| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: not tell what was best for them, unless they had a mind to take
their fate in the island. If they desired that, as I had liberty
to leave the island, I had some inclination to give them their
lives, if they thought they could shift on shore. They seemed very
thankful for it, and said they would much rather venture to stay
there than be carried to England to be hanged. So I left it on
that issue.
However, the captain seemed to make some difficulty of it, as if he
durst not leave them there. Upon this I seemed a little angry with
the captain, and told him that they were my prisoners, not his; and
that seeing I had offered them so much favour, I would be as good
Robinson Crusoe |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Glasses by Henry James: a world she had plenty to do to live in. Mrs. Meldrum told me more
about her, and there was nothing that, as the centre of a group of
giggling, nudging spectators, Flora wasn't ready to tell about
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
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini: upon these new ideas merely as a fencer exercises his eye and wrist
with the foils, without ever suffering himself to be deluded into
supposing the issue a real one, he found himself suddenly converted
into a revolutionary firebrand, committed to revolutionary action
of the most desperate kind. The representative and delegate of a
nobleman in the States of Brittany, he found himself simultaneously
and incongruously the representative and delegate of the whole Third
Estate of Rennes.
It is difficult to determine to what extent, in the heat of passion
and swept along by the torrent of his own oratory, he might
yesterday have succeeded in deceiving himself. But it is at least
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