| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens: forbids him to pursue his claim upon your hand; in which he offers,
voluntarily proposes, to free you from your pledge; and talks
magnanimously (men do so, very commonly, in such cases) of being in
time more worthy of your regard--and so forth. A letter, to be
plain, in which he not only jilts you--pardon the word; I would
summon to your aid your pride and dignity--not only jilts you, I
fear, in favour of the object whose slighting treatment first
inspired his brief passion for yourself and gave it birth in
wounded vanity, but affects to make a merit and a virtue of the
act.'
She glanced proudly at him once more, as by an involuntary impulse,
Barnaby Rudge |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Buttered Side Down by Edna Ferber: won't betray confidences. Still, it is certain that if Effie had
been as attractive when a young girl as she was when an old girl,
she never would have been an old girl and head of Spiegel's corset
department at a salary of something very comfortably over one
hundred and twenty-five a month (and commissions). Effie had
improved with the years, and ripened with experience. She knew her
value. At twenty she had been pale, anaemic and bony, with a
startled-faun manner and bad teeth. Years of saleswomanship had
broadened her, mentally and physically, until she possessed a wide
and varied knowledge of that great and diversified subject known as
human nature. She knew human nature all the way from the fifty-
Buttered Side Down |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Edition of The Ambassadors by Henry James: He had already told her about that--had seen her the day after
his talk with little Bilham; and they had then threshed out
together the bearing of the revelation. She had helped him to put
into it the logic in which little Bilham had left it slightly
deficient Strether hadn't pressed him as to the object of the
preference so unexpectedly described; feeling in the presence of
it, with one of his irrepressible scruples, a delicacy from which
he had in the quest of the quite other article worked himself
sufficiently free. He had held off, as on a small principle of
pride, from permitting his young friend to mention a name; wishing
to make with this the great point that Chad's virtuous attachments
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