| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart: shall I be?"
"You forget," I broke in, "that I have the revolver, and that no
one knows about it."
But Gertrude had risen angrily.
"I can not stand it; it is always with me," she cried. "Halsey,
I did not throw your revolver into the tulip bed. I--think--
you--did it--yourself!"
They stared at each other across the big library table, with
young eyes all at once hard, suspicious. And then Gertrude held
out both hands to him appealingly.
"We must not," she said brokenly. "Just now, with so much at
The Circular Staircase |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from An Inland Voyage by Robert Louis Stevenson: Boom is not a nice place, and is only remarkable for one thing:
that the majority of the inhabitants have a private opinion that
they can speak English, which is not justified by fact. This gave
a kind of haziness to our intercourse. As for the Hotel de la
Navigation, I think it is the worst feature of the place. It
boasts of a sanded parlour, with a bar at one end, looking on the
street; and another sanded parlour, darker and colder, with an
empty bird-cage and a tricolour subscription box by way of sole
adornment, where we made shift to dine in the company of three
uncommunicative engineer apprentices and a silent bagman. The
food, as usual in Belgium, was of a nondescript occasional
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sons of the Soil by Honore de Balzac: quite ready to forget it. He was eaten up with the desire to be a peer
of France, and dreamed of his grand cordon of the Legion of honor, his
Saint-Louis cross, and his income of one hundred and forty thousand
francs. Bitten by the demon of aristocracy, the sight of the blue
ribbon put him beside himself. The gallant cuirassier of Essling would
have licked up the mud on the Pont-Royal to be invited to the house of
a Navarreins, a Lenoncourt, a Grandlieu, a Maufrigneuse, a d'Espard, a
Vandenesse, a Verneuil, a Herouville, or a Chaulieu.
From 1818, when the impossibility of a change in favor of the
Bonaparte family was made clear to him, Montcornet had himself
trumpeted in the faubourg Saint-Germain by the wives of some of his
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