| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Herland by Charlotte Gilman: applied to cats, except for show purposes.
I wish I could represent the kind, quiet, steady, ingenious way
they questioned us. It was not just curiosity--they weren't a bit
more curious about us than we were about them, if as much. But
they were bent on understanding our kind of civilization, and
their lines of interrogation would gradually surround us and
drive us in till we found ourselves up against some admissions
we did not want to make.
"Are all these breeds of dogs you have made useful?" they asked.
"Oh--useful! Why, the hunting dogs and watchdogs and
sheepdogs are useful--and sleddogs of course!--and ratters, I
Herland |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton: communication from Nick had reached her; and she smiled with a
touch of bitterness at the difficulty he was doubtless finding
in the composition of the promised letter. Her own scrap-
basket, for the first days, had been heaped with the fragments
of the letters she had begun; and she told herself that, since
they both found it so hard to write, it was probably because
they had nothing left to say to each other.
Meanwhile the days at Mrs. Melrose's drifted by as they had been
wont to drift when, under the roofs of the rich, Susy Branch had
marked time between one episode and the next of her precarious
existence. Her experience of such sojourns was varied enough to
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Father Goriot by Honore de Balzac: with M. de Beauseant and M. d'Ajuda-Pinto; and M. de Beauseant,
like a well-bred man of the world, always left his wife and the
Portuguese as soon as he had installed them. But M. d'Ajuda-Pinto
must marry, and a Mlle. de Rochefide was the young lady. In the
whole fashionable world there was but one person who as yet knew
nothing of the arrangement, and that was Mme. de Beauseant. Some
of her friends had hinted at the possibility, and she had laughed
at them, believing that envy had prompted those ladies to try to
make mischief. And now, though the bans were about to be
published, and although the handsome Portuguese had come that day
to break the news to the Vicomtesse, he had not found courage as
Father Goriot |
