| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Message by Honore de Balzac: he wore on a ribbon about his neck. I found it half buried in the
flesh, but the dying boy did not utter a sound as I extricated it
as gently as possible from the wound which it had made. He had
scarcely given me the necessary directions--I was to go to his
home at La Charite-sur-Loire for his mistress' love-letters,
which he conjured me to return to her--when he grew speechless in
the middle of a sentence; but from his last gesture, I understood
that the fatal key would be my passport in his mother's house. It
troubled him that he was powerless to utter a single word to
thank me, for of my wish to serve him he had no doubt. He looked
wistfully at me for a moment, then his eyelids drooped in token
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Wheels of Chance by H. G. Wells: "I'm thinking," he said, full of a rapture of protective
responsibility, " what we had best be doing. You are tired, you
know. And we can't wander all night--after the day we've had."
"That was Chichester we were near?" she asked.
"If," he meditated, with a tremble in his voice, "you would make
ME your brother, MISS BEAUMONT."
"Yes?"
"We could stop there together--"
She took a minute to answer. "I am going to light these lamps,"
said Hoopdriver. He bent down to his own, and struck a match on
his shoe. She looked at his face in its light, grave and intent.
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Vision Splendid by William MacLeod Raine: to believe this of James Farnum that she had taken him with her to
call on Marchant. It was in a sense a test, and he was answering
it by showing himself complacently callous and hidebound.
Surely he had not always been like this, a smug and well-clad
Pharisee, afraid to look at the truth. In those early days, when
they had been friends, with the possibility of being a good deal
more, there had been an impetuous touch of ardor she could no
longer find. Her cool glance ran down his figure. The man was
taking on flesh, the plump well-fed look of one who has escaped
moral conduct by giving up the fight. Fat cushioned the square jaw
and detracted from its strength. For the first time she observed a
|
