| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Yates Pride by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: for many years was suffering from rheumatism, and was cared for
by her daughter in the little cottage across the road from the
Lancaster house. Her husband and grandson were the man and boy
at work in the grounds. The three sisters took care of
themselves and their house with the elegant ease and lack of
fluster of gentlewomen born and bred. Miss Amelia, bringing in
the tea-tray, was an unclassed being, neither maid nor mistress,
but outranking either. She had tied on a white apron. She bore
the silver tray with an ease which bespoke either nerve or muscle
in her lace-draped arms.
She poured the tea, holding the silver pot high and letting the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Hated Son by Honore de Balzac: brow which death seemed to graze with its pinion, across that visible
soul where the young man's slightest emotions showed, she answered:--
"Because I too love flowers."
To believe ourselves linked far back in the past by community of
tastes, is not that a declaration of love such as virgins know how to
give? Love desires to seem old; it is a coquetry of youth.
Etienne brought flowers on the morrow, ordering his people to find
rare ones, as his mother had done in earlier days for him. Who knows
the depths to which the roots of a feeling reach in the soul of a
solitary being thus returning to the traditions of mother-love in
order to bestow upon a woman the same caressing devotion with which
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Youth by Joseph Conrad: on't leave a stable falling in an earthquake. So we
went to look for him. It was chancing death, since once
out of our lashings we were as exposed as if on a raft.
But we went. The house was shattered as if a shell had
exploded inside. Most of it had gone overboard--stove,
men's quarters, and their property, all was gone; but
two posts, holding a portion of the bulkhead to which
Abraham's bunk was attached, remained as if by a mir-
acle. We groped in the ruins and came upon this, and
there he was, sitting in his bunk, surrounded by foam and
wreckage, jabbering cheerfully to himself. He was out
Youth |
