| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Ursula by Honore de Balzac: francs. If the education of the world does cost double, at least it
teaches you to understand life, politics, men,--and sometimes women."
Blondet concluded the lesson by a paraphrase from La Fontaine: "The
world sells dearly what we think it gives."
Instead of laying to heart the sensible advice which the cleverest
pilots of the Parisian archipelago gave him, Savinien took it all as a
joke.
"Take care, my dear fellow," said de Marsay one day. "You have a great
name; if you don't obtain the fortune that name requires you'll end
your days in the uniform of a cavalry-sergeant. 'We have seen the fall
of nobler heads,'" he added, declaiming the line of Corneille as he
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad: rack, till sometimes he wished to goodness he had been
fool enough not to make it at all. And yet, if his
chance to get on rested on the discovery of "something
wrong," he could not have hoped for a greater stroke
of luck.
X
The knowledge was too disturbing, really. There was
"something wrong" with a vengeance, and the moral
certitude of it was at first simply frightful to contem-
plate. Sterne had been looking aft in a mood so idle,
that for once he was thinking no harm of anyone. His
End of the Tether |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells: but set to work on the biscuits at once, while the white-haired man
helped Montgomery to release about a score more of the rabbits.
Three big hutches, however, went up to the house with the puma.
The brandy I did not touch, for I have been an abstainer from
my birth.
VII. "THE LOCKED DOOR."
THE reader will perhaps understand that at first everything was so strange
about me, and my position was the outcome of such unexpected adventures,
that I had no discernment of the relative strangeness of this
or that thing. I followed the llama up the beach, and was overtaken
by Montgomery, who asked me not to enter the stone enclosure.
The Island of Doctor Moreau |
