| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories by Alice Dunbar: To its banks at the end of Moss Street, one day there came a man
and a maiden. They were both tall and lithe and slender, with
the agility of youth and fire. He was the final concentration of
the essence of Spanish passion filtered into an American frame;
she, a repressed Southern exotic, trying to fit itself into the
niches of a modern civilisation. Truly, a fitting couple to seek
the bayou banks.
They climbed the levee that stretched a feeble check to waters
that seldom rise, and on the other side of the embankment, at the
brink of the river, she sat on a log, and impatiently pulled off
the little cap she wore. The skies were gray, heavy, overcast,
The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens: had, I am told, your lovely daughter's aid, and your open-hearted
husband's.'
'--Much more than mine, sir,' said Mrs Varden; 'a great deal more.
I have often had my doubts. It's a--'
'A bad example,' suggested Mr Chester. 'It is. No doubt it is.
Your daughter is at that age when to set before her an
encouragement for young persons to rebel against their parents on
this most important point, is particularly injudicious. You are
quite right. I ought to have thought of that myself, but it
escaped me, I confess--so far superior are your sex to ours, dear
madam, in point of penetration and sagacity.'
Barnaby Rudge |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad: the great Presence he called "The Chief," and also for the
Assistant Commissioner, whose face appeared to him more ominously
wooden than ever before, and quite wonderfully long. "What a
queer, foreign-looking chap he is," he thought to himself, smiling
from a distance with friendly buoyancy. And directly they came
together he began to talk with the kind intention of burying the
awkwardness of failure under a heap of words. It looked as if the
great assault threatened for that night were going to fizzle out.
An inferior henchman of "that brute Cheeseman" was up boring
mercilessly a very thin House with some shamelessly cooked
statistics. He, Toodles, hoped he would bore them into a count out
The Secret Agent |
