| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Madame Firmiani by Honore de Balzac: cent interest. But all I had did not suffice to cover the full amount.
We were lovers enough for her to offer, and me to accept, her
savings--"
"What! besides her other virtues does that adorable woman lay by
money?" cried his uncle.
"Don't laugh at her, uncle; her position has obliged her to be very
careful. Her husband went to Greece in 1820 and died there three years
later. It has been impossible, up to the present time, to get legal
proofs of his death, or obtain the will which he made leaving his
whole property to his wife. These papers were either lost or stolen,
or have gone astray during the troubles in Greece,--a country where
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Bureaucracy by Honore de Balzac: a servant, she never went out alone. Though living close by the
boulevard du Temple, where Franconi, La Gaite, and l'Ambigu-Comique
were within a stone's throw, and, further on, the Porte-Saint-Martin,
Elisabeth had never seen a comedy. When she asked to "see what it was
like" (with the Abbe Gaudron's permission, be it understood), Monsieur
Baudoyer took her--for the glory of the thing, and to show her the
finest that was to be seen--to the Opera, where they were playing "The
Chinese Laborer." Elisabeth thought "the comedy" as wearisome as the
plague of flies, and never wished to see another. On Sundays, after
walking four times to and fro between the place Royale and Saint-
Paul's church (for her mother made her practise the precepts and the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: woman, seeking only increased pleasure and luxury from her relations with
man, stands the male seeking only pleasure and self-indulgence from his
relations with her. Side by side with the New Woman, anxious for labour
and seeking from man only such love and fellowship as she gives, stands the
New Man, anxious to possess her only on the terms she offers. If the
social movement, through which the most advanced women of our day are
attempting to bring themselves into co-ordination with the new conditions
of life, removes them immeasurably from certain types of the primitive
male; the same movement equally removes the new male from the old female.
The sexual tragedy of modern life lies, not in the fact that woman as such
is tending to differ fundamentally from man as such; but that, in the
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