| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Gentle Grafter by O. Henry: your stopping its mouth, sir, yourself, if you please.'
"I put on some of the polite outside habiliments of external society
and went into Rufe's room. He had gotten up and lit his lamp, and was
pouring some milk into a tin pan on the floor for a dingy-white, half-
grown, squealing pig.
"'How is this, Rufe?' says I. 'You flimflammed in your part of the
work to-night and put the game on crutches. And how do you explain the
pig? It looks like back-sliding to me.'
"'Now, don't be too hard on me, Jeff,' says he. 'You know how long
I've been used to stealing shoats. It's got to be a habit with me. And
to-night, when I see such a fine chance, I couldn't help takin' it.'
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sarrasine by Honore de Balzac: neighbor, the gentleman in black who just walked away, was the cause
of my feeling cold."
Ere long the exaggeration to which people in society are naturally
inclined, produced a large and growing crop of the most amusing ideas,
the most curious expressions, the most absurd fables concerning this
mysterious individual. Without being precisely a vampire, a ghoul, a
fictitious man, a sort of Faust or Robin des Bois, he partook of the
nature of all these anthropomorphic conceptions, according to those
persons who were addicted to the fantastic. Occasionally some German
would take for realities these ingenious jests of Parisian evil-
speaking. The stranger was simply /an old man/. Some young men, who
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: surface sound, this murmur of their welcome, this popping of their
corks - just as his gestures of response were the extravagant
shadows, emphatic in proportion as they meant little, of some game
of OMBRES CHINOISES. He projected himself all day, in thought,
straight over the bristling line of hard unconscious heads and into
the other, the real, the waiting life; the life that, as soon as he
had heard behind him the click of his great house-door, began for
him, on the jolly corner, as beguilingly as the slow opening bars
of some rich music follows the tap of the conductor's wand.
He always caught the first effect of the steel point of his stick
on the old marble of the hall pavement, large black-and-white
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