| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Lily of the Valley by Honore de Balzac: out what is the matter. A woman always has secrets from her husband;
but perhaps she will tell you what troubles her. I would sacrifice
everything to make her happy, even to half my remaining days or half
my fortune. She is necessary to my very life. If I have not that angel
at my side as I grow old I shall be the most wretched of men. I do
desire to die easy. Tell her I shall not be here long to trouble her.
Yes, Felix, my poor friend, I am going fast, I know it. I hide the
fatal truth from every one; why should I worry them beforehand? The
trouble is in the orifice of the stomach, my friend. I have at last
discovered the true cause of this disease; it is my sensibility that
is killing me. Indeed, all our feelings affect the gastric centre."
The Lily of the Valley |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tom Grogan by F. Hopkinson Smith: McGaw, and calling to Lathers as he disappeared through the door
in the fence, "Somp'n wid a mustache, somp'n wid a mustache," like
a news-boy calling an extra. Then a stone grazed Lathers's ear.
Lathers sprang through the gate, but the boy was half way through
the yard. It was this flea-like alertness that always saved Mr.
Finnegan's scalp.
Once out of Lathers's reach, Cully bounded up the road like a
careering letter X, with arms and legs in air. If there was any
one thing that delighted the boy's soul, it was, to quote from his
own picturesque vocabulary, "to set up a job on de ole woman."
Here was his chance. Before he reached the stable he had planned
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Pierrette by Honore de Balzac: of resource and invention the ablest romance-writers. When the post
gets hold of a letter, worth, to it, from three to ten sous, and does
not immediately know where to find the person to whom that letter is
addressed, it displays a financial anxiety only to be met with in very
pertinacious creditors. The post goes and comes and ferrets through
all the eighty-six departments. Difficulties only arouse the genius of
the clerks, who may really be called men-of-letters, and who set about
to search for that unknown human being with as much ardor as the
mathematicians of the Bureau give to longitudes. They literally
ransack the whole kingdom. At the first ray of hope all the post-
offices in Paris are alert. Sometimes the receiver of a missing letter
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