| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Mansfield Park by Jane Austen: What is your advice?"
"My advice," said he calmly, "is that you change the play."
"_I_ should have no objection," she replied; "for though
I should not particularly dislike the part of Amelia
if well supported, that is, if everything went well,
I shall be sorry to be an inconvenience; but as they
do not chuse to hear your advice at _that_ _table_"
(looking round), "it certainly will not be taken."
Edmund said no more.
"If _any_ part could tempt _you_ to act, I suppose it would
be Anhalt," observed the lady archly, after a short pause;
Mansfield Park |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Village Rector by Honore de Balzac: repentance of her who caused the crime. All has been repaired so far
as society is concerned; but I am still responsible for that life,
crushed in its bud,--a life confided to me and for which I am now
required to render an account."
The flame of her eyes was veiled in tears.
"There is here, before me, a man," she continued, "who, because he did
his duty strictly, has been to me an object of hatred which I thought
eternal. He was the first inflictor of my punishment. My feet were
still too deep in blood, I was too near the deed, not to hate justice.
So long as that root of anger lay in my heart, I knew there was still
a lingering remnant of condemnable passion. I had nothing to forgive
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: It killed the old-fashioned keel-boating, by reducing
the freight-trip to New Orleans to less than a week.
The railroads have killed the steamboat passenger traffic by doing
in two or three days what the steamboats consumed a week in doing;
and the towing-fleets have killed the through-freight traffic
by dragging six or seven steamer-loads of stuff down the river
at a time, at an expense so trivial that steamboat competition
was out of the question.
Freight and passenger way-traffic remains to the steamers.
This is in the hands--along the two thousand miles of river between
St. Paul and New Orleans---of two or three close corporations well
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