| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Mother by Owen Wister: faintness that overtakes the stock market, my own specialties were a good
deal more than faint. On the 20th of August I took the afternoon train to
spend my two weeks' holiday at Lenox; and during much of the journey I
gazed at the Wall Street edition of the afternoon paper that I had
purchased as I came through the Grand Central Station. Ethel and I read
it in the evening."
"'I wonder what she's buying now?' said Ethel, vindictively."
"'Well, I can't help feeling sorry for her,' I answered, with as much of
a smile as I could produce."
"'That is so unnecessary, Richard! She can easily afford to gratify her
gambling instinct.'"
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, etc. by Oscar Wilde: Roses of shadow, since his rose is true?
It may seem strange that so great a dramatist as Shakespeare, who
realised his own perfection as an artist and his humanity as a man
on the ideal plane of stage-writing and stage-playing, should have
written in these terms about the theatre; but we must remember that
in Sonnets CX. and CXI. Shakespeare shows us that he too was
wearied of the world of puppets, and full of shame at having made
himself 'a motley to the view.' The 111th Sonnet is especially
bitter:-
O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Domestic Peace by Honore de Balzac: ideas together. Repulsed by the mistress of the house, routed from
chair to chair by each newcomer, and driven into the darkness of this
little corner, she allowed herself to be walled in, the victim of the
jealousy of the other ladies, who would gladly have buried that
dangerous beauty. She had, of course, no friend to encourage her to
maintain the place she first held in the front rank; then each of
those treacherous fair ones would have enjoined on the men of her
circle on no account to take out our poor friend, under pain of the
severest punishment. That, my dear fellow, is the way in which those
sweet faces, in appearance so tender and so artless, would have formed
a coalition against the stranger, and that without a word beyond the
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