| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson: time, their eyes stood out of their faces, and their mouths gaped
like codfish at a fishmonger's.
Pretty soon a second measure of mulled ale was called for; and
while Dick was still artfully spinning out the incidents a third
followed the second.
Here was the position of the parties towards the end: Arblaster,
three-parts drunk and one-half asleep, hung helpless on his stool.
Even Tom had been much delighted with the tale, and his vigilance
had abated in proportion. Meanwhile, Dick had gradually wormed his
right arm clear of its bonds, and was ready to risk all.
"And so," said Pirret, "y' are one of these?"
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: throughout the modern civilised world we have reached a point at which the
social demand is not merely for human creatures in the bulk for use as
beasts of burden, but, rather, and only, for such human creatures as shall
be so trained and cultured as to be fitted for the performance of the more
complex duties of modern life. Not, now, merely for many men, but, rather,
for few men, and those few, well born and well instructed, is the modern
demand. And the woman who today merely produces twelve children and
suckles them, and then turns them loose on her society and family, is
regarded, and rightly so, as a curse and down draught, and not the
productive labourer, of her community. Indeed, so difficult and expensive
has become in the modern world the rearing and training of even one
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: that could have happened to me: for that phrase would savour of
too great bitterness towards myself. I would sooner say, or hear
it said of me, that I was so typical a child of my age, that in my
perversity, and for that perversity's sake, I turned the good
things of my life to evil, and the evil things of my life to good.
What is said, however, by myself or by others, matters little. The
important thing, the thing that lies before me, the thing that I
have to do, if the brief remainder of my days is not to be maimed,
marred, and incomplete, is to absorb into my nature all that has
been done to me, to make it part of me, to accept it without
complaint, fear, or reluctance. The supreme vice is shallowness.
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