| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Pool in the Desert by Sara Jeanette Duncan: and he implied too much. He had magnificent shoulders, which he
bent a great deal over secluded sofas, and a very languid interest
in matters over which ordinary men were enthusiastic. He seemed to
believe that if he smiled all the way across his face, he would
damage a conventionality. His clothes were unexceptionable, and he
always did the right thing, though bored by the necessity. He was
good-looking in an ugly way, which gave him an air of restrained
capacity for melodrama, and made women think him interesting.
Somebody with a knack of disparagement said that he was too much
expressed. It rather added to his unpopularity that he was a man
whom women usually took with preposterous seriousness--all but Kitty
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Soul of a Bishop by H. G. Wells: He reread Likeman's letter first.
Likeman could not forgive him.
"My dear Scrope," he wrote, "your explanation explains nothing.
This sensational declaration of infidelity to our mother church,
made under the most damning and distressing circumstances in the
presence of young and tender minds entrusted to your
ministrations, and in defiance of the honourable engagements
implied in the confirmation service, confirms my worst
apprehensions of the weaknesses of your character. I have always
felt the touch of theatricality in your temperament, the peculiar
craving to be pseudo-deeper, pseudo-simpler than us all, the need
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Charmides and Other Poems by Oscar Wilde: The cunning hand which made the flowering hawthorn branches bow
For Southwell's arch, and carved the House of One
Who loved the lilies of the field with all
Our dearest English flowers? the same sun
Rises for us: the seasons natural
Weave the same tapestry of green and grey:
The unchanged hills are with us: but that Spirit hath passed away.
And yet perchance it may be better so,
For Tyranny is an incestuous Queen,
Murder her brother is her bedfellow,
And the Plague chambers with her: in obscene
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