| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan by Honore de Balzac: too late--or, if you choose, too soon."
"And de Marsay?"
"De Marsay played with me as if I were a doll. I was so young at the
time! We never love men who pretend to teach us; they rub up all our
little vanities."
"And that wretched boy who hanged himself?"
"Lucien? An Antinous and a great poet. I worshiped him in all
conscience, and I might have been happy. But he was in love with a
girl of the town; and I gave him up to Madame. de Serizy. . . . If he
had cared to love me, should I have given him up?"
"What an odd thing, that you should come into collision with an Esther!"
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Son of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs: will have nothing to guide him but his own impulses, and I know
how powerful these may be in the wrong direction at times."
But Lady Greystoke only shook her head as she had a hundred
other times when the subject had claimed her attention in the past.
"No, John," she insisted, "I shall never give my consent to
the implanting in Jack's mind of any suggestion of the savage
life which we both wish to preserve him from."
It was evening before the subject was again referred to and
then it was raised by Jack himself. He had been sitting, curled
in a large chair, reading, when he suddenly looked up and
addressed his father.
The Son of Tarzan |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Twelve Stories and a Dream by H. G. Wells: working off! I'm wet through."
He stared at me. Then at the band, the wheezy rattle of whose
performance was certainly going faster. Then with a tremendous sweep
of the arm he hurled the dog away from him and it went spinning
upward, still inanimate, and hung at last over the grouped parasols
of a knot of chattering people. Gibberne was gripping my elbow.
"By Jove!" he cried. "I believe--it is! A sort of hot pricking
and--yes. That man's moving his pocket-handkerchief! Perceptibly.
We must get out of this sharp."
But we could not get out of it sharply enough. Luckily, perhaps!
For we might have run, and if we had run we should, I believe,
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