| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Middlemarch by George Eliot: but Lydgate was naturally addressed on the question of money or other aid,
and the fact that he was written to, nay, the very delay in writing
at all, seemed to certify that the answer was thoroughly compliant.
She was too much excited by these thoughts to do anything but light
stitching in a warm corner of the dining-room, with the outside
of this momentous letter lying on the table before her. About twelve
she heard her husband's step in the passage, and tripping to open
the door, she said in her lightest tones, "Tertius, come in here--
here is a letter for you."
"Ah?" he said, not taking off his hat, but just turning her round
within his arm to walk towards the spot where the letter lay.
Middlemarch |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Dust by Mr. And Mrs. Haldeman-Julius: had enjoyed giving pleasure? It had been charming--the response
of the big, aloof man to the merry child of seven, but that child
was now a woman, and, in all probability, a beautiful one. Wasn't
there danger of far more complicated emotions which might prove
even uprooting in their consequences? Mrs. Wade blushed. Really,
she chided herself sternly, she wouldn't have believed she could
be such an old goose--going out of her way to borrow trouble. If
her husband was moved to be hospitable, she ought to be wholly
glad, not petty enough to resent it. She would put such thoughts
out of her mind, indeed she would, and welcome Rose as she would
have wanted Norah to have welcomed Bill, had the circumstances
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: in the sunny space among the native women, was exposed to presentiments
of disaster. The cries of the senseless beasts rang in her ears
high and low in the air, as they ran from tree-trunk to tree-top.
How small the little figures looked wandering through the trees!
She became acutely conscious of the little limbs, the thin veins,
the delicate flesh of men and women, which breaks so easily and lets
the life escape compared with these great trees and deep waters.
A falling branch, a foot that slips, and the earth has crushed them
or the water drowned them. Thus thinking, she kept her eyes anxiously
fixed upon the lovers, as if by doing so she could protect them
from their fate. Turning, she found the Flushings by her side.
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