasses by Henry James: herself. She held her little court in the crowd, upon the grass,
playing her light over Jews and Gentiles, completely at ease in all
promiscuities. It was an effect of these things that from the very
first, with every one listening, I could mention that my main
business with her would be just to have a go at her head and to
arrange in that view for an early sitting. It would have been as
impossible, I think, to be impertinent to her as it would have been
to throw a stone at a plate-glass window; so any talk that went
forward on the basis of her loveliness was the most natural thing
in the world and immediately became the most general and sociable.
It was when I saw all this that I judged how, though it was the
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