| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Illustrious Gaudissart by Honore de Balzac: dynasty; I'll cook him; this triumph will be capital practice for
my ministerial talents.' So I went to work and praised his
'Debats.' Hein! if I didn't lead him along! Thread by thread, I
began to net my man. I launched my four-horse phrases, and the F-
sharp arguments, and all the rest of the cursed stuff. Everybody
listened; and I saw a man who had July as plain as day on his
mustache, just ready to nibble at a 'Movement.' Well, I don't know
how it was, but I unluckily let fall the word 'blockhead.'
Thunder! you should have seen my gray hat, my dynastic hat
(shocking bad hat, anyhow), who got the bit in his teeth and was
furiously angry. I put on my grand air--you know--and said to him:
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Bronte Sisters: and at length sank into a kind of slumber. He has been quieter
since; and now Hattersley has left him, expressing a hope that he
shall find him better when he calls to-morrow.
'Perhaps I may recover,' he replied; 'who knows? This may have
been the crisis. What do you think, Helen?' Unwilling to depress
him, I gave the most cheering answer I could, but still recommended
him to prepare for the possibility of what I inly feared was but
too certain. But he was determined to hope. Shortly after he
relapsed into a kind of doze, but now he groans again.
There is a change. Suddenly he called me to his side, with such a
strange, excited manner, that I feared he was delirious, but he was
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Death of the Lion by Henry James: lordship's valet. One would suppose it some thrilling number of
THE FAMILY BUDGET. Mrs. Wimbush, who's aware of the accident, is
much less agitated by it than she would doubtless be were she not
for the hour inevitably engrossed with Guy Walsingham."
Later in the day I informed my correspondent, for whom indeed I
kept a loose diary of the situation, that I had made the
acquaintance of this celebrity and that she was a pretty little
girl who wore her hair in what used to be called a crop. She
looked so juvenile and so innocent that if, as Mr. Morrow had
announced, she was resigned to the larger latitude, her superiority
to prejudice must have come to her early. I spent most of the day
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