| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic: voting. He's directly interested, and he mustn't vote.
Your chairman knows that perfectly well."
"Yes, I think Brother Winch ought not to vote," decided Theron,
with great calmness. He saw now what was coming,
and underneath his surface composure there were sharp flutterings.
"Very well, then," said Gorringe. "I vote no, and it's a tie.
It rests with the chairman now to cast the deciding vote,
and say whether this interesting arrangement shall go
through or not."
"Me?" said Theron, eying the lawyer with a cool self-control
which had come all at once to him. "Me? Oh, I vote Aye."
The Damnation of Theron Ware |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just
as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves,
and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those
who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it,
so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do
most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at last we
have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem
and know the life - educated men who live in the East End - coming
forward and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic
impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the
ground that such charity degrades and demoralises. They are
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Another Study of Woman by Honore de Balzac: townswoman; she is adrift, and becomes a chattel. The Carmelites will
not receive a married woman; it would be bigamy. Would her lover still
have anything to say to her? That is the question. Thus your perfect
lady may perhaps give occasion to calumny, never to slander."
"It is all so horribly true," said the Princesse de Cadignan.
"And so," said Blondet, "our 'perfect lady' lives between English
hypocrisy and the delightful frankness of the eighteenth century--a
bastard system, symptomatic of an age in which nothing that grows up
is at all like the thing that has vanished, in which transition leads
nowhere, everything is a matter of degree; all the great figures
shrink into the background, and distinction is purely personal. I am
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