| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart: reminded of unpleasant things and I snapped her off.
"No," I said sharply, "I'm not going to use bluing at my time of
life, or starch, either."
Liddy's nerves are gone, she says, since that awful summer, but
she has enough left, goodness knows! And when she begins to go
around with a lump in her throat, all I have to do is to threaten
to return to Sunnyside, and she is frightened into a semblance of
cheerfulness,--from which you may judge that the summer there was
anything but a success.
The newspaper accounts have been so garbled and incomplete--one
of them mentioned me but once, and then only as the tenant at the
The Circular Staircase |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Off on a Comet by Jules Verne: That point was reached on the 3rd of March, and thence the coast
was continuously followed, as it led through what had been Tunis,
across the province of Constantine, away to the oasis of Ziban;
where, taking a sharp turn, it first reached a latitude of 32 degrees,
and then returned again, thus forming a sort of irregular gulf,
enclosed by the same unvarying border of mineral concrete.
This colossal boundary then stretched away for nearly 150 leagues
over the Sahara desert, and, extending to the south of Gourbi Island,
occupied what, if Morocco had still existed, would have been
its natural frontier.
Adapting her course to these deviations of the coastline, the _Dobryna_
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: queer sorts as one travels. I must say I find it hugely amusing.
There's the manager of the line--called Vinrace--a nice big Englishman,
doesn't say much--you know the sort. As for the rest--they might
have come trailing out of an old number of _Punch_. They're like
people playing croquet in the 'sixties. How long they've all been
shut up in this ship I don't know--years and years I should say--
but one feels as though one had boarded a little separate world,
and they'd never been on shore, or done ordinary things in
their lives. It's what I've always said about literary people--
they're far the hardest of any to get on with. The worst of it is,
these people--a man and his wife and a niece--might have been,
|
