| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from What is Man? by Mark Twain: her to give up any part of her share in that unlovely work.
In the talk last night I said I found everything going so
smoothly that if she were willing I would go back to Bermuda in
February and get blessedly out of the clash and turmoil again for
another month. She was urgent that I should do it, and said that
if I would put off the trip until March she would take Katy and
go with me. We struck hands upon that, and said it was settled.
I had a mind to write to Bermuda by tomorrow's ship and secure a
furnished house and servants. I meant to write the letter this
morning. But it will never be written, now.
For she lies yonder, and before her is another journey than that.
What is Man? |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Silverado Squatters by Robert Louis Stevenson: the very metropolis of deadly snakes, and that the rattle was
simply the commonest noise in Silverado. Immediately on our
return, we attacked the Hansons on the subject. They had
formerly assured us that our canyon was favoured, like
Ireland, with an entire immunity from poisonous reptiles;
but, with the perfect inconsequence of the natural man, they
were no sooner found out than they went off at score in the
contrary direction, and we were told that in no part of the
world did rattlesnakes attain to such a monstrous bigness as
among the warm, flower-dotted rocks of Silverado. This is a
contribution rather to the natural history of the Hansons,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad: the bearing of that utterance from that girl who, as Dona Rita
herself had told me, was the most taciturn of human beings; and yet
of all human beings the one nearest to herself. I seized her head
in my hands and turning up her face I looked straight down into her
black eyes which should have been lustrous. Like a piece of glass
breathed upon they reflected no light, revealed no depths, and
under my ardent gaze remained tarnished, misty, unconscious.
"Will Monsieur kindly let me go. Monsieur shouldn't play the
child, either." (I let her go.) "Madame could have the world at
her feet. Indeed she has it there only she doesn't care for it."
How talkative she was, this maid with unsealed lips! For some
The Arrow of Gold |
