| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Soul of a Bishop by H. G. Wells: seized with a panic fear, entirely irrational and unjustifiable,
that he would not be able to deliver the address. The fear had
arisen after lunch, had gripped his mind, and then as now had
come the thought, "If only I could smoke!" And he had smoked. It
seemed better to break a vow than fail the Association. He had
fallen to the temptation with a completeness that now filled him
with shame and horror. He had stalked Dunk, his valet-butler, out
of the dining-room, had affected to need a book from the
book-case
beyond the sideboard, had gone insincerely to the sideboard
humming "From Greenland's icy mountains," and then, glancing over
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from In the Cage by Henry James: of this and that one whom she would on the chance have just simply
liked to BE. Her conceit, her baffled vanity, was possibly
monstrous; she certainly often threw herself into a defiant
conviction that she would have done the whole thing much better.
But her greatest comfort, mostly, was her comparative vision of the
men; by whom I mean the unmistakeable gentlemen, for she had no
interest in the spurious or the shabby and no mercy at all for the
poor. She could have found a sixpence, outside, for an appearance
of want; but her fancy, in some directions so alert, had never a
throb of response for any sign of the sordid. The men she did
track, moreover, she tracked mainly in one relation, the relation
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lay Morals by Robert Louis Stevenson: in which we impoverish mankind and ourselves. It is another
question for each man's heart. He knows if he can enjoy what
he buys and uses; if he cannot, he is a dog in the manger;
nay, it he cannot, I contend he is a thief, for nothing
really belongs to a man which he cannot use. Proprietor is
connected with propriety; and that only is the man's which is
proper to his wants and faculties.
A youth, in choosing a career, must not be alarmed by
poverty. Want is a sore thing, but poverty does not imply
want. It remains to be seen whether with half his present
income, or a third, he cannot, in the most generous sense,
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