| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Street of Seven Stars by Mary Roberts Rinehart: "But, mother!" expostulated the oldest girl. "When you are so
afraid of the ocean! And a year!"
"What is to be will be," she had replied. "If I'm going to be
drowned I'll be drowned, whether it's in the sea or in a bathtub.
And I'll not let father go alone."
Fatalism being their mother's last argument and always final, the
children gave up. They let her go. More, they prepared for her so
elaborate a wardrobe that the poor soul had had no excuse to
purchase anything abroad. She had gone through Paris looking
straight ahead lest her eyes lead her into the temptation of the
shops. In Vienna she wore her home-town outfit with
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne by Robert Louis Stevenson: the winter's firing. At the top of the woods, which do not climb
very high upon this cold ridge, I struck leftward by a path among
the pines, until I hit on a dell of green turf, where a streamlet
made a little spout over some stones to serve me for a water-tap.
'In a more sacred or sequestered bower . . . nor nymph nor faunus
haunted.' The trees were not old, but they grew thickly round the
glade: there was no outlook, except north-eastward upon distant
hill-tops, or straight upward to the sky; and the encampment felt
secure and private like a room. By the time I had made my
arrangements and fed Modestine, the day was already beginning to
decline. I buckled myself to the knees into my sack and made a
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Start in Life by Honore de Balzac: it seems to me, young man, that your respectable mother is, at the
present moment, not exactly in the social sphere of an ambassadress.
She carried a handbag worthy of the utmost respect, and wore shoe-
strings which--"
"My mother, monsieur!" exclaimed Oscar, in a tone of indignation.
"That was the person in charge of our household."
"'Our household' is a very aristocratic term," remarked the count.
"Kings have households," replied Oscar, proudly.
A look from Georges repressed the desire to laugh which took
possession of everybody; he contrived to make Mistigris and the
painter understand that it was necessary to manage Oscar cleverly in
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