| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart: probable, and I hoped it had been so. I could not have borne,
just then, to think that it was my poor Gertrude we had been
hounding through the darkness, and yet--I had met Gertrude not
far from that very window.
I went up-stairs at last, tired and depressed. Mrs. Watson and
Liddy were making tea in the kitchen. In certain walks of life
the tea-pot is the refuge in times of stress, trouble or
sickness: they give tea to the dying and they put it in the
baby's nursing bottle. Mrs. Watson was fixing a tray to be sent
in to me, and when I asked her about Rosie she confirmed her
absence.
The Circular Staircase |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Daisy Miller by Henry James: He was some seven-and-twenty years of age; when his friends spoke
of him, they usually said that he was at Geneva "studying."
When his enemies spoke of him, they said--but, after all, he had
no enemies; he was an extremely amiable fellow, and universally liked.
What I should say is, simply, that when certain persons spoke
of him they affirmed that the reason of his spending so much
time at Geneva was that he was extremely devoted to a lady
who lived there--a foreign lady--a person older than himself.
Very few Americans--indeed, I think none--had ever seen this lady,
about whom there were some singular stories. But Winterbourne
had an old attachment for the little metropolis of Calvinism;
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Market-Place by Harold Frederic: and affable as ever, but the sense of comradeship
had somehow vanished. Insensibly, the two parties
had ceased to have impulses and tastes in common.
There were no more trips together--no more fortuitous
luncheons or formal dinners as a group.
The young people looked up at the front of the big hotel
on this morning of departure, after they had clambered
over the drifts into the snow-bedecked train, and opened
the window of their compartment. They made sure that
they could identify the windows of Miss Madden's suite,
and that the curtains were drawn aside--but there was no
The Market-Place |
