| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Adieu by Honore de Balzac: undulations she thus produced upon the surface of the water. Then she
knelt down at the edge of the stream and amused herself, like a child,
in casting in her long tresses and pulling them abruptly out, to watch
the shower of drops that glittered down, looking, as the sunlight
struck athwart them, like a chaplet of pearls.
"That woman is mad!" cried the marquis.
A hoarse cry, uttered by Genevieve, seemed uttered as a warning to the
unknown woman, who turned suddenly, throwing back her hair from either
side of her face. At this instant the colonel and Monsieur d'Albon
could distinctly see her features; she, herself, perceiving the two
friends, sprang to the iron railing with the lightness and rapidity of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Duchesse de Langeais by Honore de Balzac: apprehensions gathered strength in the silence. She was forced,
without aid from without, to face the thought of a hideous duel
of which she could not speak. Her proud hard nature was more
responsive to thrills of hate than it had ever been to the
caresses of love. Ah! if the General could but have seen her, as
she sat with her forehead drawn into folds between her brows;
immersed in bitter thoughts in that boudoir where he had enjoyed
such happy moments, he might perhaps have conceived high hopes.
Of all human passions, is not pride alone incapable of
engendering anything base? Mme de Langeais kept her thoughts to
herself, but is it not permissible to suppose that M. de
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Twice Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: meanly-dressed woman, of ill-favored aspect, and so withered,
shrunken, and decrepit, that even the space since she began to
decay must have exceeded the ordinary term of human existence. In
the spot where they encountered, no mortal could observe them.
Three little hills stood near each other, and down in the midst
of them sunk a hollow basin, almost mathematically circular, two
or three hundred feet in breadth, and of such depth that a
stately cedar might but just be visible above the sides. Dwarf
pines were numerous upon the hills, and partly fringed the outer
verge of the intermediate hollow, within which there was nothing
but the brown grass of October, and here and there a tree trunk
Twice Told Tales |
