| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Lock and Key Library by Julian Hawthorne, Ed.: the subject of the recent murder.
"Is it not strange," I said, "that both these crimes should have
happened while we were casually staying in both places?"
"Perhaps we are the criminals," he replied, laughing. I shivered
slightly at this audacity. He laughed as he spoke, but there was a
hard, metallic, and almost defiant tone in his voice which
exasperated me.
"Perhaps we are," I answered, quietly. He looked full at me; but I
was prepared, and my face told nothing. I added, as in
explanation, "The crime being apparently contagious, we may have
brought the infection from Nuremberg."
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Chouans by Honore de Balzac: "What the devil are those dandies up to?" he exclaimed in a sonorous
voice. "Creeping instead of marching, I call it."
At his first words the officers who accompanied him turned
spasmodically, as if startled out of sleep by a sudden noise. The
sergeants and corporals followed their example, and the whole company
paused in its march without receiving the wished for "Halt!" Though
the officers cast a first look at the detachment, which was creeping
like an elongated tortoise up the mountain of La Pelerine, these young
men, all dragged, like many others, from important studies to defend
their country, and in whom war had not yet smothered the sentiment of
art, were so much struck by the scene which lay spread before their
The Chouans |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: sanctity of a close personal friendship so to say, because she, with one or
two other men and women I have known, have embodied for me the highest
ideal of human nature, in which intellectual power and strength of will are
combined with an infinite tenderness and a wide human sympathy; a
combination which, whether in the person of the man or the woman, is
essential to the existence of the fully rounded and harmonised human
creature; and which an English woman of genius summed in one line when she
cried in her invocation of her great French sister:--
"Thou large-brained woman and large-hearted man!"
One word more I should like to add, as I may not again speak or write on
this subject. I should like to say to the men and women of the generations
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