| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy: leader of fashion in this country; Sir Percy Blakeney has more money
than any half-dozen other men put together, he is hand and glove with
royalty, and your trying to snub Lady Blakeney will not harm her, but
will make you look a fool. Isn't that so, my Lord?
But what Lord Grenville thought of this matter, or to what
reflections this comely tirade of Lady Portarles led the Comtesse de
Tournay, remained unspoken, for the curtain had just risen on the
third act of ORPHEUS, and admonishments to silence came from every
part of the house.
Lord Grenville took a hasty farewell of the ladies and slipped
back into his box, where M. Chauvelin had sat through this
The Scarlet Pimpernel |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: This was his rarest quality. Far on in middle age, when men begin
to lie down with the bestial goddesses, Comfort and Respectability,
the strings of his nature still sounded as high a note as a young
man's. He loved the harsh voice of duty like a call to battle. He
loved courage, enterprise, brave natures, a brave word, an ugly
virtue; everything that lifts us above the table where we eat or
the bed we sleep upon. This with no touch of the motive-monger or
the ascetic. He loved his virtues to be practical, his heroes to
be great eaters of beef; he loved the jovial Heracles, loved the
astute Odysseus; not the Robespierres and Wesleys. A fine buoyant
sense of life and of man's unequal character ran through all his
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy: But as the days, and still more particularly the lonely evenings,
dragged along, he found himself, to his moral consternation,
to be thinking more of her instead of thinking less of her,
and experiencing a fearful bliss in doing what was erratic,
informal, and unexpected. Surrounded by her influence all day,
walking past the spots she frequented, he was always thinking
of her, and was obliged to own to himself that his conscience
was likely to be the loser in this battle.
To be sure she was almost an ideality to him still. Perhaps to know her
would be to cure himself of this unexpected and unauthorized passion.
A voice whispered that, though he desired to know her, he did not desire
Jude the Obscure |
