| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart: When she came in she was holding something in her hand, and she
laid it on the dressing-table carefully.
"I found it in the linen hamper," she said. "It must be Mr.
Halsey's, but it seems queer how it got there."
It was the half of a link cuff-button of unique design, and I
looked at it carefully.
"Where was it? In the bottom of the hamper?" I asked.
"On the very top," she replied. "It's a mercy it didn't fall out
on the way."
When Liddy had gone I examined the fragment attentively. I had
never seen it before, and I was certain it was not Halsey's. It
The Circular Staircase |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Market-Place by Harold Frederic: unconsciously took their cue from this august couple,
and all exposed somewhat the effort their civility
to him involved. At another time the suspicion of this
would have stung him. He had only to glance across the
table to where his wife sat now, and it was all right.
What other people thought of him--how other people
liked or disliked him--was of no earthly importance.
Whenever he chose to exert himself, he could compel from
them the behaviour that he desired. It was their dull
inability to read character which prompted them to regard him
as merely a rich outsider who had married Edith Cressage.
The Market-Place |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: alive respectability is next, upon the map, to the Beulah of
considerate virtue. But there they all slumber and take
their rest in the middle of God's beautiful and wonderful
universe; the drowsy heads have nodded together in the same
position since first their fathers fell asleep; and not even
the sound of the last trumpet can wake them to a single
active thought.
The poet has a hard task before him to stir up such fellows
to a sense of their own and other people's principles in
life.
And it happens that literature is, in some ways, but an
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