| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from An Unsocial Socialist by George Bernard Shaw: supporting an idle class whilst accepting a lower standard of
comfort for themselves than for that idle class, rendered the
determination of just ratios of exchange, and consequently the
practice of honest dealing, impossible. He had at last to ask the
mason what he would consider fair payment for the execution of
the design, though he knew that the man could no more solve the
problem than he, and that, though he would certainly ask as much
as he thought he could get, his demand must be limited by his
poverty and by the competition of the monumental tradesman.
Trefusis settled the matter by giving double what was asked, only
imposing such conditions as were necessary to compel the mason to
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Another Study of Woman by Honore de Balzac: and advertisements; in these days the lady has her little passion
neatly ruled like a sheet of music with its crotchets and quavers and
minims, its rests, its pauses, its sharps to sign the key. A mere weak
women, she is anxious not to compromise her love, or her husband, or
the future of her children. Name, position, and fortune are no longer
flags so respected as to protect all kinds of merchandise on board.
The whole aristocracy no longer advances in a body to screen the lady.
She has not, like the great lady of the past, the demeanor of lofty
antagonism; she can crush nothing under foot, it is she who would be
crushed. Thus she is apt at Jesuitical /mezzo termine/, she is a
creature of equivocal compromises, of guarded proprieties, of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy: as maid and wife, and all the past things of my life that are
interesting to my feelings are mixed up with this road.
And they have been stirred up in me too, lately; for I've been
visiting at Christminster. Yes; I've seen Jude."
"Ah! How do they bear their terrible affliction?"
"In a ve-ry strange way--ve-ry strange! She don't live with him any longer.
I only heard of it as a certainty just before I left; though I had thought
things were drifting that way from their manner when I called on them."
"Not live with her husband? Why, I should have thought 'twould have united
them more."
"He's not her husband, after all. She has never really married
Jude the Obscure |
