| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Street of Seven Stars by Mary Roberts Rinehart: the side a stone staircase took off and led, twisting from one
landing cave to another, to the upper floor.
Here lived the dressmaker, amid the constant whirring of
sewing-machines, the Babel of workpeople. Harmony, seeking not a
home but a hiding-place, took the room at once. She was asked for
no reference. In a sort of agony lest this haven fail her she
paid for a week in advance. The wooden bed, the cracked mirror
over the table, even the pigeons outside on the windowsill were
hers for a week.
The dressmaker was friendly, almost garrulous.
"I will have it cleaned," she explained. "I have been so busy:
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: It is easy to imagine Christophe's amazement as he entered the great
/salle des gardes/, then so vast that military necessity has since
divided it by a partition into two chambers. It occupied on the second
floor (that of the king), as did the corresponding hall on the first
floor (that of the queen-mother), one third of the whole front of the
chateau facing the courtyard; and it was lighted by two windows to
right and two to left of the tower in which the famous staircase winds
up. The young captain went to the door of the royal chamber, which
opened upon this vast hall, and told one of the two pages on duty to
inform Madame Dayelles, the queen's bedchamber woman, that the furrier
was in the hall with her surcoat.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: The eyes that peered anxiously at me were--simply Antonia's eyes.
I had seen no others like them since I looked into them last,
though I had looked at so many thousands of human faces.
As I confronted her, the changes grew less apparent to me,
her identity stronger. She was there, in the full vigour
of her personality, battered but not diminished, looking at me,
speaking to me in the husky, breathy voice I remembered so well.
`My husband's not at home, sir. Can I do anything?'
`Don't you remember me, Antonia? Have I changed so much?'
She frowned into the slanting sunlight that made her brown
hair look redder than it was. Suddenly her eyes widened,
My Antonia |
