| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honore de Balzac: divan. The ceiling, from the middle of which a lustre of unpolished
silver hung, was of a brilliant whiteness, and the cornice was gilded.
The carpet was like an Oriental shawl; it had the designs and recalled
the poetry of Persia, where the hands of slaves had worked on it. The
furniture was covered in white cashmere, relieved by black and poppy-
colored ornaments. The clock, the candelabra, all were in white marble
and gold. The only table there had a cloth of cashmere. Elegant
flower-pots held roses of every kind, flowers white or red. In fine,
the least detail seemed to have been the object of loving thought.
Never had richness hidden itself more coquettishly to become elegance,
to express grace, to inspire pleasure. Everything there would have
The Girl with the Golden Eyes |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle: mark of nitrate of silver upon his right forefinger, and a bulge
on the right side of his top-hat to show where he has secreted
his stethoscope, I must be dull, indeed, if I do not pronounce
him to be an active member of the medical profession."
I could not help laughing at the ease with which he explained his
process of deduction. "When I hear you give your reasons," I
remarked, "the thing always appears to me to be so ridiculously
simple that I could easily do it myself, though at each
successive instance of your reasoning I am baffled until you
explain your process. And yet I believe that my eyes are as good
as yours."
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: it will thus have a smack of nature and wildness which skilful
dispositions cannot overtake. The gardener should be an idler, and
have a gross partiality to the kitchen plots: an eager or toilful
gardener misbecomes the garden landscape; a tasteful gardener will be
ever meddling, will keep the borders raw, and take the bloom off
nature. Close adjoining, if you are in the south, an olive-yard, if
in the north, a swarded apple-orchard reaching to the stream,
completes your miniature domain; but this is perhaps best entered
through a door in the high fruit-wall; so that you close the door
behind you on your sunny plots, your hedges and evergreen jungle,
when you go down to watch the apples falling in the pool. It is a
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