| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Country Doctor by Honore de Balzac: amazement at the ingenious device by which the man had sought to learn
the truth about this point of law.
"Very well, Taboureau, your man is a swindler; you should not make
bargains with such people."
"Ah! sir, they understand business, those people do."
"Good-bye, Taboureau."
"Your servant, gentlemen."
"Well, now," remarked Benassis, when the usurer had gone, "if that
fellow were in Paris, do you not think that he would be a millionaire
before very long?"
After dinner, the doctor and his visitor went back to the salon, and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Amy Foster by Joseph Conrad: leaping over the stiles, not as a feat of agility, but
in the ordinary course of progression--all these
peculiarities were, as one may say, so many causes
of scorn and offence to the inhabitants of the vil-
lage. They wouldn't in their dinner hour lie flat
on their backs on the grass to stare at the sky.
Neither did they go about the fields screaming dis-
mal tunes. Many times have I heard his high-
pitched voice from behind the ridge of some slop-
ing sheep-walk, a voice light and soaring, like a
lark's, but with a melancholy human note, over our
Amy Foster |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Talisman by Walter Scott: confidence, they could, by fair manhood, never obtain any
advantage.
Yet, though De Vaux entertained these sentiments concerning his
Northern neighbours, and extended them, with little mitigation,
even to such as had assumed the Cross, his respect for the King,
and a sense of the duty imposed by his vow as a Crusader,
prevented him from displaying them otherwise than by regularly
shunning all intercourse with his Scottish brethren-at-arms as
far as possible, by observing a sullen taciturnity when compelled
to meet them occasionally, and by looking scornfully upon them
when they encountered on the march and in camp. The Scottish
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