| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Amazing Interlude by Mary Roberts Rinehart: She intended at first to make no change in her frock. After all, it was
not a social call, and if she did not dress it would put things on the
right footing.
But slipping along the corridor after her bath, clad in a kimono and
slippers and extremely nervous, she encountered a young woman on her
way to dinner, and she was dressed in that combination of street skirt
and evening blouse that some Englishwomen from the outlying districts
still affect. And Sara Lee thereupon decided to dress. She called in
the elderly maid, who was already her slave, and together they went over
her clothes.
It was the maid, perhaps; then who brought into Sara Lee's life the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Buttered Side Down by Edna Ferber: plain as a path leading up to a cozy little three-room flat up
here on the North Side somewhere. See it? With me and you
married, and playing at housekeeping in a parlor and bedroom and
kitchen? And both of us going down town to work in the morning
just the same as we do now. Only not the same, either."
"Wake up, little boy," said Gertie, prying her fingers away
from those other detaining ones. "I'd fit into a three-room flat
like a whale in a kitchen sink. I'm going back to Beloit,
Wisconsin. I've learned my lesson all right. There's a fellow
there waiting for me. I used to think he was too slow. But say,
he's got the nicest little painting and paper-hanging business you
Buttered Side Down |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Commission in Lunacy by Honore de Balzac: work all day and tired at night, were little able to sing his praises;
theirs was the gracelessness of children, who can never pay because
they owe too much. There is such compulsory ingratitude; but what
heart that has sown good to reap gratitude can think itself great?
By the end of the second year of his apostolic work, Popinot had
turned the storeroom at the bottom of his house into a parlor, lighted
by the three iron-barred windows. The walls and ceiling of this
spacious room were whitewashed, and the furniture consisted of wooden
benches like those seen in schools, a clumsy cupboard, a walnut-wood
writing-table, and an armchair. In the cupboard were his registers of
donations, his tickets for orders for bread, and his diary. He kept
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