| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Unconscious Comedians by Honore de Balzac: who pays me best," continued Fromenteau addressing Gaillard. "You want
to recover fifty thousand francs and you talk farthings to your means
of action. Give me five hundred francs and your man is pinched to-
night, for we spotted him yesterday!"
"Five hundred francs for you alone!" cried Theodore Gaillard.
"Lizette wants a shawl," said the spy, not a muscle of his face
moving. "I call her Lizette because of Beranger."
"You have a Lizette, and you stay in such a business!" cried the
virtuous Gazonal.
"It is amusing! People may cry up the pleasures of hunting and fishing
as much as they like but to stalk a man in Paris is far better fun."
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: morning. It overwhelms me; I want to DO something, yet I can do
nothing and am fit for nothing. . . . I would fain do GREAT
THINGS." Again, after an inspiring interview, he writes: "I
went homewards, intoxicated with joy, hope, and strength. I
wanted to feed upon my happiness in solitude far from all men.
It was late; but, unheeding that, I took a mountain path and went
on like a madman, looking at the heavens, regardless of earth.
Suddenly an instinct made me draw hastily back --I was on the
very edge of a precipice, one step more and I must have fallen.
I took fright and gave up my nocturnal promenade." A. Gratry:
Henri Perreyve, London, 1872, pp. 92, 89.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Weir of Hermiston by Robert Louis Stevenson: when the voice stops and the bright face of the listener is turned away,
solitude falls again on the bruised heart. Kirstie had lost her "cannie
hour at e'en"; she could no more wander with Archie, a ghost if you
will, but a happy ghost, in fields Elysian. And to her it was as if the
whole world had fallen silent; to him, but an unremarkable change of
amusements. And she raged to know it. The effervescency of her
passionate and irritable nature rose within her at times to bursting
point.
This is the price paid by age for unseasonable ardours of feeling. It
must have been so for Kirstie at any time when the occasion chanced; but
it so fell out that she was deprived of this delight in the hour when
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