| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Emma by Jane Austen: to her first surmises. There probably was something more to conceal
than her own preference; Mr. Dixon, perhaps, had been very near
changing one friend for the other, or been fixed only to Miss Campbell,
for the sake of the future twelve thousand pounds.
The like reserve prevailed on other topics. She and Mr. Frank Churchill
had been at Weymouth at the same time. It was known that they were
a little acquainted; but not a syllable of real information could Emma
procure as to what he truly was. "Was he handsome?"--"She believed
he was reckoned a very fine young man." "Was he agreeable?"--
"He was generally thought so." "Did he appear a sensible young man;
a young man of information?"--"At a watering-place, or in a common
Emma |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed by Edna Ferber: got into the heroine's calm gray eyes. What heroine
could remain calm-eyed when her creator's mind is filled
with roast beef? A half-hour elapses before I get back
on the track. Then appears the hero--a tall blond youth,
fair to behold. I make him two yards high, and endow him
with a pair of clothing-advertisement shoulders.
There assails my nostrils a fearful smell of
scorching. The roast! A wild rush into the kitchen. I
fling open the oven door. The roast is mahogany-colored,
and gravyless. It takes fifteen minutes of the most
desperate first-aid-to-the-injured measures before the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Pierre Grassou by Honore de Balzac: his wife and daughter. The wife had a fine veneer of mahogany on her
face, and in figure she resembled a cocoa-nut, surmounted by a head
and tied in around the waist. She pivoted on her legs, which were tap-
rooted, and her gown was yellow with black stripes. She proudly
exhibited unutterable mittens on a puffy pair of hands; the plumes of
a first-class funeral floated on an over-flowing bonnet; laces adorned
her shoulders, as round behind as they were before; consequently, the
spherical form of the cocoa-nut was perfect. Her feet, of a kind that
painters call abatis, rose above the varnished leather of the shoes in
a swelling that was some inches high. How the feet were ever got into
the shoes, no one knows.
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