| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: she supports, be turned out into the streets? For, it is remarkable, that,
with theorists of this class, it is not toil, or the amount of toil,
crushing alike to brain and body, which the female undertakes that is
objected to; it is the form and the amount of the reward. It is not the
hand-labouring woman, even in his own society, worn out and prematurely
aged at forty with grinding domestic toil, that has no beginning and knows
no end--
"Man's work is from sun to sun,
But the woman's work is never done"--
it is not the haggard, work-crushed woman and mother who irons his shirts,
or the potential mother who destroys health and youth in the sweater's den
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Illustrious Gaudissart by Honore de Balzac: would say, "The good-man does not hear anything to-day."
On two or three occasions in the course of five years, and usually
about the time of the equinox, this remark had driven him to frenzy;
he flourished his knives and shouted, "That joke dishonors me!"
As for his daily life, he ate, drank, and walked about like other men
in sound health; and so it happened that he was treated with about the
same respect and attention that we give to a heavy piece of furniture.
Among his many absurdities was one of which no man had as yet
discovered the object, although by long practice the wiseheads of the
community had learned to unravel the meaning of most of his vagaries.
He insisted on keeping a sack of flour and two puncheons of wine in
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Coxon Fund by Henry James: bewildering effect, at which her eyes followed so hungrily the
little flourish of the letter with which I emphasised them that I
instinctively slipped Mr. Pudney's communication into my pocket.
She looked, in her embarrassed annoyance, capable of grabbing it to
send it back to him. I felt, after she had gone, as if I had
almost given her my word I wouldn't deliver the enclosure. The
passionate movement, at any rate, with which, in solitude, I
transferred the whole thing, unopened, from my pocket to a drawer
which I double-locked would have amounted, for an initiated
observer, to some such pledge.
CHAPTER XII
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