| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Prince of Bohemia by Honore de Balzac: will.'
"Well," concluded Nathan, "I ask myself sometimes whether du Bruel is
really deceived. Truly there is nothing more comic, nothing stranger
than the sight of a careless young fellow ruling a married couple, his
slightest whims received as law, the weightiest decisions revoked at a
word from him. That dinner incident, as you can see, is repeated times
without number, it interferes with important matters. Still, but for
Claudine's caprices, du Bruel would be de Cursy still, one
vaudevillist among five hundred; whereas he is in the House of Peers."
"You will change the names, I hope!" said Nathan, addressing Mme. de
la Baudraye.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Research Magnificent by H. G. Wells: him this saving crisis of the nerves. That, indeed, is the chief
superiority of idle love-making over other more prevalent forms of
idleness and self-indulgence; it does at least bear its proper
label. It is reprehensible. It brings your careless honour to the
challenge of concealment and shabby evasions and lies. . . .
But in this pellucid air things took their proper proportions again.
And now what was he to do?
"Politics," he said aloud to the turf and the sky.
Is there any other work for an aristocratic man? . . . Science?
One could admit science in that larger sense that sweeps in History,
or Philosophy. Beyond that whatever work there is is work for which
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: labour, and who, in place of life, is recognised as producing disease and
death, but who exists parasitically through her sexual attribute. Enormous
as is the distance between the women at the two extremes of this series,
and sharply opposed as their relation to the world is, there is yet, in
actual life, no sharp, clear, sudden-drawn line dividing the women of the
one type from those of the other. They shade off into each other by
delicate and in sensible degrees. And it is down this inclined plane that
the women of civilised races are peculiarly tempted, unconsciously, to
slip; from the noble height of a condition of the most strenuous social
activity, into a condition of complete, helpless, and inactive parasitism,
without being clearly aware of the fact themselves, and without society's
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