| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Deputy of Arcis by Honore de Balzac: can wake me; but if Mollot drops off first my night is ruined--"
"Don't you ever go off together?" said Achille Pigoult, joining the
group. "I see you are talking of sleep."
"Hush, naughty boy!" replied Madame Mollot, graciously.
"Do you know what they mean?" whispered Cecile to Ernestine.
"At any rate, he was not in at one o'clock in the morning," continued
Madame Mollot.
"Then he defrauded you!--came home without your knowing it!" said
Achille Pigoult. "Ha! that man is sly indeed; he'll put us all in his
pouch and sell us in the market-place."
"To whom?" asked Vinet.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Mrs. Warren's Profession by George Bernard Shaw: morality which sends a pallid crowd of critics into the street
shrieking that the pillars of society are cracking and the ruin
of the State is at hand. Even the Ibsen champions of ten years
ago remonstrate with me just as the veterans of those brave days
remonstrated with them. Mr Grein, the hardy iconoclast who first
launched my plays on the stage alongside Ghosts and The Wild
Duck, exclaimed that I have shattered his ideals. Actually his
ideals! What would Dr Relling say? And Mr William Archer
himself disowns me because I "cannot touch pitch without
wallowing in it". Truly my play must be more needed than I knew;
and yet I thought I knew how little the others know.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Voice of the City by O. Henry: her voice that made you think of lorgnettes, of ac-
counts at Tiffany's, of sledges smoothly gliding on
the trail from Dawson to Forty Mile, of the tinkling
of pendant prisms on your grandmothers' chandeliers,
of snow lying on a convent roof; of a police sergeant
refusing bail. "Your mother," continued Alicia,
"invites us to make a visit to the farm. I have
never seen a farm. We will go there for a week or
two, Robert."
"We will," said Robert, with the grand air of an
associate Supreme Justice concurring in an opinion.
The Voice of the City |
