| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Edition of The Ambassadors by Henry James: "Why, didn't you see it all at the hotel?"
"Oh"--she was amused--"'all' is a good deal to say. I don't know--
I forget. I lost myself in HER."
"You were splendid," Strether returned--"but 'all' isn't a good
deal to say: it's only a little. Yet it's charming so far as it
goes. She wants a man to herself."
"And hasn't she got you?"
"Do you think she looked at me--or even at you--as if she had?"
Strether easily dismissed that irony. "Every one, you see, must
strike her as having somebody. You've got Chad--and Chad has
got you."
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Juana by Honore de Balzac: purity and whiteness. Reborn into virtue and chastity, there is no
past for her; she is all future, and should forget the things behind
her to relearn life. In this sense the famous words which a modern
poet has put into the lips of Marion Delorme is infused with truth,--
"And Love remade me virgin."
That line seems like a reminiscence of a tragedy of Corneille, so
truly does it recall the energetic diction of the father of our modern
theatre. Yet the poet was forced to sacrifice it to the essentially
vaudevillist spirit of the pit.
So Juana loveless was doomed to be Juana humiliated, degraded,
hopeless. She could not honor the man who took her thus. She felt, in
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from In the Cage by Henry James: to be but the positive creation of a dream. She saw, straight
before her, like a vista painted in a picture, the empty street and
the lamps that burned pale in the dusk not yet established. It was
into the convenience of this quiet twilight that a gentleman on the
doorstep of the Chambers gazed with a vagueness that our young
lady's little figure violently trembled, in the approach, with the
measure of its power to dissipate. Everything indeed grew in a
flash terrific and distinct; her old uncertainties fell away from
her, and, since she was so familiar with fate, she felt as if the
very nail that fixed it were driven in by the hard look with which,
for a moment, Captain Everard awaited her.
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