| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton: of his lively imagination, of his inexhaustible interest in
every form of beauty and strangeness and folly. On this stream,
sitting in the stout little craft of his poverty, his
insignificance and his independence, he had made some notable
voyages .... And so, when Susy Branch, whom he had sought out
through a New York season as the prettiest and most amusing girl
in sight, had surprised him with the contradictory revelation of
her modern sense of expediency and her old-fashioned standard of
good faith, he had felt an irresistible desire to put off on one
more cruise into the unknown.
It was of the essence of the adventure that, after her one brief
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Mrs. Warren's Profession by George Bernard Shaw: since drama ends exactly where resistance ends. Yet the
introduction of this resistance produces so strong an impression
of heartlessness nowadays that a distinguished critic has summed
up the impression made on him by Mrs Warren's Profession, by
declaring that "the difference between the spirit of Tolstoy and
the spirit of Mr Shaw is the difference between the spirit of
Christ and the spirit of Euclid." But the epigram would be as
good if Tolstoy's name were put in place of mine and D'Annunzio's
in place of Tolstoy. At the same time I accept the enormous
compliment to my reasoning powers with sincere complacency; and I
promise my flatterer that when he is sufficiently accustomed to
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Duchesse de Langeais by Honore de Balzac: for you," broke in Montriveau. "The Restoration, madam, ought
to say, like Catherine de Medici, when she heard that the battle
of Dreux was lost, `Very well; now we will go to the
meeting-house.' Now 1815 was your battle of Dreux. Like the
royal power of those days, you won in fact, while you lost in
right. Political Protestantism has gained an ascendancy over
people's minds. If you have no mind to issue your Edict of
Nantes; or if, when it is issued, you publish a Revocation; if
you should one day be accused and convicted of repudiating the
Charter, which is simply a pledge given to maintain the interests
established under the Republic, then the Revolution will rise
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