| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Europeans by Henry James: sketching away at his little scraps of paper.
The lady put out her foot; it was very small, and there was an immense
rosette on her slipper. She fixed her eyes for a while on this ornament,
and then she looked at the glowing bed of anthracite coal in the grate.
"Did you ever see anything so hideous as that fire?" she demanded.
"Did you ever see anything so--so affreux as--as everything?"
She spoke English with perfect purity; but she brought out this
French epithet in a manner that indicated that she was accustomed
to using French epithets.
"I think the fire is very pretty," said the young man,
glancing at it a moment. "Those little blue tongues,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Breaking Point by Mary Roberts Rinehart: a wry smile, "and the other fellow reaps."
Bassett went out after that, going to the office on the chance of
a letter from Melis, but there was none. When he came back he
found Dick standing over a partially packed suitcase, and knew that
they had come to the end of the road indeed.
"What's the next step?" he asked bluntly.
"I'll have to leave here. It's too expensive."
"And after that, what?"
"I'll get a job. I suppose a man is as well hidden here as anywhere.
I can grow a beard-that's the usual thing, isn't it?"
Bassett made an impatient gesture, and fell to pacing the floor.
The Breaking Point |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from In the Cage by Henry James: resembled a front of many floors. It had gone a great way with her
that he would build up a business to his chin, which he carried
quite in the air. This could only be a question of time; he would
have all Piccadilly in the pen behind his ear. That was a merit in
itself for a girl who had known what she had known. There were
hours at which she even found him good-looking, though, frankly
there could be no crown for her effort to imagine on the part of
the tailor or the barber some such treatment of his appearance as
would make him resemble even remotely a man of the world. His very
beauty was the beauty of a grocer, and the finest future would
offer it none too much room consistently to develop. She had
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