| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: other imaginations, there was some kind of peg on which to hang the
false costumes he created; windmills are big, and wave their arms
like giants; sheep in the distance are somewhat like an army; a
little boat on the river-side must look much the same whether
enchanted or belonging to millers; but except that Dulcinea is a
woman, she bears no resemblance at all to the damsel of his
imagination.'
At the time of these letters, the oldest son only was born to them.
In September of the next year, with the birth of the second,
Charles Frewen, there befell Fleeming a terrible alarm and what
proved to be a lifelong misfortune. Mrs. Jenkin was taken suddenly
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Maitre Cornelius by Honore de Balzac: "You need not have waited till this moment to do me that service. You
are selling me your influence--Pasques-Dieu! to me, Louis XI.! Are you
the master, and am I your servant?"
"Ah, sire," said the old man, "I was waiting to surprise you agreeably
with news of the arrangements I had made for you in Ghent; I was
awaiting confirmation from Oosterlinck through that apprentice. What
has become of that young man?"
"Enough!" said the king; "this is only one more blunder you have
committed. I do not like persons to meddle in my affairs without my
knowledge. Enough! leave me; I wish to reflect upon all this."
Maitre Cornelius found the agility of youth to run downstairs to the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Another Study of Woman by Honore de Balzac: allowance, with no carriage, no luxury, no opera-box, none of the
divine accessories of the toilet, is no longer a wife, a maid, or a
townswoman; she is adrift, and becomes a chattel. The Carmelites will
not receive a married woman; it would be bigamy. Would her lover still
have anything to say to her? That is the question. Thus your perfect
lady may perhaps give occasion to calumny, never to slander."
"It is all so horribly true," said the Princesse de Cadignan.
"And so," said Blondet, "our 'perfect lady' lives between English
hypocrisy and the delightful frankness of the eighteenth century--a
bastard system, symptomatic of an age in which nothing that grows up
is at all like the thing that has vanished, in which transition leads
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