| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Heart of the West by O. Henry: town.'
"'You mean Ed Collier?' says Mame.
"'I do,' I answers; 'and a pity it is that he has gone back to crime
again. I met him outside the tent, and he exposed his intentions of
devastating the food crop of the world. 'Tis enormously sad when one's
ideal descends from his pedestal to make a seventeen-year locust of
himself.'
"Mame looked me straight in the eye until she had corkscrewed my
reflections.
"'Jeff,' says she, 'it isn't quite like you to talk that way. I don't
care to hear Ed Collier ridiculed. A man may do ridiculous things, but
Heart of the West |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Wife, et al by Anton Chekhov: letter full of personal dignity, and how in the spring or the
summer she would go with Dymov to the Crimea, free herself
finally from the past there, and begin a new life.
On getting home late in the evening she sat down in the
drawing-room, without taking off her things, to begin the letter.
Ryabovsky had told her she was not an artist, and to pay him out
she wrote to him now that he painted the same thing every year,
and said exactly the same thing every day; that he was at a
standstill, and that nothing more would come of him than had come
already. She wanted to write, too, that he owed a great deal to
her good influence, and that if he was going wrong it was only
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart: a hatchet, and thus armed, I set to work. The plaster came out
easily: the lathing was more obstinate. It gave under the blows,
only to spring back into place again, and the necessity for
caution made it doubly hard.
I had a blister on my palm when at last the hatchet went through
and fell with what sounded like the report of a gun to my
overstrained nerves. I sat on a trunk, waiting to hear Liddy fly
up the stairs, with the household behind her, like the tail of a
comet. But nothing happened, and with a growing feeling of
uncanniness I set to work enlarging the opening.
The result was absolutely nil. When I could hold a lighted
The Circular Staircase |
