| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Commission in Lunacy by Honore de Balzac: to fall below the inspirations suggested by her animal instinct? A
mother is as cunning to get at her children as a girl can be in the
conduct of a love intrigue. If your Marquise really wanted to give her
children food and clothes, the Devil himself would not have hindered
her, heh? That is rather too big a fable for an old lawyer to swallow!
--To proceed.
" 'That at the age the said children have now attained it is necessary
that steps should be taken to preserve them from the evil effects of
such an education; that they should be provided for as beseems their
rank, and that they should cease to have before their eyes the sad
example of their father's conduct;
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson by Robert Louis Stevenson: kind if you would do the like, for I do not see much chance of our
meeting in the flesh: and a name, and a handwriting, and an
address, and even a style? I know about as much of Tacitus, and
more of Horace; it is not enough between contemporaries, such as we
still are. I have just remembered another of my books, which I re-
read the other day, and thought in places good - PRINCE OTTO. It
is not as good as either of the others; but it has one
recommendation - it has female parts, so it might perhaps please
better in France.
I will ask Chatto to send you, then - PRINCE OTTO, MEMORIES AND
PORTRAITS, UNDERWOODS, and BALLADS, none of which you seem to have
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Human Drift by Jack London: regions, the Pigmy to the fever-rotten jungles of Africa. And in
this day the drift of the races continues, whether it be of
Chinese into the Philippines and the Malay Peninsula, of Europeans
to the United States or of Americans to the wheat-lands of
Manitoba and the Northwest.
Perhaps most amazing has been the South Sea Drift. Blind,
fortuitous, precarious as no other drift has been, nevertheless
the islands in that waste of ocean have received drift after drift
of the races. Down from the mainland of Asia poured an Aryan
drift that built civilisations in Ceylon, Java, and Sumatra. Only
the monuments of these Aryans remain. They themselves have
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