| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens: must, for your own sake and safety, be as like your usual self as
though you owed me no obligation whatever, and had never stood
within these walls. You comprehend me?'
Hugh understood him perfectly. After a pause he muttered that he
hoped his patron would involve him in no trouble about this last
letter; for he had kept it back solely with the view of pleasing
him. He was continuing in this strain, when Mr Chester with a
most beneficent and patronising air cut him short by saying:
'My good fellow, you have my promise, my word, my sealed bond (for
a verbal pledge with me is quite as good), that I will always
protect you so long as you deserve it. Now, do set your mind at
Barnaby Rudge |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Figure in the Carpet by Henry James: mean? For God's sake try to get AT him. Don't let him suffer by
our arrangement. Speak of him, you know, if you can, as I should
have spoken of him."
I wondered an instant. "You mean as far and away the biggest of
the lot - that sort of thing?"
Corvick almost groaned. "Oh you know, I don't put them back to
back that way; it's the infancy of art! But he gives me a pleasure
so rare; the sense of" - he mused a little - "something or other."
I wondered again. "The sense, pray, of want?"
"My dear man, that's just what I want YOU to say!"
Even before he had banged the door I had begun, book in hand, to
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Battle of the Books by Jonathan Swift: for those who are talking; at length of a sudden demand audience;
decide the matter in a short dogmatical way; then withdraw within
himself again, and vouchsafe to talk no more, until his spirits
circulate again to the same point.
There are some faults in conversation which none are so subject to
as the men of wit, nor ever so much as when they are with each
other. If they have opened their mouths without endeavouring to
say a witty thing, they think it is so many words lost. It is a
torment to the hearers, as much as to themselves, to see them upon
the rack for invention, and in perpetual constraint, with so little
success. They must do something extraordinary, in order to acquit
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