| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from At the Sign of the Cat & Racket by Honore de Balzac: you. Did I not tell you long ago that the man was mad! Your maid has
told me pretty stories. Why, he must be a perfect monster!"
Augustine laid a finger on her white lips, as if to implore a moment's
silence. During this dreadful night misery had led her to that patient
resignation which in mothers and loving wives transcends in its
effects all human energy, and perhaps reveals in the heart of women
the existence of certain chords which God has withheld from men.
An inscription engraved on a broken column in the cemetery at
Montmartre states that Madame de Sommervieux died at the age of
twenty-seven. In the simple words of this epitaph one of the timid
creature's friends can read the last scene of a tragedy. Every year,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Fanny Herself by Edna Ferber: and read. There was no one to censor her reading, so she
read promiscuously, wading gloriously through trash and
classic and historical and hysterical alike, and finding
something of interest in them all.
She read the sprightly "Duchess" novels, where mad offers of
marriage were always made in flower-scented conservatories;
she read Dickens, and Thelma, and old bound Cosmopolitans,
and Zola, and de Maupassant, and the "Wide, Wide World," and
"Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates," and "Jane Eyre." All
of which are merely mentioned as examples of her
catholicism in literature. As she read she was unaware
Fanny Herself |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Odyssey by Homer: in the pride of his might and of his strength of arm, that
he will lead me to his home and make me his wife? Nay he
himself, methinks, has no such hope in his breast; so, as
for that, let not any of you fret himself while feasting in
this place; that were indeed unmeet.'
Then Eurymachus, son of Polybus, answered her, saying:
'Daughter of Icarius, wise Penelope, it is not that we deem
that he will lead thee to his home,--far be such a thought
from us,--but we dread the speech of men and women, lest
some day one of the baser sort among the Achaeans say:
"Truly men far too mean are wooing the wife of one that is
The Odyssey |
