| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Distinguished Provincial at Paris by Honore de Balzac: you," he added, glancing at a collection of small arms and foils
stacked in a corner, the armory of the modern warrior.
"That was still further from my intention, sir. I have come to speak
to the editor."
"Nobody is ever here before four o'clock."
"Look you here, Giroudeau, old chap," remarked a voice, "I make it
eleven columns; eleven columns at five francs apiece is fifty-five
francs, and I have only been paid forty; so you owe me another fifteen
francs, as I have been telling you."
These words proceeded from a little weasel-face, pallid and semi-
transparent as the half-boiled white of an egg; two slits of eyes
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Copy-Cat & Other Stories by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: the pail. "What is your name?" he asked, in an
undertone.
"Jane Waters," she replied, readily. Her hus-
band's name had been Waters, or the man who had
called himself her husband, and her own middle
name was Jane. The first was Sara. David remem-
bered at once. "She is taking her own middle name
and the name of the man she married," he thought.
Then he asked, plucking berries, with his eyes averted:
"Married?"
"No," said the woman, flushing deeply.
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Persuasion by Jane Austen: (perhaps those very cases which strike us the most) may be precisely such
as cannot be brought forward without betraying a confidence,
or in some respect saying what should not be said."
"Ah!" cried Captain Harville, in a tone of strong feeling,
"if I could but make you comprehend what a man suffers when he takes
a last look at his wife and children, and watches the boat
that he has sent them off in, as long as it is in sight,
and then turns away and says, `God knows whether we ever meet again!'
And then, if I could convey to you the glow of his soul when he does
see them again; when, coming back after a twelvemonth's absence,
perhaps, and obliged to put into another port, he calculates how soon
Persuasion |
