| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield: "Now, if we were to cut him open here, Mrs. Parker," said the doctor,
"you'd find his lungs chock-a-block with white powder. Breathe, my good
fellow!" And Mrs. Parker never knew for certain whether she saw or whether
she fancied she saw a great fan of white dust come out of her poor dead
husband's lips...
But the struggle she'd had to bring up those six little children and keep
herself to herself. Terrible it had been! Then, just when they were old
enough to go to school her husband's sister came to stop with them to help
things along, and she hadn't been there more than two months when she fell
down a flight of steps and hurt her spine. And for five years Ma Parker
had another baby--and such a one for crying!--to look after. Then young
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Eve and David by Honore de Balzac: possible notice. I am not precisely wearing Adam's costume, but I
cannot show myself here. To my astonishment, the honors paid by
the departments to a Parisian celebrity awaited me. I am the hero
of a banquet, for all the world as if I were a Deputy of the Left.
Now, after that, do you understand that I must have a black coat?
Promise to pay; have it put down to your account, try the
advertisement dodge, rehearse an unpublished scene between Don
Juan and M. Dimanche, for I must have a gala suit at all costs. I
have nothing, nothing but rags: start with that; it is August, the
weather is magnificent, ergo see that I receive by the end of the
week a charming morning suit, dark bronze-green jacket, and three
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Heart of the West by O. Henry: poetry."
"Then Idaho has struck a new book," says I, "for the one he had was by
a man who writes under the /nom de plume/ of K. M."
"He'd better have stuck to it," says Mrs. Sampson, "whatever it was.
And to-day he caps the vortex. I get a bunch of flowers from him, and
on 'em is pinned a note. Now, Mr. Pratt, you know a lady when you see
her; and you know how I stand in Rosa society. Do you think for a
moment that I'd skip out to the woods with a man along with a jug of
wine and a loaf of bread, and go singing and cavorting up and down
under the trees with him? I take a little claret with my meals, but
I'm not in the habit of packing a jug of it into the brush and raising
Heart of the West |
