| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Recruit by Honore de Balzac: evening to watch her countenance: some out of true friendship, but
most of them to detect the secret of her seclusion.
They found the countess seated as usual, at the corner of the great
fireplace in her salon, a room almost as unpretentious as the other
salons in Carentan; for, in order not to wound the narrow view of her
guests, she denied herself the luxuries to which she was accustomed.
The floor of her reception room was not even waxed, the walls were
still hung with dingy tapestries; she used the country furniture,
burned tallow candles, and followed the customs of the town,--adopting
provincial life, and not shrinking from its pettiness or its many
disagreeable privations. Knowing, however, that her guests would
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Recruit by Honore de Balzac: but, confident in her own presentiments, her own unfailing hope, she
had the happiness of seeing him come safely through the perils of
childhood, with a constitution that was ever improving, in spite of
the warnings of the Faculty.
Thanks to her constant care, this son had grown and developed so much,
and so gracefully, that at twenty years of age, he was thought a most
elegant cavalier at Versailles. Madame de Dey possessed a happiness
which does not always crown the efforts and struggles of a mother. Her
son adored her; their souls understood each other with fraternal
sympathy. If they had not been bound by nature's ties, they would
instinctively have felt for each other that friendship of man to man,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart: It was all I could do to get Liddy out of the room. The demands
of the occasion had no influence on her: she had seen the ghost,
she persisted, and she wasn't going into the hall. But I got her
over to my room at last, more dead than alive, and made her lie
down on the bed.
The tappings, which seemed to have ceased for a while, had
commenced again, but they were fainter. Halsey came over in a
few minutes, and stood listening and trying to locate the sound.
"Give me my revolver, Aunt Ray," he said; and I got it--the one I
had found in the tulip bed--and gave it to him. He saw Liddy
there and divined at once that Louise was alone.
The Circular Staircase |
