| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Ursula by Honore de Balzac: for Ursula,--first he denied it, and now he asks her in marriage.
After trying to kill Ursula with sorrow you now want her for a
daughter-in-law. My good friend, you have got some secret in your
pouch."
Minoret tried to answer; he searched for words and could find nothing
better than:--
"You're very queer, monsieur. Good-day, gentlemen"; and he turned with
a slow step into the Rue des Bourgeois.
"He has stolen the fortune of our poor Ursula," said Bongrand, "but
how can we ever find the proof?"
"God may--"
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: and feelings has been partly woven on a Scottish loom--perhaps the
Shorter Catechism, or Robert Burns's poems, or the romances of Sir
Walter Scott. At all events, he is among a kindred and
comprehending people. They do not speak English in the same way
that he does--through the nose---but they think very much more in
his mental dialect than the English do. They are independent and
wide awake, curious and full of personal interest. The wayside
mind in Inverness or Perth runs more to muscle and less to fat, has
more active vanity and less passive pride, is more inquisitive and
excitable and sympathetic--in short, to use a symbolist's
description, it is more apt to be red-headed--than in Surrey or
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed by Edna Ferber: into a neglected corner of my mind and made to languish
there, unfed by tears or sighs.
News comes in cycles. There are weeks when a city
editor tears his hair in vain as he bellows for a
first-page story. There follow days so bristling with
real, live copy that perfectly good stuff which, in the
ordinary course of events might be used to grace the
front sheet, is sandwiched away between the marine
intelligence and the Elgin butter reports.
Such a week was this. I interviewed everything from
a red-handed murderer to an incubator baby. The town
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