| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy: filled in a possible strength in an actual weakness. Marriage
transforms a distraction into a support, the power of
which should be, and happily often is, in direct pro-
portion to the degree of imbecility it supplants. Oak
began now to see light in this direction, and said to
himself, "I'll make her my wife, or upon my soul I shall
be good for nothing!"
All this while he was perplexing himself about an
errand on which he might consistently visit the cottage
of Bathsheba's aunt.
He found his opportunity in the death of a ewe,
Far From the Madding Crowd |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lin McLean by Owen Wister: but the one where faith also had seemed to unite. Had he not married
once, innocent of the woman's being already a wife? But I stopped, for to
trench here was not for me or any one.
And my pause strangely flashed on him something of that I had in my mind.
"No," he said, his eyes steady and serious upon me, "don't you ask about
the things you're meaning." Then his face grew radiant and rather stern.
"Do you suppose I don't know she's too good for me? And that some bygones
can't ever be bygones? But if you," he said, "never come to look away up
to a woman from away down, and mean to win her just the same as if you
did deserve her, why, you'll make a turruble mess of the whole business!"
When we walked in silence for a long while, he lighted again with the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from At the Sign of the Cat & Racket by Honore de Balzac: stealing out at night from the palace of Claudius."
"Theodore!" said a faint voice.
"I will kill her!"
"My dear----"
"She is in love with that little cavalry colonel, because he rides
well----"
"Theodore!"
"Let me be!" said the painter in a tone almost like a roar.
It would be odious to describe the whole scene. In the end the frenzy
of passion prompted the artist to acts and words which any woman not
so young as Augustine would have ascribed to madness.
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