| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Frances Waldeaux by Rebecca Davis: yours---- They belong to your generation, I suppose. It
was a more sentimental one than mine. You are not
very young. And you certainly are not a sham. The
statues are interesting, but I fail to see why they
should have had such an effect upon you."
"Oh!" said Frances. "But you did not stay alone with
them as long as I did, or you would have felt it too.
Now I am sure that the debates in Parliament impressed
you just as they did me?"
George said nothing, but she went on eagerly. It never
occurred to her that he could be bored by her impressions
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lady Baltimore by Owen Wister: himself as others see him. Well, here lies the hitch in many a work of
art: if its maker--poet, painter, or novelist--could but have become its
audience too, for a single day, before he launched it irrevocably upon
the uncertain ocean of publicity, how much better his boat would often
sail! How many little touches to the rigging he would give, how many
little drops of oil to the engines here and there, the need of which he
had never suspected, but for that trial trip! That's where the
ship-builders and dramatists have the advantage over us others: they can
dock their productions and tinker at them. Even to the musician comes
this useful chance, and Schumann can reform the proclamation which opens
his B-flat Symphony.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde: thing pure, noble, honest, without stain. The world seemed to me
finer because you were in it, and goodness more real because you
lived. And now - oh, when I think that I made of a man like you my
ideal! the ideal of my life!
SIR ROBERT CHILTERN. There was your mistake. There was your error.
The error all women commit. Why can't you women love us, faults and
all? Why do you place us on monstrous pedestals? We have all feet
of clay, women as well as men; but when we men love women, we love
them knowing their weaknesses, their follies, their imperfections,
love them all the more, it may be, for that reason. It is not the
perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love. It is when we are
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