| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Cousin Pons by Honore de Balzac: An hour later the President's servants arrived in a troop on poor
Pons' second floor. They behaved after the manner of their kind; they
cringed and fawned; they wept. Madeleine took M. Pons aside and flung
herself resolutely at his feet.
"It is all my fault; and monsieur knows quite well that I love him,"
here she burst into tears. "It was vengeance boiling in my veins;
monsieur ought to throw all the blame of the unhappy affair on that.
We are all to lose our pensions. . . . Monsieur, I was mad, and I
would not have the rest suffer for my fault. . . . I can see now well
enough that fate did not make me for monsieur. I have come to my
senses, I aimed too high, but I love you still, monsieur. These ten
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from To-morrow by Joseph Conrad: mad; no getting into the house. No money to get
back; a hungry chum in London who would begin
to think he had been given the go-by. "Damn!"
he muttered. He could break the door in, cer-
tainly; but they would perhaps bundle him into
chokey for that without asking questions--no great
matter, only he was confoundedly afraid of being
locked up, even in mistake. He turned cold at the
thought. He stamped his feet on the sod-
den grass.
"What are you?--a sailor?" said an agitated
 To-morrow |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Some Reminiscences by Joseph Conrad: only banjoist of my acquaintance, and being also a younger son of
a retired colonel, the poem of Mr. Kipling, by a strange
aberration of associated ideas, always seems to me to have been
written with an exclusive view to his person. When he did not
play the banjo he loved to sit and look at it. He proceeded to
this sentimental inspection and after meditating a while over the
strings under my silent scrutiny inquired airily:
"What are you always scribbling there, if it's fair to ask?"
It was a fair enough question, but I did not answer him, and
simply turned the pad over with a movement of instinctive
secrecy: I could not have told him he had put to flight the
 Some Reminiscences |