| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Market-Place by Harold Frederic: there were attractive things about it, and objections to it
suggested themselves as well.
"I may decide," he began speaking again, still revolving
this hypothetical scheme in his thoughts--"I may want
to--well, here's what occurs to me as an off-chance.
I take an interest in your daughter, d'ye see? and it
seems a low-down sort of thing to me that she should be
so poor. Well, then--I might say to you, here's two
thousand a year, say, made over to you in your name, on the
understanding that you turn over half of it, say, to her.
She could take it from you, of course, as her father.
The Market-Place |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from New Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson: That child to hear you. He intent
Is still on his play-business bent.
He does not hear, he will not look,
Nor yet be lured out of this book.
For long ago, the truth to say,
He has grown up and gone away;
And it is but a child of air
That lingers in the garden there.
FOR RICHMOND'S GARDEN WALL
WHEN Thomas set this tablet here,
Time laughed at the vain chanticleer;
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from La Grande Breteche by Honore de Balzac: After crossing some large, lofty, dark rooms, diabolically cold and
damp, I reached the state bedroom where the Countess lay. From the
rumors that were current concerning this lady (monsieur, I should
never end if I were to repeat all the tales that were told about her),
I had imagined her a coquette. Imagine, then, that I had great
difficulty in seeing her in the great bed where she was lying. To be
sure, to light this enormous room, with old-fashioned heavy cornices,
and so thick with dust that merely to see it was enough to make you
sneeze, she had only an old Argand lamp. Ah! but you have not been to
Merret. Well, the bed is one of those old world beds, with a high
tester hung with flowered chintz. A small table stood by the bed, on
La Grande Breteche |
