| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane: into some of those grotesque attitudes which were at the time
popular among the dancers in the theatres up-town, giving to the
Bowery public the phantasies of the aristocratic theatre-going
public, at reduced rates.
"Say, Pete," said Maggie, leaning forward, "dis is great."
"Sure," said Pete, with proper complacence.
A ventriloquist followed the dancer. He held two fantastic
dolls on his knees. He made them sing mournful ditties and say
funny things about geography and Ireland.
"Do dose little men talk?" asked Maggie.
"Naw," said Pete, "it's some damn fake. See?"
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Where There's A Will by Mary Roberts Rinehart: head.
"I wish," she said unpleasantly, "I wish you wouldn't always drag
in disagreeable things, Minnie!"
And she was sulky all the way to the house.
Miss Summers came to my room that night as I was putting my hot-
water bottle to bed, in a baby-blue silk wrapper with a band of
fur around the low neck--Miss Summers, of course, not the hot-
water bottle.
"Well!" she said, sitting down on the foot of the bed and staring
at me. "Well, young woman, for a person who has never been
farther away than Finleyville you do pretty well!"
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from War and the Future by H. G. Wells: trenches at Martinpuich. But I do not know how opinion is going
in America, and I am quite unable to estimate the power of these
new ideas I set down, relative to the blind forces of instinct
and tradition that move the mass of mankind. On the whole I
believe more in the reason-guided will-power of men than I did in
the early half of 1914. If I am doubtful whether after all this
war will "end war," I think on the other hand it has had such an
effect of demonstration that it may start a process of thought
and conviction, it may sow the world with organisations and
educational movements considerable enough to grapple with an
either arrest or prevent the next great war catastrophe. I am by
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