| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Virginian by Owen Wister: thrilling down through the blood of generations of schoolboys.
This ancestress was her chief claim to be a member of those
shining societies which I have enumerated. But she had been
willing to join none of them, although invitations to do so were
by no means lacking. I cannot tell you her reason. Still, I can
tell you this. When these societies were much spoken of in her
presence, her very sprightly countenance became more sprightly,
and she added her words of praise or respect to the general
chorus. But when she received an invitation to join one of these
bodies, her countenance, as she read the missive, would assume an
expression which was known to her friends as " slicking her nose
The Virginian |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Mother by Owen Wister: "But he hasn't. Richard hasn't told me anything."
"Ethel! Then what is the matter?"
"I told him something. I told him that if it was going to be any story
about--about something I shouldn't like, I should simply follow it with a
story about him that he wouldn't like."
"Ethel! You darling!"
"Oh, yes, and I said I was sure you would all listen, even though I was
not an author myself. And I have it ready, you know, and it's awfully
like Richard, only a different side of him from the burglar one."
"But, my dear, what did he do when you--"
This enquiry was, however, cut short by the entrance of the men. And from
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: diligence, obedience, and continual and shameless assumption of moral
and intellectual authority. Thus the schoolboy hears both sides, and
is so far better off than the homebred boy who hears only one. But
the two sides are not fairly presented. They are presented as good
and evil, as vice and virtue, as villainy and heroism. The boy feels
mean and cowardly when he obeys, and selfish and rascally when he
disobeys. He looses his moral courage just as he comes to hate books
and languages. In the end, John Ruskin, tied so close to his mother's
apron-string that he did not escape even when he went to Oxford, and
John Stuart Mill, whose father ought to have been prosecuted for
laying his son's childhood waste with lessons, were superior, as
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