| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from La Grenadiere by Honore de Balzac: but the more sincere the lover, the more timid he became; and besides,
the lady inspired awe, and it was a difficult matter to find enough
courage to speak to her. Finally, if a few of the bolder sort wrote to
her, their letters must have been burned unread. It was Mme.
Willemsens' practice to throw all the letters which she received into
the fire, as if she meant that the time spent in Touraine should be
untroubled by any outside cares even of the slightest. She might have
come to the enchanting retreat to give herself up wholly to the joy of
living.
The three masters whose presence was allowed at La Grenadiere spoke
with something like admiring reverence of the touching picture that
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Mistress Wilding by Rafael Sabatini: "Not quite," put in Mr. Wilding. "Mr. Westmacott, I think, was
constrained away. He did not intend..."
"Tais-toi!" blazed Feversham. "Did I interrogate you? It is for
Mistaire Westercott to answer." He set a hand on the table and leaned
forward towards Wilding, his face very malign. "You shall to answer
for yourself, Mistaire Wildin'; I promise you you shall to answer for
yourself." He turned again to Richard. "Ek, bien?" he snapped. "Will
you speak?"
Richard came forward a step; he was certainly nervous, and certainly
pale; but neither as pale nor as nervous as from our knowledge of
Richard we might have looked to see him at that moment.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Off on a Comet by Jules Verne: would have occurred at the summit of a mountain 35,000 feet high;
and had Servadac been in possession of a barometer, he would have
immediately discovered the fact that only now for the first time,
as the result of experiment, revealed itself to him--a fact,
moreover, which accounted for the compression of the blood-vessels
which both he and Ben Zoof had experienced, as well as for
the attenuation of their voices and their accelerated breathing.
"And yet," he argued with himself, "if our encampment has been
projected to so great an elevation, how is it that the sea remains
at its proper level?"
Once again Hector Servadac, though capable of tracing consequences,
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