| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Happy Prince and Other Tales by Oscar Wilde: It came from a tall, supercilious-looking Rocket, who was tied to
the end of a long stick. He always coughed before he made any
observation, so as to attract attention.
"Ahem! ahem!" he said, and everybody listened except the poor
Catherine Wheel, who was still shaking her head, and murmuring,
"Romance is dead."
"Order! order!" cried out a Cracker. He was something of a
politician, and had always taken a prominent part in the local
elections, so he knew the proper Parliamentary expressions to use.
"Quite dead," whispered the Catherine Wheel, and she went off to
sleep.
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Study of a Woman by Honore de Balzac: new Maintenon to the gloomy piety of the last days of Louis XIV., and
enough worldliness to adopt the habits of gallantry of the first years
of that reign, should it ever be revived. At the present moment she is
strictly virtuous from policy, possibly from inclination. Married for
the last seven years to the Marquis de Listomere, one of those
deputies who expect a peerage, she may also consider that such conduct
will promote the ambitions of her family. Some women are reserving
their opinion of her until the moment when Monsieur de Listomere
becomes a peer of France, when she herself will be thirty-six years of
age,--a period of life when most women discover that they are the
dupes of social laws.
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Coxon Fund by Henry James: interest is that it concerns even more closely several other
persons. Such episodes, as one looks back, are the little dramas
that made up the innumerable facets of the big drama--which is yet
to be reported.
CHAPTER II
It is furthermore remarkable that though the two stories are
distinct--my own, as it were, and this other--they equally began,
in a manner, the first night of my acquaintance with Frank Saltram,
the night I came back from Wimbledon so agitated with a new sense
of life that, in London, for the very thrill of it, I could only
walk home. Walking and swinging my stick, I overtook, at
|
