| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Man in Lower Ten by Mary Roberts Rinehart: my hand. I sat up irritably and nursed the wound, which was bleeding
a little. Still drowsy, I felt more cautiously for what I supposed
had been my scarf pin, but there was nothing there. Wide awake now,
I reached for my traveling-bag, on the chance that I had put my watch
in there. I had drawn the satchel to me and had my hand on the lock
before I realized that it was not my own!
Mine was of alligator hide. I had killed the beast in Florida, after
the expenditure of enough money to have bought a house and enough
energy to have built one. The bag I held in my hand was a black one,
sealskin, I think. The staggering thought of what the loss of my bag
meant to me put my finger on the bell and kept it there until the
The Man in Lower Ten |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Albert Savarus by Honore de Balzac: Mediterranean lies beneath the waves. In short, Rodolphe's lightest
aspiration was now a living hope.
At the end of a few days, Francesca understood this boundless love;
but it was so natural, and so perfectly shared by her, that it did not
surprise her. She was worthy of it.
"What is there that is strange?" said she to Rodolphe, as they walked
on the garden terrace, when he had been betrayed into one of those
outbursts of conceit which come so naturally to Frenchmen in the
expression of their feelings--"what is extraordinary in the fact of
your loving a young and beautiful woman, artist enough to be able to
earn her living like Tinti, and of giving you some of the pleasures of
Albert Savarus |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honore de Balzac: closed; introduced him sometimes behind the scenes of theatres, more
often into the houses of courtesans; he exhibited human emotions to
him one by one; taught him politics in the drawing-rooms, where they
simmered at the time, explained to him the machinery of government,
and endeavored out of attraction towards a fine nature, deserted, yet
rich in promise, virilely to replace a mother: is not the Church the
mother of orphans? The pupil was responsive to so much care. The
worthy priest died in 1812, a bishop, with the satisfaction of having
left in this world a child whose heart and mind were so well moulded
that he could outwit a man of forty. Who would have expected to have
found a heart of bronze, a brain of steel, beneath external traits as
The Girl with the Golden Eyes |
