| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from La Grande Breteche by Honore de Balzac: for every woman, from the highest lady to the inn-servant inclusive,
has a native presence of mind.
" 'Yes; you are fresh and good-looking enough never to lack lovers!
But tell me, Rosalie, why did you become an inn-servant on leaving
Madame de Merret? Did she not leave you some little annuity?'
" 'Oh yes, sir. But my place here is the best in all the town of
Vendome.'
"This reply was such an one as judges and attorneys call evasive.
Rosalie, as it seemed to me, held in this romantic affair the place of
the middle square of the chess-board: she was at the very centre of
the interest and of the truth; she appeared to me to be tied into the
La Grande Breteche |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Lover's Complaint by William Shakespeare: A plaintful story from a sistering vale,
My spirits to attend this double voice accorded,
And down I laid to list the sad-tun'd tale;
Ere long espied a fickle maid full pale,
Tearing of papers, breaking rings a-twain,
Storming her world with sorrow's wind and rain.
Upon her head a platted hive of straw,
Which fortified her visage from the sun,
Whereon the thought might think sometime it saw
The carcase of a beauty spent and done.
Time had not scythed all that youth begun,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken: 'These lines--converging, they suggest such distance!
The soul is drawn away, beyond horizons.
Lured out to what? One dares not think.
Sometimes, I glimpse these infinite perspectives
In intimate talk (with such as you) and shrink . . .
'One feels so petty!--One feels such--emptiness!--'
You mimic horror, let fall your lifted hand,
And smile at me; with brooding tenderness . . .
Alone on darkened waters I fall and rise;
Slow waves above me break, faint waves of cries.
'And then these colors . . . but who would dare describe them?
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