| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad: till I am dead, is there? Everything I leave here is altogether
your own now, my dear."
Winnie, with her hat on, silent behind her mother's back, went on
arranging the collar of the old woman's cloak. She got her hand-
bag, an umbrella, with an impassive face. The time had come for
the expenditure of the sum of three-and-sixpence on what might well
be supposed the last cab drive of Mrs Verloc's mother's life. They
went out at the shop door.
The conveyance awaiting them would have illustrated the proverb
that "truth can be more cruel than caricature," if such a proverb
existed. Crawling behind an infirm horse, a metropolitan hackney
The Secret Agent |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Dream Life and Real Life by Olive Schreiner: partly there was something mean in their envy of one another. If she had
raised her little finger, I suppose, she might have married any one out of
twenty of them.
Then I came. I do not think I was prettier; I do not think I was so pretty
as she was. I was certainly not as handsome. But I was vital, and I was
new, and she was old--they all forsook her and followed me. They
worshipped me. It was to my door that the flowers came; it was I had
twenty horses offered me when I could only ride one; it was for me they
waited at street corners; it was what I said and did that they talked of.
Partly I liked it. I had lived alone all my life; no one ever had told me
I was beautiful and a woman. I believed them. I did not know it was
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: Or, possibly, you arise very early in the morning; totter down stairs
in a state of somnambulism; take the simulacrum of a meal by the
glimmer of one lamp in the deserted coffee-room; and find yourself by
seven o'clock outside in a belated moonlight and a freezing chill.
The mail sleigh takes you up and carries you on, and you reach the
top of the ascent in the first hour of the day. To trace the fires
of the sunrise as they pass from peak to peak, to see the unlit tree-
tops stand out soberly against the lighted sky, to be for twenty
minutes in a wonderland of clear, fading shadows, disappearing
vapours, solemn blooms of dawn, hills half glorified already with the
day and still half confounded with the greyness of the western heaven
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