| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Silas Marner by George Eliot: daughter. It wouldn't be right to want to force her to come to us
against her will. We can't alter her bringing up and what's come of
it."
"No," said Godfrey, with a keen decisiveness of tone, in contrast
with his usually careless and unemphatic speech--"there's debts
we can't pay like money debts, by paying extra for the years that
have slipped by. While I've been putting off and putting off, the
trees have been growing--it's too late now. Marner was in the
right in what he said about a man's turning away a blessing from his
door: it falls to somebody else. I wanted to pass for childless
once, Nancy--I shall pass for childless now against my wish."
Silas Marner |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from St. Ives by Robert Louis Stevenson: BY half-past eight o'clock on the next morning, I was ringing the
bell of the lawyer's office in Castle Street, where I found him
ensconced at a business table, in a room surrounded by several
tiers of green tin cases. He greeted me like an old friend.
'Come away, sir, come away!' said he. 'Here is the dentist ready
for you, and I think I can promise you that the operation will be
practically painless.'
'I am not so sure of that, Mr. Robbie,' I replied, as I shook hands
with him. 'But at least there shall be no time lost with me.'
I had to confess to having gone a-roving with a pair of drovers and
their cattle, to having used a false name, to having murdered or
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Prince Otto by Robert Louis Stevenson: sideways in a pennon; and thereupon, as though the change had been a
summons, Seraphina plunged once more into the labyrinth of the wood.
She left day upon the high ground. In the lower groves there still
lingered the blue early twilight and the seizing freshness of the
dew. But here and there, above this field of shadow, the head of a
great out-spread pine was already glorious with day; and here and
there, through the breaches of the hills, the sun-beams made a great
and luminous entry. Here Seraphina hastened along forest paths.
She had lost sight of the pilot smoke, which blew another way, and
conducted herself in that great wilderness by the direction of the
sun. But presently fresh signs bespoke the neighbourhood of man;
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