| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Ursula by Honore de Balzac: meaning which escapes us. You don't know your merits, my dear fellow.
Take a certain tone and style and in six months you'll captivate an
English-woman with a hundred thousand pounds; but you must call
yourself viscount, a title which belongs to you. My charming step-
mother, Lady Dudley, who has not her equal for matching two hearts,
will find you some such woman in the fens of Great Britain. What you
must now do is to get the payment of your debts postponed for ninety
days. Why didn't you tell us about them? The money-lenders at Baden
would have spared you--served you perhaps; but now, after you have
once been in prison, they'll despise you. A money-lender is, like
society, like the masses, down on his knees before the man who is
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from House of Mirth by Edith Wharton: she had neither the aptitude nor the moral constancy to remake
her life on new lines; to become a worker among workers, and let
the world of luxury and pleasure sweep by her unregarded. She
could not hold herself much to blame for this ineffectiveness,
and she was perhaps less to blame than she believed. Inherited
tendencies had combined with early training to make her the
highly specialized product she was: an organism as helpless out
of its narrow range as the sea-anemone torn from the rock. She
had been fashioned to adorn and delight; to what other end does
nature round the rose-leaf and paint the humming-bird's breast?
And was it her fault that the purely decorative mission is less
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Catriona by Robert Louis Stevenson: fell in with it.
I was in this frame, my heart beating, the grey eyes plain before me
like two stars, when Andie broke in upon my musing.
"I see ye has gotten guid news," said he.
I found him looking curiously in my face; with that there came before
me like a vision of James Stewart and the court of Inverary; and my
mind turned at once like a door upon its hinges. Trials, I reflected,
sometimes draw out longer than is looked for. Even if I came to
Inverary just too late, something might yet be attempted in the
interests of James - and in those of my own character, the best would
be accomplished. In a moment, it seemed without thought, I had a plan
|
