| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Summer by Edith Wharton: violence for violence, but this calm acceptance of
things as they were left her without a weapon.
"See here, Charity--you're always telling me I've got
no rights over you. There might be two ways of looking
at that--but I ain't going to argue it. All I know is
I raised you as good as I could, and meant fairly by
you always except once, for a bad half-hour. There's
no justice in weighing that half-hour against the rest,
and you know it. If you hadn't, you wouldn't have gone
on living under my roof. Seems to me the fact of your
doing that gives me some sort of a right; the right to
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling: cloth. That is the Bisara of Pooree, and it were better for a man
to take a king cobra in his hand than to touch the Bisara of Pooree.
All kinds of magic are out of date and done away with except in
India where nothing changes in spite of the shiny, toy-scum stuff
that people call "civilization." Any man who knows about the Bisara
of Pooree will tell you what its powers are--always supposing that
it has been honestly stolen. It is the only regularly working,
trustworthy love-charm in the country, with one exception.
[The other charm is in the hands of a trooper of the Nizam's Horse,
at a place called Tuprani, due north of Hyderabad.] This can be
depended upon for a fact. Some one else may explain it.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Recruit by Honore de Balzac: waited, trembling, till it should please him to depart.
"Citoyenne," he said, after a long silence in which there was
something terrifying, "I am here to enforce the laws of the Republic."
Madame de Dey shuddered.
"Have you nothing to reveal to me?" he demanded.
"Nothing," she replied, astonished.
"Ah! madame," cried the prosecutor, changing his tone and seating
himself beside her, "at this moment, for want of a word between us,
you and I may be risking our heads on the scaffold. I have too long
observed your character, your soul, your manners, to share the error
into which you have persuaded your friends this evening. You are, I
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