| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Margret Howth: A Story of To-day by Rebecca Harding Davis: come every day to see her, though he never said much when he was
there: he lugged his great copy of the Venus del Pardo along with
him one day, and left it, thinking she would like to look at it;
Knowles called it trash, when he came. The Doctor came always in
the morning; he told her he would read to her one day, and did it
always afterwards, putting on his horn spectacles, and holding
her old Bible close up to his rugged, anxious face. He used to
read most from the Gospel of St. John. She liked better to hear
him than any of the others, even than Margret, whose voice was so
low and tender: something in the man's half-savage nature was
akin to the child's.
Margret Howth: A Story of To-day |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Mistress Wilding by Rafael Sabatini: in a voice that was usually so calm and level, "offering you
protestations of a callow worship, you might have cause to doubt me.
But I am a man, Ruth - a tried, and haply a sinful man, alas! - a
man who needs you, and who will have you at all costs."
"At all costs?" she echoed, and her lip took on a curl. "And you call
this egotism by the name of love! No doubt you are right," she continued
with an irony that stung him, "for love it is - love of yourself."
"And is not all love of another founded upon the love of self?" he asked
her, startling her with a question that revealed to her clear-sighted
mind a truth undreamed of. "When some day - please Heaven - I come to
find favour in your eyes, and you come to love me, what will it mean
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Duchesse de Langeais by Honore de Balzac: your party, you that might be its Sylla if you had the slightest
ambition that way. I know nothing about politics myself; I argue
from my own feelings; but still I know enough to guess that
society would be overturned if people were always calling its
foundations in question----"
"If that is how your Court and your Government think, I am sorry
for you," broke in Montriveau. "The Restoration, madam, ought
to say, like Catherine de Medici, when she heard that the battle
of Dreux was lost, `Very well; now we will go to the
meeting-house.' Now 1815 was your battle of Dreux. Like the
royal power of those days, you won in fact, while you lost in
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