| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte: in some populous but healthy district, where we will take a few
young ladies to board and educate - if we can get them - and as
many day pupils as will come, or as we can manage to instruct.
Your father's relations and old friends will be able to send us
some pupils, or to assist us with their recommendations, no doubt:
I shall not apply to my own. What say you to it, Agnes? will you
be willing to leave your present situation and try?'
'Quite willing, mamma; and the money I have saved will do to
furnish the house. It shall be taken from the bank directly.'
'When it is wanted: we must get the house, and settle on
preliminaries first.'
Agnes Grey |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Cousin Pons by Honore de Balzac: subsistence, chiefly by winning the esteem of the porters' lodges in
his district. So he raised his eyes to heaven and thanked Mme. Cibot
with a solemn face worthy of Tartuffe.
"Then you think that with careful nursing our dear patient will get
better, my dear M. Poulain?"
"Yes, if this shock has not been too much for him."
"Poor man! who can have vexed him? There isn't nobody like him on
earth except his friend M. Schmucke. I will find out what is the
matter, and I will undertake to give them that upset my gentleman a
hauling over the coals--"
"Look here, my dear Mme. Cibot," said the doctor as they stood in the
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Man in Lower Ten by Mary Roberts Rinehart: But the cabby did not hear, or perhaps did not care to. We jogged
comfortably along, to my relief, leaving the young man far behind.
I avoid reporters on principle, having learned long ago that I am
an easy mark for a clever interviewer.
It was perhaps nine o'clock when I left the station. Our way was
along the boulevard which hugged the side of one of the city's great
hills. Far below, to the left, lay the railroad tracks and the
seventy times seven looming stacks of the mills. The white mist of
the river, the grays and blacks of the smoke blended into a
half-revealing haze, dotted here and there with fire. It was
unlovely, tremendous. Whistler might have painted it with its
The Man in Lower Ten |
