| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Distinguished Provincial at Paris by Honore de Balzac: led off with exaggerated salvos. Martainville applauded bravely;
Nathan, Merlin, and the treacherous Florine followed his example; but
it was clear that the piece was a failure. A crowd gathered in
Coralie's dressing-room and consoled her, till she had no courage
left. She went home in despair, less for her own sake than for
Lucien's.
"Braulard has betrayed us," Lucien said.
Coralie was heartstricken. The next day found her in a high fever,
utterly unfit to play, face to face with the thought that she had been
cut short in her career. Lucien hid the papers from her, and looked
them over in the dining-room. The reviewers one and all attributed the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane: momentarily startled by a thought that perhaps
his gun was not loaded. He stood trying to
rally his faltering intellect so that he might rec-
ollect the moment when he had loaded, but he
could not.
A hatless general pulled his dripping horse to
a stand near the colonel of the 304th. He shook
his fist in the other's face. "You 've got to hold
'em back!" he shouted, savagely; "you 've got
to hold 'em back!"
In his agitation the colonel began to stammer.
The Red Badge of Courage |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne by Robert Louis Stevenson: up, like a banner, in the diminutive and tottering church. In
1877, it appeared, the inhabitants subscribed forty-eight francs
ten centimes for the 'Work of the Propagation of the Faith.' Some
of this, I could not help hoping, would be applied to my native
land. Cheylard scrapes together halfpence for the darkened souls
in Edinburgh; while Balquhidder and Dunrossness bemoan the
ignorance of Rome. Thus, to the high entertainment of the angels,
do we pelt each other with evangelists, like schoolboys bickering
in the snow.
The inn was again singularly unpretentious. The whole furniture of
a not ill-to-do family was in the kitchen: the beds, the cradle,
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