| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Vendetta by Honore de Balzac: force, and said, in a voice so shaken that none but a lover could have
heard the words:--
"What misery in a word!"
"In the name of our love, what have I said?" asked Luigi Porta.
"My father," she replied, "never spoke to me of our deplorable
history, and I was too young when we left Corsica to know anything
about it."
"Are we in vendetta?" asked Luigi, trembling.
"Yes. I have heard my mother say that the Portas killed my brother and
burned our house. My father then massacred the whole family. How is it
that you survived?--for you were tied to the posts of the bed before
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Long Odds by H. Rider Haggard: stopping with him at the place he bought in Yorkshire. Shortly after
that, the death of his only son so unsettled him that he immediately
left England, accompanied by two companions, his old fellow-voyagers,
Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good, and has now utterly vanished into the
dark heart of Africa. He is persuaded that a white people, of which he
has heard rumours all his life, exists somewhere on the highlands in the
vast, still unexplored interior, and his great ambition is to find them
before he dies. This is the wild quest upon which he and his companions
have departed, and from which I shrewdly suspect they never will return.
One letter only have I received from the old gentleman, dated from a
mission station high up the Tana, a river on the east coast, about three
Long Odds |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Eugenie Grandet by Honore de Balzac: that he had secured his listener's assent, Grandet answered: "I can
decide nothing without consulting my wife." His wife, whom he had
reduced to a state of helpless slavery, was a useful screen to him in
business. He went nowhere among friends; he neither gave nor accepted
dinners; he made no stir or noise, seeming to economize in everything,
even movement. He never disturbed or disarranged the things of other
people, out of respect for the rights of property. Nevertheless, in
spite of his soft voice, in spite of his circumspect bearing, the
language and habits of a coarse nature came to the surface, especially
in his own home, where he controlled himself less than elsewhere.
Physically, Grandet was a man five feet high, thick-set, square-built,
Eugenie Grandet |
