| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Underground City by Jules Verne: known and loved hitherto into quite a different girl. As for Jack Ryan,
he was as joyous as a lark rising in the first beams of the sun.
He only trusted that his gayety would prove contagious, and enliven his
traveling companions, thus rewarding them for letting him join them.
Nell was pensive and silent.
James Starr had decided, very sensibly, to set off in the evening.
It would be very much better for the girl to pass gradually from
the darkness of night to the full light of day; and that would
in this way be managed, since between midnight and noon she
would experience the successive phases of shade and sunshine,
to which her sight had to get accustomed.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Gambara by Honore de Balzac: a sort of sewer tolerated by the police close to the purified purlieus
of the Palais-Royal, as an Italian major-domo allows a careless
servant to leave the sweepings of the rooms in a corner of the
staircase.
The young man hesitated. He might have been a bedizened citizen's wife
craning her neck over a gutter swollen by the rain. But the hour was
not unpropitious for the indulgence of some discreditable whim.
Earlier, he might have been detected; later, he might find himself cut
out. Tempted by a glance which is encouraging without being inviting,
to have followed a young and pretty woman for an hour, or perhaps for
a day, thinking of her as a divinity and excusing her light conduct by
Gambara |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain: everyday life and the operation of the laws upon it. If
I went among them as a gentleman, there would be
restraints and conventionalities which would shut me
out from their private joys and troubles, and I should
get no further than the outside shell.
One morning I was out on a long walk to get up
muscle for my trip, and had climbed the ridge which
bordered the northern extremity of the valley, when I
came upon an artificial opening in the face of a low
precipice, and recognized it by its location as a hermit-
age which had often been pointed out to me from a
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court |
