| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: screaming fits?' 'She puts the child on the hen-roost and repeats
some charm....' "
"Well, you're saying it yourself! What's wanted to prevent her
taking her child to the hen-roost to cure it of screaming fits is
just . . ." Sviazhsky said, smiling good-humoredly.
"Oh, no!" said Levin with annoyance; "that method of doctoring I
merely meant as a simile for doctoring the people with schools.
The people are poor and ignorant--that we see as surely as the
peasant woman sees the baby is ill because it screams. But in
what way this trouble of poverty and ignorance is to be cured by
schools is as incomprehensible as how the hen-roost affects the
Anna Karenina |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart: but after rummaging around I found a pair of garden scissors and
a hatchet, and thus armed, I set to work. The plaster came out
easily: the lathing was more obstinate. It gave under the blows,
only to spring back into place again, and the necessity for
caution made it doubly hard.
I had a blister on my palm when at last the hatchet went through
and fell with what sounded like the report of a gun to my
overstrained nerves. I sat on a trunk, waiting to hear Liddy fly
up the stairs, with the household behind her, like the tail of a
comet. But nothing happened, and with a growing feeling of
uncanniness I set to work enlarging the opening.
The Circular Staircase |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lady Susan by Jane Austen: Your affectionate mother,
C. DE COURCY.
XIV
MR. DE COURCY TO SIR REGINALD
Churchhill.
My dear Sir,--I have this moment received your letter, which has given
me more astonishment than I ever felt before. I am to thank my sister, I
suppose, for having represented me in such a light as to injure me in your
opinion, and give you all this alarm. I know not why she should choose to
make herself and her family uneasy by apprehending an event which no one
but herself, I can affirm, would ever have thought possible. To impute such
Lady Susan |
