| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Market-Place by Harold Frederic: though worn almost to shabbiness, conveyed an indefinable sense
of some theological standard, or pretence to such a standard.
His meagre face, too, with its infinity of anxious yet
meaningless lines, and its dim spectacled eyes, so plainly
overtaxed by the effort to discern anything clearly,
might have belonged to any old village priest grown
childish and blear-eyed in the solitude of stupid books.
Even the blotches of tell-tale colour on his long nose
were not altogether unclerical in their suggestion.
A poor old man he seemed, as he stood blinking in the
electric light of the strange, warm apartment--a helpless,
The Market-Place |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lady Susan by Jane Austen: friends on whom you depend. It is not for us to blame any expectations on
your father's side of your marrying to advantage; where possessions are so
extensive as those of your family, the wish of increasing them, if not
strictly reasonable, is too common to excite surprize or resentment. He has
a right to require; a woman of fortune in his daughter-in-law, and I am
sometimes quarrelling with myself for suffering you to form a connection so
imprudent; but the influence of reason is often acknowledged too late by
those who feel like me. I have now been but a few months a widow, and,
however little indebted to my husband's memory for any happiness derived
from him during a union of some years, I cannot forget that the indelicacy
of so early a second marriage must subject me to the censure of the world,
Lady Susan |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Juana by Honore de Balzac: other chances for elevation. We sometimes meet with invalid women,
feeble beings apparently, who, without rising from sofas or leaving
their chambers, have ruled society, moved a thousand springs, and
placed their husbands where their ambition or their vanity prompted.
But Juana, whose childhood was passed in her retreat in Tarragona,
knew nothing of the vices, the meannesses, or the resources of
Parisian society; she looked at that society with the curiosity of a
girl, but she learned from it only that which her sorrow and her
wounded pride revealed to her.
Juana had the tact of a virgin heart which receives impressions in
advance of the event, after the manner of what are called
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