| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from House of Mirth by Edith Wharton: by the appeal of her exquisite nearness, he was ready to swear
that such a marriage was a desecration, and that, as a man of
honour, he was bound to do all he could to protect her from the
results of her disinterestedness. This impulse was reinforced by
the reflection that if she had married Gryce she would have been
surrounded by flattery and approval, whereas, having refused to
sacrifice herself to expediency, she was left to bear the whole
cost of her resistance. Hang it, if he could find a way out of
such difficulties for a professional sponge like Carry Fisher,
who was simply a mental habit corresponding to the physical
titillations of the cigarette or the cock-tail, he could surely
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson: bones were already white, before the winds and the waves and
the humour of Indian chiefs and Spanish governors had decided
whether they were to be unknown and useless martyrs or
honoured heroes. Indeed, I believe this is the lesson: if it
is for fame that men do brave actions, they are only silly
fellows after all.
It is at best but a pettifogging, pickthank business to
decompose actions into little personal motives, and explain
heroism away. The Abstract Bagman will grow like an Admiral
at heart, not by ungrateful carping, but in a heat of
admiration. But there is another theory of the personal
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Hermione's Little Group of Serious Thinkers by Don Marquis: own good, you know, and because one owes a spir-
itual duty to one's servants -- and she got angry and
gave notice.
The servant problem is frightful. It will have to
be taken seriously.
BLOUSES, BURGARS AND BUTTERMILK
SOME of us -- Our Little Group of Advanced
Thinkers, you know -- are going in for Bul-
garian buttermilk.
It came in about the time the Bulgarian blouses
did -- there was a war over there somewhere, you
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