| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Chance by Joseph Conrad: "You know," continued Marlow out of the shadow of the bookcase and
nearly invisible in the depths of the arm-chair, "the only time I
saw him he had given me the impression of absolute rigidity, as
though he had swallowed a poker. But it seems that he could
collapse. I can hardly picture this to myself. I understand that
he did collapse to a certain extent in his corner of the cab. The
unexpected had crumpled him up. She regarded him perplexed,
pitying, a little disillusioned, and nodded at him gravely: Yes.
Married. What she did not like was to see him smile in a manner far
from encouraging to the devotion of a daughter. There was something
unintentionally savage in it. Old de Barral could not quite command
Chance |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: tiresome people, answer questions about the dates of the building,
the styles of the furniture, the authorship of the pictures, the
favourite haunts of the ghost? It wasn't that she looked as if you
could have given her shillings--it was impossible to look less so.
Yet when she finally drifted toward him, distinctly handsome,
though ever so much older--older than when he had seen her before--
it might have been as an effect of her guessing that he had, within
the couple of hours, devoted more imagination to her than to all
the others put together, and had thereby penetrated to a kind of
truth that the others were too stupid for. She WAS there on harder
terms than any one; she was there as a consequence of things
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Master Key by L. Frank Baum: several days. Anyhow, I'll be back in a week, and you mustn't worry
about me a single minute."
"How are you going?" inquired his father, in the gentle, soothing tone
persons use in addressing maniacs.
"Through the air," said Rob.
His father groaned.
"Where's your balloon?" inquired sister Mabel, sarcastically.
"I don't need a balloon," returned the boy. "That's a clumsy way of
traveling, at best. I shall go by electric propulsion."
"Good gracious!" cried Mr. Joslyn, and the mother murmured: "My poor
boy! my poor boy!"
The Master Key |
