| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Lady Windermere's Fan by Oscar Wilde: to take it.]
LORD WINDERMERE. [Still looking at letter.] But it's my wife's
handwriting, isn't it?
MRS. ERLYNNE. [Takes the letter quickly.] Yes, it's - an address.
Will you ask them to call my carriage, please?
LORD WINDERMERE. Certainly.
[Goes L. and Exit.]
MRS. ERLYNNE. Thanks! What can I do? What can I do? I feel a
passion awakening within me that I never felt before. What can it
mean? The daughter must not be like the mother - that would be
terrible. How can I save her? How can I save my child? A moment
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Malbone: An Oldport Romance by Thomas Wentworth Higginson: married somebody else.
She was one of those persons who seem to have come into the
world well-dressed. There was an atmosphere of elegance around
her, like a costume; every attitude implied a presence-chamber
or a ball-room. The girls complained that in private
theatricals no combination of disguises could reduce Kate to
the ranks, nor give her the "make-up" of a waiting-maid. Yet as
her father was a New York merchant of the precarious or
spasmodic description, she had been used from childhood to the
wildest fluctuations of wardrobe;--a year of Paris
dresses,--then another year spent in making over ancient
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Lily of the Valley by Honore de Balzac: pushed hither and thither by a mass of men and women, who hustled each
other in a cloud of dust. The brazen clash of military music was
drowned in the hurrahs and acclamations of "Long live the Duc
d'Angouleme! Long live the King! Long live the Bourbons!" The ball was
an outburst of pent-up enthusiasm, where each man endeavored to outdo
the rest in his fierce haste to worship the rising sun,--an exhibition
of partisan greed which left me unmoved, or rather, it disgusted me
and drove me back within myself.
Swept onward like a straw in the whirlwind, I was seized with a
childish desire to be the Duc d'Angouleme himself, to be one of these
princes parading before an awed assemblage. This silly fancy of a
The Lily of the Valley |
