| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield: benches on either side were stacked high with wraps. Two old women in
white aprons ran up and down tossing fresh armfuls. And everybody was
pressing forward trying to get at the little dressing-table and mirror at
the far end.
A great quivering jet of gas lighted the ladies' room. It couldn't wait;
it was dancing already. When the door opened again and there came a burst
of tuning from the drill hall, it leaped almost to the ceiling.
Dark girls, fair girls were patting their hair, tying ribbons again,
tucking handkerchiefs down the fronts of their bodices, smoothing marble-
white gloves. And because they were all laughing it seemed to Leila that
they were all lovely.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Massimilla Doni by Honore de Balzac: push back his thick brown hair, and gazed again at Massimilla's
gondola.
"And this insolent mockery of fate is carried even into my love
affair," said he to himself. "My heart and imagination are full of
precious gifts; Massimilla will have none of them; she is a
Florentine, and she will throw me over. I have to sit by her side like
ice, while her voice and her looks fire me with heavenly sensations!
As I watch her gondola a few hundred feet away from my own I feel as
if a hot iron were set on my heart. An invisible fluid courses through
my frame and scorches my nerves, a cloud dims my sight, the air seems
to me to glow as it did at Rivalta when the sunlight came through a
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: Medes, the Chaldeans, the Lydians, whom they had conquered, children
no longer of Ahura Mazda, but of Ahriman, of darkness and not of
light, to be conquered by Alexander and his Greeks even more rapidly
and more shamefully than they had conquered the East.
This is the short epic of the Persian Empire, ending, alas! as all
human epics are wont to end, sadly, if not shamefully.
But let me ask you, Did I say too much, when I said, that to these
Persians we owe that we are here to-night?
I do not say that without them we should not have been here. God, I
presume, when He is minded to do anything, has more than one way of
doing it.
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