| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Fanny Herself by Edna Ferber: read and reread the passages dealing with Samuel Weller, and
Mr. Micawber, and Sairey Gamp, and Fanny Squeers. It was
rather trying to read Dickens before supper, she had
discovered. Pickwick Papers was fatal, she had found. It
sent one to the pantry in a sort of trance, to ransack for
food--cookies, apples, cold meat, anything. But whatever
one found, it always fell short of the succulent sounding
beefsteak pies, and saddles of mutton, and hot pineapple
toddy of the printed page.
To-night Mrs. Brandeis, coming in from the kitchen after a
conference with Mattie, found her daughter in conversational
Fanny Herself |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Persuasion by Jane Austen: he had looked and said everything with such exquisite grace,
that they could assure them all, their heads were both turned by him;
and off they ran, quite as full of glee as of love, and apparently
more full of Captain Wentworth than of little Charles.
The same story and the same raptures were repeated, when the two girls came
with their father, through the gloom of the evening, to make enquiries;
and Mr Musgrove, no longer under the first uneasiness about his heir,
could add his confirmation and praise, and hope there would be now
no occasion for putting Captain Wentworth off, and only be sorry to think
that the cottage party, probably, would not like to leave the little boy,
to give him the meeting. "Oh no; as to leaving the little boy,"
Persuasion |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Distinguished Provincial at Paris by Honore de Balzac: which he saw in every direction.
"Will she always look like that?" said he to himself, ignorant that
the morning had been spent in preparing a transformation.
In the provinces comparison and choice are out of the question; when a
face has grown familiar it comes to possess a certain beauty that is
taken for granted. But transport the pretty woman of the provinces to
Paris, and no one takes the slightest notice of her; her prettiness is
of the comparative degree illustrated by the saying that among the
blind the one-eyed are kings. Lucien's eyes were now busy comparing
Mme. de Bargeton with other women, just as she herself had contrasted
him with Chatelet on the previous day. And Mme. de Bargeton, on her
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