| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling: this picnic--and a dust-storm, more or less, does no great harm.
We gathered by the tank. Some one had brought out a banjo--which
is a most sentimental instrument--and three or four of us sang.
You must not laugh at this. Our amusements in out-of-the-way
Stations are very few indeed. Then we talked in groups or
together, lying under the trees, with the sun-baked roses dropping
their petals on our feet, until supper was ready. It was a
beautiful supper, as cold and as iced as you could wish; and we
stayed long over it.
I had felt that the air was growing hotter and hotter; but nobody
seemed to notice it until the moon went out and a burning hot wind
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Two Poets by Honore de Balzac: her brows, and arms outstretched to talent of every kind. Great men
would greet him there as one of their order. Everything smiled upon
genius. There, there were no jealous booby-squires to invent stinging
gibes and humiliate a man of letters; there was no stupid indifference
to poetry in Paris. Paris was the fountain-head of poetry; there the
poet was brought into the light and paid for his work. Publishers
should no sooner read the opening pages of An Archer of Charles IX.
than they should open their cash-boxes with "How much do you want?"
And besides all this, he understood that this journey with Mme. de
Bargeton would virtually give her to him; that they should live
together.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lady Windermere's Fan by Oscar Wilde: MRS. ERLYNNE. I have not told HER the truth, you mean.
LORD WINDERMERE. [Standing C.] I sometimes wish you had. I
should have been spared then the misery, the anxiety, the annoyance
of the last six months. But rather than my wife should know - that
the mother whom she was taught to consider as dead, the mother whom
she has mourned as dead, is living - a divorced woman, going about
under an assumed name, a bad woman preying upon life, as I know you
now to be - rather than that, I was ready to supply you with money
to pay bill after bill, extravagance after extravagance, to risk
what occurred yesterday, the first quarrel I have ever had with my
wife. You don't understand what that means to me. How could you?
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