| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Enemies of Books by William Blades: some for ornament, where you pass pleasant hours? and is--
ah! there's the rub!--is there a special hand-maid, whose
special duty it is to keep your den daily dusted and in order?
Plead you guilty to these indictments? then am I sure of
a sympathetic co-sufferer.
Dust! it is all a delusion. It is not the dust that makes
women anxious to invade the inmost recesses of your Sanctum--
it is an ingrained curiosity. And this feminine weakness,
which dates from Eve, is a common motive in the stories
of our oldest literature and Folk-lore. What made Fatima
so anxious to know the contents of the room forbidden her
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: blue, seemed the reply vouchsafed by nature to the mood of her chosen
spirits. These chosen spirits were to be found also among the deer,
dumbly basking, and among the fish, set still in mid-stream, for they
were mute sharers in a benignant state not needing any exposition by
the tongue. No words that Cassandra could come by expressed the
stillness, the brightness, the air of expectancy which lay upon the
orderly beauty of the grass walks and gravel paths down which they
went walking four abreast that Sunday afternoon. Silently the shadows
of the trees lay across the broad sunshine; silence wrapt her heart in
its folds. The quivering stillness of the butterfly on the half-opened
flower, the silent grazing of the deer in the sun, were the sights her
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Arizona Nights by Stewart Edward White: almost crazy now. I suppose you think I'm a bad woman, but I am
not. You won't believe that. Its' true though. The desert
would make anyone bad. I don't see how you stand it. You've
been good to me, and I've really tried, but it's no use. The
country is awful. I never ought to have come. I'm sorry you are
going to think me a bad woman, for I like you and admire you, but
nothing, NOTHING could make me stay here any longer." She
signed herself simply Estrella Sands, her maiden name.
Buck Johnson stood staring at the paper for a much longer time
than was necessary merely to absorb the meaning of the words.
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