| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: advantage, not because he was socially too low to have attained to it,
but because he conceived himself as belonging to the upper class from
which our public school boys are now drawn. Let Mr Harris survey for
a moment the field of contemporary journalism. He will see there some
men who have the very characteristics from which he infers that
Shakespear was at a social disadvantage through his lack of
middle-class training. They are rowdy, ill-mannered, abusive,
mischievous, fond of quoting obscene schoolboy anecdotes, adepts in
that sort of blackmail which consists in mercilessly libelling and
insulting every writer whose opinions are sufficiently heterodox to
make it almost impossible for him to risk perhaps five years of a
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from In a German Pension by Katherine Mansfield: "kur" with feverish animation. The Frau Oberregierungsrat sat by me
knitting a shawl for her youngest of nine daughters, who was in that very
interesting, frail condition..."But it is bound to be quite satisfactory,"
she said to me. "The dear married a banker--the desire of her life."
There must have been eight or ten of us gathered together, we who were
married exchanging confidences as to the underclothing and peculiar
characteristics of our husbands, the unmarried discussing the over-clothing
and peculiar fascinations of Possible Ones.
"I knit them myself," I heard the Frau Lehrer cry, "of thick grey wool. He
wears one a month, with two soft collars."
"And then," whispered Fraulein Lisa, "he said to me, 'Indeed you please me.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne by Robert Louis Stevenson: in what my eyes are to rest upon; and if landscapes were sold, like
the sheets of characters of my boyhood, one penny plain and
twopence coloured, I should go the length of twopence every day of
my life.
But if things had grown better to the south, it was still desolate
and inclement near at hand. A spidery cross on every hill-top
marked the neighbourhood of a religious house; and a quarter of a
mile beyond, the outlook southward opening out and growing bolder
with every step, a white statue of the Virgin at the corner of a
young plantation directed the traveller to Our Lady of the Snows.
Here, then, I struck leftward, and pursued my way, driving my
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