| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Lady Windermere's Fan by Oscar Wilde: about her life. I tell you simply this - Mrs. Erlynne was once
honoured, loved, respected. She was well born, she had position -
she lost everything - threw it away, if you like. That makes it
all the more bitter. Misfortunes one can endure - they come from
outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults -
ah! - there is the sting of life. It was twenty years ago, too.
She was little more than a girl then. She had been a wife for even
less time than you have.
LADY WINDERMERE. I am not interested in her - and - you should not
mention this woman and me in the same breath. It is an error of
taste. [Sitting R. at desk.]
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Ball at Sceaux by Honore de Balzac: Lady Dudley's?"
"Lady Dudley may have some male relation staying with her," said the
Baron de Fontaine; "but a young girl!--No!"
Next day Mademoiselle de Fontaine expressed a wish to take a ride.
Then she gradually accustomed her old uncle and her brothers to
escorting her in very early rides, excellent, she declared for her
health. She had a particular fancy for the environs of the hamlet
where Lady Dudley was living. Notwithstanding her cavalry manoeuvres,
she did not meet the stranger so soon as the eager search she pursued
might have allowed her to hope. She went several times to the "Bal de
Sceaux" without seeing the young Englishman who had dropped from the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Man in Lower Ten by Mary Roberts Rinehart: in the wind; he drops his characters overboard when he hasn't any
further use for them and drowns them; he forgets the coffee-pot and
the frying-pan and all the other small essentials, and, if he carries
a love affair, he mutters a fervent "Allah be praised" when he lands
them, drenched with adventures, at the matrimonial dock at the end
of the final chapter.
I put in a thoroughly unsatisfactory afternoon. Time dragged
eternally. I dropped in at a summer vaudeville, and bought some
ties at a haberdasher's. I was bored but unexpectant; I had no
premonition of what was to come. Nothing unusual had ever happened
to me; friends of mine had sometimes sailed the high seas of
The Man in Lower Ten |
