| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Lock and Key Library by Julian Hawthorne, Ed.: d'hote being very delightful--of one being certain to meet pleasant
people there." It may be so. For many years I believed it was so.
The general verdict received my assent. I had never met those
delightful people, but was always expecting to meet them. Hitherto
they had been conspicuous by their absence. According to my
experience in Spain, France, and Germany, such dinners had been
dreary or noisy and vapid. If the guests were English, they were
chillingly silent, or surlily monosyllabic: to their neighbors they
were frigid; amongst each other they spoke in low undertones. And
if the guests were foreigners, they were noisy, clattering, and
chattering, foolish for the most part, and vivaciously commonplace.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Koran: inheritance for that which ye have done. Therein shall ye have much
fruit whereof to eat.
Verily, the sinners are in the torment of hell to dwell for aye.
It shall not be intermitted for them, and they therein shall be
confused. We have not wronged them, but it was themselves they
wronged.
And they shall cry out, 'O Malik! let thy lord make an end of us;'
he shall say, 'Verily, ye are to tarry here.'
We have brought you the truth, but most of you are averse from the
truth. Have they arranged the affair? then will we arrange it too!
Or do they reckon that we did not hear their secrets and their
The Koran |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft: AUTHOR'S PREFACE
THE WRONGS OF WOMAN, like the wrongs of the oppressed part of
mankind, may be deemed necessary by their oppressors: but surely
there are a few, who will dare to advance before the improvement
of the age, and grant that my sketches are not the abortion of a
distempered fancy, or the strong delineations of a wounded heart.
In writing this novel, I have rather endeavoured to pourtray
passions than manners.
In many instances I could have made the incidents more dramatic,
would I have sacrificed my main object, the desire of exhibiting
the misery and oppression, peculiar to women, that arise out of
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