| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft: speaking, can be most useful; but I am far from thinking that a
woman, once married, ought to consider the engagement as indissoluble
(especially if there be no children to reward her for sacrificing
her feelings) in case her husband merits neither her love, nor
esteem. Esteem will often supply the place of love; and prevent
a woman from being wretched, though it may not make her happy.
The magnitude of a sacrifice ought always to bear some proportion
to the utility in view; and for a woman to live with a man, for
whom she can cherish neither affection nor esteem, or even be of
any use to him, excepting in the light of a house-keeper, is an
abjectness of condition, the enduring of which no concurrence of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: thou, Dr. Slop,--hast thou been entrusted with the secret articles of the
solemn treaty which has brought thee into this place?--Art thou aware that
at this instant, a daughter of Lucina is put obstetrically over thy head?
Alas!--'tis too true.--Besides, great son of Pilumnus! what canst thou do?-
-Thou hast come forth unarm'd;--thou hast left thy tire-tete,--thy new-
invented forceps,--thy crotchet,--thy squirt, and all thy instruments of
salvation and deliverance, behind thee,--By Heaven! at this moment they are
hanging up in a green bays bag, betwixt thy two pistols, at the bed's
head!--Ring;--call;--send Obadiah back upon the coach-horse to bring them
with all speed.
--Make great haste, Obadiah, quoth my father, and I'll give thee a crown!
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The War in the Air by H. G. Wells: sacking, curtain serge, and patches of old carpet, and went
either bare-footed or on rude wooden sandals. These people, the
reader must understand, were an urban population sunken back to
the state of a barbaric peasantry, and so without any of the
simple arts a barbaric peasantry would possess. In many ways
they were curiously degenerate and incompetent. They had lost
any idea of making textiles, they could hardly make up clothes
when they had material, and they were forced to plunder the
continually dwindling supplies of the ruins about them for cover.
All the simple arts they had ever known they had lost, and with
the breakdown of modern drainage, modern water supply, shopping,
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