| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Buttered Side Down by Edna Ferber: particular about choosing "lookers," with especial attention to
figure, hair, and finger nails. Gertie was a looker. Providence
had taken care of that. But you cannot leave your hair and finger
nails to Providence. They demand coaxing with a bristle brush and
an orangewood stick.
Now clerking, as Gertie would tell you, is fierce on the feet.
And when your feet are tired you are tired all over. Gertie's feet
were tired every night. About eight-thirty she longed to peel off
her clothes, drop them in a heap on the floor, and tumble,
unbrushed, unwashed, unmanicured, into bed. She never did it.
Things had been particularly trying to-night. After washing
Buttered Side Down |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Davis: chipping and moulding figures,--hideous, fantastic enough, but
sometimes strangely beautiful: even the mill-men saw that,
while they jeered at him. It was a curious fancy in the man,
almost a passion. The few hours for rest he spent hewing and
hacking with his blunt knife, never speaking, until his watch
came again,--working at one figure for months, and, when it was
finished, breaking it to pieces perhaps, in a fit of
disappointment. A morbid, gloomy man, untaught, unled, left to
feed his soul in grossness and crime, and hard, grinding labor.
I want you to come down and look at this Wolfe, standing there
among the lowest of his kind, and see him just as he is, that
Life in the Iron-Mills |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Bronte Sisters: as I had reached that tree, that you came out into the garden with
your friend. Not choosing to show myself, under the circumstances,
I stood still, in the shadow, till you had both passed by.'
'And how much of our conversation did you hear?'
'I heard quite enough, Helen. And it was well for me that I did
hear it; for nothing less could have cured my infatuation. I
always said and thought, that I would never believe a word against
you, unless I heard it from your own lips. All the hints and
affirmations of others I treated as malignant, baseless slanders;
your own self-accusations I believed to be overstrained; and all
that seemed unaccountable in your position I trusted that you could
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall |
