| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde: younger generation, and I am sure it is all right if you approve of
it. In my time, of course, we were taught not to understand
anything. That was the old system, and wonderfully interesting it
was. I assure you that the amount of things I and my poor dear
sister were taught not to understand was quite extraordinary. But
modem women understand everything, I am told.
MRS. CHEVELEY. Except their husbands. That is the one thing the
modern woman never understands.
LADY MARKBY. And a very good thing too, dear, I dare say. It might
break up many a happy home if they did. Not yours, I need hardly
say, Gertrude. You have married a pattern husband. I wish I could
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Exiles by Honore de Balzac: men belonging to the clergy, the court, and the legal faculty. There
were some learned foreigners, too--soldiers and rich citizens. The
broad faces were there, with prominent brows and venerable beards,
which fill us with a sort of pious respect for our ancestors when we
see their portraits from the Middle Ages. Lean faces, too, with
burning, sunken eyes, under bald heads yellow from the labors of
futile scholasticism, contrasted with young and eager countenances,
grave faces, warlike faces, and the ruddy cheeks of the financial
class.
These lectures, dissertations, theses, sustained by the brightest
geniuses of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, roused our
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Economist by Xenophon: so swiftly? And why is it that, for all their crowding, the ship's
company[9] cause each other no distress? Simply that there, as you may
see them, they sit in order; in order bend to the oar; in order
recover the stroke; in order step on board; in order disembark. But
disorder is, it seems to me, precisely as though a man who is a
husbandman should stow away[10] together in one place wheat and barley
and pulse, and by and by when he has need of barley meal, or wheaten
flour, or some condiment of pulse,[11] then he must pick and choose
instead of laying his hand on each thing separately sorted for use.
[9] See Thuc. iii. 77. 2.
[10] "Should shoot into one place."
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