| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Cousin Pons by Honore de Balzac: an affected old creature she is, my fingers itched to give her velvet
tippet a dusting with my broom handle! A servant wearing a velvet
tippet! did anybody ever see the like? No, upon my word, the world is
turned upside down; what is the use of making a Revolution? Dine twice
a day if you can afford it, you scamps of rich folk! But laws are no
good, I tell you, and nothing will be safe if Louis-Philippe does not
keep people in their places; for, after all, if we are all equal, eh,
sir? a housemaid didn't ought to have a velvet tippet, while I, Mme.
Cibot, haven't one, after thirty years of honest work.--There is a
pretty thing for you! People ought to be able to tell who you are. A
housemaid is a housemaid, just as I myself am a portress. Why do they
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Some Reminiscences by Joseph Conrad: animals of wood. Even the live tourist animal was nowhere in
evidence. We had something to eat in a long, narrow room at one
end of a long, narrow table, which, to my tired perception and to
my sleepy eyes, seemed as if it would tilt up like a see-saw
plank, since there was no one at the other end to balance it
against our two dusty and travel-stained figures. Then we
hastened upstairs to bed in a room smelling of pine planks, and I
was fast asleep before my head touched the pillow.
In the morning my tutor (he was a student of the Cracow
University) woke me up early, and as we were dressing remarked:
"There seems to be a lot of people staying in this hotel. I have
Some Reminiscences |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy: Boucher. It was Percy's mother.
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
The Scarlet Pimpernel |
