| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Man of Business by Honore de Balzac: cylinder desk, empty as the cash-box, in the middle of the room, and a
couple of armchairs on either side of a coal fire. The carpet on the
floor was bought cheap at second-hand (like the bills and bad debts).
In short, it was the mahogany furniture of furnished apartments which
usually descends from one occupant of chambers to another during fifty
years of service. Now you know the pair of antagonists.
"During the first three months of a partnership dissolved four months
later in a bout of fisticuffs, Cerizet and Claparon bought up two
thousand francs' worth of bills bearing Maxime's signature (since
Maxime was his name), and filled a couple of letters to bursting with
judgments, appeals, orders of the court, distress-warrants,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Soul of a Bishop by H. G. Wells: is at hand when God will come into the world and rule it, and
when men will know what is required of them. This time is close
at hand. In a little while God will be made manifest throughout
the earth. Men will know him and know that he is King. To you
this truth is to be shown--that you may tell it to others."
"This is no vision?" said the bishop, "no dream that will pass
away?"
"Am I not here beside you?"
(5)
The bishop was anxious to be very clear. Things that had been
shapelessly present in his mind now took form and found words for
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Hellenica by Xenophon: ambassadors with full powers. Meanwhile Lysander had sent an Athenian
exile, named Aristoteles, in company of certain Lacedaemonians, to
Sparta to report to the board of ephors how he had answered
Theramenes, that they, and they alone, had supreme authority in
matters of peace and war.
[5] Or, "they refused to treat for peace."
[6] Sellasia, the bulwark of Sparta in the valley of the Oenus.
[7] The MSS. have "in the neighbourhood of," which words are
inappropriate at this date, though they may well have been added
by some annotator after the Cleomenic war and the battle of
Sellasia, B.C. 222, when Antigonus of Macedon destroyed the place
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