| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Ball at Sceaux by Honore de Balzac: the room, of course the least cared for of any in the house, and
succeeded in giving a look of harmony to the files of bills, the
letter-boxes, the books and furniture of this sanctum, where the
interests of the royal demesnes were debated over. When Joseph had
reduced this chaos to some sort of order, and brought to the front
such things as might be most pleasing to the eye, as if it were a shop
front, or such as by their color might give the effect of a kind of
official poetry, he stood for a minute in the midst of the labyrinth
of papers piled in some places even on the floor, admired his
handiwork, jerked his head, and went.
The anxious sinecure-holder did not share his retainer's favorable
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Rezanov by Gertrude Atherton: assembled, and he had a gift for each; curious ob-
jects of Alaskan workmanship for the men, minia-
ture totem poles and fur-bordered moccasins; but
silk and cotton, linen, shawls, and find handker-
chiefs for senora and maiden.
"They are trifles," he said, in response to an en-
thusiastic chorus. "The cargo I was obliged to
take over was a very large one. You must not
protest. I shall never miss these things." And he
knew that he had sown the seeds of a rapacity simi-
lar to that implanted in the worthy bosoms of the
Rezanov |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Crowd by Gustave le Bon: being, or do not transform themselves into acts except in the
case of individuals forming a crowd. The psychological crowd is
a provisional being formed of heterogeneous elements, which for a
moment are combined, exactly as the cells which constitute a
living body form by their reunion a new being which displays
characteristics very different from those possessed by each of
the cells singly.
Contrary to an opinion which one is astonished to find coming
from the pen of so acute a philosopher as Herbert Spencer, in the
aggregate which constitutes a crowd there is in no sort a
summing-up of or an average struck between its elements. What
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