| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Davis: baby, and threw him on the pallet. Three days after, he tried
it again: that time reached the wall. Lord help you! he fought
like a tiger,--giv' some terrible blows. Fightin' for life, you
see; for he can't live long, shut up in the stone crib down
yonder. Got a death-cough now. 'T took two of us to bring him
down that day; so I just put the irons on his feet. There he
sits, in there. Goin' to-morrow, with a batch more of 'em.
That woman, hunchback, tried with him,--you remember?--she's
only got three years. 'Complice. But she's a woman, you know.
He's been quiet ever since I put on irons: giv' up, I suppose.
Looks white, sick-lookin'. It acts different on 'em, bein'
Life in the Iron-Mills |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield: cottages. In some of them there was a flicker of light, and a shadow,
crab-like, moved across the window. Laura bent her head and hurried on.
She wished now she had put on a coat. How her frock shone! And the big
hat with the velvet streamer--if only it was another hat! Were the people
looking at her? They must be. It was a mistake to have come; she knew all
along it was a mistake. Should she go back even now?
No, too late. This was the house. It must be. A dark knot of people
stood outside. Beside the gate an old, old woman with a crutch sat in a
chair, watching. She had her feet on a newspaper. The voices stopped as
Laura drew near. The group parted. It was as though she was expected, as
though they had known she was coming here.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: has veered round again from Pembroke to Southampton; but even so his
work was not wasted: it is by exhausting all the hypotheses that we
reach the verifiable one; and after all, the wrong road always leads
somewhere.
Frank Harris's play was written long before mine. I read it in
manuscript before the Shakespear Memorial National Theatre was mooted;
and if there is anything except the Fitton theory (which is Tyler's
property) in my play which is also in Mr Harris's it was I who annexed
it from him and not he from me. It does not matter anyhow, because
this play of mine is a brief trifle, and full of manifest
impossibilities at that; whilst Mr Harris's play is serious both in
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