| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: lovely. Who ever questioned the perennial charm of Rose Jocelyn,
Lucy Desborough, or Clara Middleton? fair women with fair names,
the daughters of George Meredith. Elizabeth Bennet has but to
speak, and I am at her knees. Ah! these are the creators of
desirable women. They would never have fallen in the mud with
Dumas and poor La Valliere. It is my only consolation that not one
of all of them, except the first, could have plucked at the
moustache of d'Artagnan.
Or perhaps, again, a proportion of readers stumble at the
threshold. In so vast a mansion there were sure to be back stairs
and kitchen offices where no one would delight to linger; but it
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Virginian by Owen Wister: waiting to be killed. By this time to-morrow the gray flannel
shirt would be buttoned round a corpse. Until what moment would
Steve chew? Against such fancies as these I managed presently to
barricade my mind, but I made a plea to be allowed to pass the
night elsewhere, and I suggested the adjacent cabin. By their
faces I saw that my words merely helped their distrust of me. The
cabin leaked too much, they said; I would sleep drier here. One
man gave it to me more directly: "If you figured on camping in
this stable, what has changed your mind?" How could I tell them
that I shrunk from any contact with what they were doing,
although I knew that only so could justice be dealt in this
The Virginian |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Europeans by Henry James: The next day Clifford Wentworth came to see Lizzie, and Acton, who was at
home and saw him pass through the garden, took note of the circumstance.
He had a natural desire to make it tally with Madame M; auunster's account
of Clifford's disaffection; but his ingenuity, finding itself unequal
to the task, resolved at last to ask help of the young man's candor.
He waited till he saw him going away, and then he went out and overtook
him in the grounds.
"I wish very much you would answer me a question," Acton said.
"What were you doing, last night, at Madame Munster's?"
Clifford began to laugh and to blush, by no means like a young man
with a romantic secret. "What did she tell you?" he asked.
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