| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Heart of the West by O. Henry: But Frau Hildesmuller was watching for him. Out rushed the whole
family of Hildesmullers.
Frau Hildesmuller, fat and flushed, inquired if he had a letter from
Lena, and then Fritz raised his voice and told the tale of his
adventure. He told the contents of that letter that the robber had
made him read, and then Frau Hildesmuller broke into wild weeping. Her
little Lena drown herself! Why had they sent her from home? What could
be done? Perhaps it would be too late by the time they could send for
her now. Peter Hildesmuller dropped his meerschaum on the walk and it
shivered into pieces.
"Woman!" he roared at his wife, "why did you let that child go away?
 Heart of the West |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Prince of Bohemia by Honore de Balzac: which reason, he said, the very greatest dancers--Camargo, Guimard,
and Taglioni, all of them thin, brown, and plain--could only redeem
their physical defects by their genius. Tullia, still in the height of
her glory, retired before younger and cleverer dancers; she did
wisely. She was an aristocrat; she had scarcely stooped below the
noblesse in her /liaisons/; she declined to dip her ankles in the
troubled waters of July. Insolent and beautiful as she was, Claudine
possessed handsome souvenirs, but very little ready money; still, her
jewels were magnificent, and she had as fine furniture as any one in
Paris.
"On quitting the stage when she, forgotten to-day, was yet in the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Margret Howth: A Story of To-day by Rebecca Harding Davis: staircase used by the hands: that was on the other side of the
factory. It was a huge, unwieldy building, such as crowd the
suburbs of trading towns. This one went round the four sides of
a square, with the yard for the vats in the middle. The ladders
and passages she passed down were on the inside, narrow and dimly
lighted: she had to grope her way sometimes. The floors shook
constantly with the incessant thud of the great looms that filled
each story, like heavy, monotonous thunder. It deafened her,
made her dizzy, as she went down slowly. It was no short walk to
reach the lower hall, but she was down at last. Doors opened
from it into the ground-floor ware-rooms; glancing in, she saw
 Margret Howth: A Story of To-day |