| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Deserted Woman by Honore de Balzac: willingly have sold her property and gone back to Geneva, but she
could not bring herself to do it; it would mean that she distrusted M.
de Nueil. Moreover, he had taken a great fancy to this very Valleroy
estate, where he was making plantations and improvements. She would
not deprive him of a piece of pleasurable routine-work, such as women
always wish for their husbands, and even for their lovers.
A Mlle. de la Rodiere, twenty-two years of age, an heiress with a
rent-roll of forty thousand livres, had come to live in the
neighborhood. Gaston always met her at Manerville whenever he was
obliged to go thither. These various personages being to each other as
the terms of a proportion sum, the following letter will throw light
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Madame Firmiani by Honore de Balzac: Parisian malice and its charming calumnies, whispered behind a fan or
in a safe aside. It was necessary to quote the remarks given at the
beginning of this history to bring out the true Firmiani in
contradistinction to the Firmiani of society. If some women forgave
her happiness, others did not forgive her propriety. Now nothing is so
dangerous in Paris as unfounded suspicions,--for the reason that it is
impossible to destroy them.
This sketch of a woman who was admirably natural gives only a faint
idea of her. It would need the pencil of an Ingres to render the pride
of that brow, with its wealth of hair, the dignity of that glance, and
the thoughts betrayed by the changing colors of her cheeks. In her
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln by Helen Nicolay: not fit smoothly on his gaunt and bony frame. He was no tailor's
figure of a man; but from the first he clothed himself as well as
his means allowed, and in the fashion of the time and place. In
reading the grotesque stories of his boyhood, of the tall
stripling whose trousers left exposed a length of shin, it must
be remembered not only how poor he was, but that he lived on the
frontier, where other boys, less poor, were scarcely better clad.
In Vandalia, the blue jeans he wore was the dress of his
companions as well, and later, from Springfield days on, clear
through his presidency, his costume was the usual suit of black
broadcloth, carefully made, and scrupulously neat. He cared
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