| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Wheels of Chance by H. G. Wells: has undergone a wonderful change. Ever since he lost that 'spoor'
in Chichester, he has been tormented by the most horrible visions
of the shameful insults that may be happening. The strangeness of
new surroundings has been working to strip off the habitual
servile from him. Here was moonlight rising over the memory of a
red sunset, dark shadows and glowing orange lamps, beauty
somewhere mysteriously rapt away from him, tangible wrong in a
brown suit and an unpleasant face, flouting him. Mr. Hoopdriver
for the time, was in the world of Romance and Knight-errantry,
divinely forgetful of his social position or hers; forgetting,
too, for the time any of the wretched timidities that had tied
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lady Baltimore by Owen Wister: almost at once John and Eliza came down the stairs. Miss Josephine took
each of them to her heart, but she did not trust herself to speak; and a
single tear rolled down her face, as the boy and girl continued to the
hall-door. There Daddy Ben stood, and John's gay good-by to him was the
last word that I heard the bridegroom say. While we all stood silently
watching them as they drove away from the tall iron gate, the
mocking-bird on the staircase broke into melodious ripples of song.
XXIII: Poor Aunt Carola!
And now here goes my language back into the small-clothes that it wore at
the beginning of all, when I told you something of that colonial society,
the Selected Salic Scions, dear to the heart of my Aunt. It were beyond
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The School For Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan: even better than that which has hitherto been read and acted.
As I have endeavoured to reproduce the works of Sheridan as he
wrote them, I may be told that he was a bad hand at punctuating
and very bad at spelling. . . . But Sheridan's shortcomings as a
speller have been exaggerated." Lest "Sheridan's shortcomings"
either in spelling or in punctuation should obscure the text,
I have, in this edition, inserted in brackets some explanatory
suggestions. It has seemed best, also, to adopt a uniform method
for indicating stage-directions and abbreviations of the names of
characters. There can be no gain to the reader in reproducing,
for example, Sheridan's different indications for the part of
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