| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley: wild eyes of passionate unreasoning tropic love.
He swore, trembling, and deadly pale.
"Give me your dagger."
"No, not mine. It may be found. I shall be suspected. What if my
sheath were seen to be empty?"
"Your knife will do. His throat is soft enough."
And she glided stealthily as a cat toward the hammock, while her
cowardly companion stood shivering at the other end of the cabin,
and turned his back to her, that he might not see the deed.
He stood waiting, one minute--two--five? Was it an hour, rather?
A cold sweat bathed his limbs; the blood beat so fiercely within
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Muse of the Department by Honore de Balzac: love--and Dinah wanted to love as much as to be loved--have an
instinctive aversion for men who are devoted to an absorbing
occupation; in spite of superiority, they are all women in the matter
of encroachment. Lousteau, a poet and journalist, and a libertine with
a veneer of misanthropy, had that tinsel of the intellect, and led the
half-idle life that attracts women. The blunt good sense and keen
insight of the really great man weighed upon Dinah, who would not
confess her own smallness even to herself. She said in her mind--"The
doctor is perhaps the better man, but I do not like him."
Then, again, she reflected on his professional duties, wondering
whether a woman could ever be anything but a /subject/ to a medical
The Muse of the Department |
