| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Main Street by Sinclair Lewis: bows to the waitresses as they came up for coffee. Myrtle
was enchanted by his humor. From the other end of the room,
a matron among matrons, Carol observed Myrtle, and hated
her, and caught herself at it. "To be jealous of a wooden-
faced village girl!" But she kept it up. She detested Erik;
gloated over his gaucheries--his "breaks," she called them.
When he was too expressive, too much like a Russian dancer,
in saluting Deacon Pierson, Carol had the ecstasy of pain in
seeing the deacon's sneer. When, trying to talk to three girls
at once, he dropped a cup and effeminately wailed, "Oh dear!"
she sympathized with--and ached over--the insulting secret
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Pool in the Desert by Sara Jeanette Duncan: promotion in the meantime, and there was rather more money, but he
had earned his second brevet with a bullet through one lung, and the
doctors ordered our leave to be spent in South Africa. We had
photographs, we knew she had grown tall and athletic and comely, and
the letters were always very creditable. I had the unusual and
qualified privilege of watching my daughter's development from ten
to twenty-one, at a distance of four thousand miles, by means of the
written word. I wrote myself as provocatively as possible; I sought
for every string, but the vibration that came back across the seas
to me was always other than the one I looked for, and sometimes
there was none. Nevertheless, Mrs. Farnham wrote me that Cecily
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Mosses From An Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne: Baglioni looked forth from the window, and called loudly, in a
tone of triumph mixed with horror, to the thunderstricken man of
science,"Rappaccini! Rappaccini! and is THIS the upshot of your
experiment!"
MRS. BULLFROG
It makes me melancholy to see how like fools some very sensible
people act in the matter of choosing wives. They perplex their
judgments by a most undue attention to little niceties of
personal appearance, habits, disposition, and other trifles which
concern nobody but the lady herself. An unhappy gentleman,
resolving to wed nothing short of perfection, keeps his heart and
Mosses From An Old Manse |
