| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Eugenie Grandet by Honore de Balzac: would trust to me for the future, I should like it better. In that
case I will pay you monthly the good round sum of a hundred francs.
See, now, you could pay for as many masses as you want for anybody--
Hein! a hundred francs a month--in /livres/?"
"I will do all you wish, father."
"Mademoiselle," said the notary, "it is my duty to point out to you
that you are despoiling yourself without guarantee--"
"Good heavens! what is all that to me?"
"Hold your tongue, Cruchot! It's settled, all settled," cried Grandet,
taking his daughter's hand and striking it with his own. "Eugenie, you
won't go back on your word?--you are an honest girl, hein?"
Eugenie Grandet |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, etc. by Oscar Wilde: his sin.
His abandonment of Shakespeare's theatre was a different matter,
and I investigated it at great length. Finally I came to the
conclusion that Cyril Graham had been wrong in regarding the rival
dramatist of the 80th Sonnet as Chapman. It was obviously Marlowe
who was alluded to. At the time the Sonnets were written, such an
expression as 'the proud full sail of his great verse' could not
have been used of Chapman's work, however applicable it might have
been to the style of his later Jacobean plays. No: Marlowe was
clearly the rival dramatist of whom Shakespeare spoke in such
laudatory terms; and that
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Fisherman's Luck by Henry van Dyke: into the stream one hardly knows whether to expect a depth of six
inches or six feet.
Tiny English flies and leaders of gossamer are the tackle for such
water in midsummer. With this delicate outfit, and with a light
hand and a long line, one may easily outfish the native angler, and
fill a twelve-pound basket every fair day. I remember an old
Norwegian, an inveterate fisherman, whose footmarks we saw ahead of
us on the stream all through an afternoon. Footmarks I call them;
and so they were, literally, for there were only the prints of a
single foot to be seen on the banks of sand, and between them, a
series of small, round, deep holes.
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