| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Ferragus by Honore de Balzac: who have not known love in the wide extent which they give to it. He
adored Madame Jules under a new aspect; he loved her now with the fury
of jealousy and the frenzied anguish of hope. Unfaithful to her
husband, the woman became common. Auguste could now give himself up to
the joys of successful love, and his imagination opened to him a
career of pleasures. Yes, he had lost the angel, but he had found the
most delightful of demons. He went to bed, building castles in the
air, excusing Madame Jules by some romantic fiction in which he did
not believe. He resolved to devote himself wholly, from that day
forth, to a search for the causes, motives, and keynote of this
mystery. It was a tale to read, or better still, a drama to be played,
Ferragus |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories by Mark Twain: which should have been done a week ago"--artificial ones, of course;
the others wouldn't keep so long--and then, instead of fixing
the flowers, she is to walk out to the grove, and go off with Elfonzo.
The invention of this plan overstrained the author that is plain,
for he straightway shows failing powers. The details of the plan
are not many or elaborate. The author shall state them himself--
this good soul, whose intentions are always better than his English:
"You walk carelessly toward the academy grove, where you will find
me with a lightning steed, elegantly equipped to bear you off
where we shall be joined in wedlock with the first connubial rights."
Last scene of all, which the author, now much enfeebled,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy: Marguerite knew very little about her, except that she had
died abroad, ailing in body as well as in mind, which Percy was still
a lad. She must have been a very beautiful woman once, when Boucher
painted her, and as Marguerite looked at the portrait, she could not
but be struck by the extraordinary resemblance which must have existed
between mother and son. There was the same low, square forehead,
crowned with thick, fair hair, smooth and heavy; the same deep-set,
somewhat lazy blue eyes beneath firmly marked, straight brows; and in
those eyes there was the same intensity behind that apparent laziness,
the same latent passion which used to light up Percy's face in the
olden days before his marriage, and which Marguerite had again noted,
The Scarlet Pimpernel |
