| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Purse by Honore de Balzac: embers, charcoal, irons, a filter, the household crockery, and
all the utensils familiar to a small household. Muslin curtains,
fairly white, carefully screened this lumber-room--a capharnaum,
as the French call such a domestic laboratory,--which was lighted
by windows looking out on a neighboring yard.
Hippolyte, with the quick eye of an artist, saw the uses, the
furniture, the general effect and condition of this first room,
thus cut in half. The more honorable half, which served both as
ante-room and dining-room, was hung with an old salmon-rose-
colored paper, with a flock border, the manufacture of Reveillon,
no doubt; the holes and spots had been carefully touched over
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from War and the Future by H. G. Wells: that he had had to carry on at least so much of the regal
tradition as to control the conversation. He was, however,
entirely un-posed. His talk reminded me somehow of Maurice
Baring's books; it had just the same quick, positive
understanding. And he had just the same detachment from the war
as the French generals. He spoke of it--as one might speak of an
inundation. And of its difficulties and perplexities.
Here on the Adriatic side there were political entanglements that
by comparison made our western after-the-war problems plain
sailing. He talked of the game of spellicans among the Balkan
nationalities. How was that difficulty to be met? In Macedonia
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Silverado Squatters by Robert Louis Stevenson: puppet, set pen to paper in the interest of somebody, so
much, and no more, is certain.
Silverado, then under my immediate sway, belonged to one whom
I will call a Mr. Ronalds. I only knew him through the
extraordinarily distorting medium of local gossip, now as a
momentous jobber; now as a dupe to point an adage; and again,
and much more probably, as an ordinary Christian gentleman
like you or me, who had opened a mine and worked it for a
while with better and worse fortune. So, through a defective
window-pane, you may see the passer-by shoot up into a
hunchbacked giant or dwindle into a potbellied dwarf.
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