| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The American by Henry James: But Noemie tells me that Rome was not built in a day, that she is
making great progress, that I must leave her to her own devices.
The fact is, without prejudice to her genius, that she has no idea
of burying herself alive. She likes to see the world, and to be seen.
She says, herself, that she can't work in the dark. With her appearance
it is very natural. Only, I can't help worrying and trembling
and wondering what may happen to her there all alone, day after day,
amid all that coming and going of strangers. I can't be always at her side.
I go with her in the morning, and I come to fetch her away, but she
won't have me near her in the interval; she says I make her nervous.
As if it didn't make me nervous to wander about all day without her!
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Enemies of Books by William Blades: of our oldest literature and Folk-lore. What made Fatima
so anxious to know the contents of the room forbidden her
by Bluebeard? It was positively nothing to her, and its
contents caused not the slightest annoyance to anybody.
That story has a bad moral, and it would, in many ways, have been
more satisfactory had the heroine been left to take her place in
the blood-stained chamber, side by side with her peccant predecessors.
Why need the women-folk (God forgive me!) bother themselves about
the inside of a man's library, and whether it wants dusting or not?
My boys' playroom, in which is a carpenter's bench, a lathe,
and no end of litter, is never tidied--perhaps it can't be,
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: womanly beauty -
"A countenance in which did meet
Sweet records, promises as sweet."
The perfect loveliness of a woman's countenance can only consist in
that majestic peace, which is founded in the memory of happy and
useful years,--full of sweet records; and from the joining of this
with that yet more majestic childishness, which is still full of
change and promise;--opening always--modest at once, and bright,
with hope of better things to be won, and to be bestowed. There is
no old age where there is still that promise.
Thus, then, you have first to mould her physical frame, and then, as
|
