| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Dynamiter by Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson: 'Sir,' said Somerset, 'you must permit me first to disengage
my honour. Last night, I was surprised into a certain
appearance of complicity; but once for all, let me inform you
that I regard you and your machinations with unmingled horror
and disgust, and I will leave no stone unturned to crush your
vile conspiracy.'
'My dear fellow,' replied Zero, with an air of some
complacency, 'I am well accustomed to these human weaknesses.
Disgust? I have felt it myself; it speedily wears off. I
think none the worse, I think the more of you, for this
engaging frankness. And in the meanwhile, what are you to
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Another Study of Woman by Honore de Balzac: much afraid of her servants as an Englishwoman who lives in dread of a
trial in the divorce-court. This woman--so free at a ball, so
attractive out walking--is a slave at home; she is never independent
but in perfect privacy, or theoretically. She must preserve herself in
her position as a lady. This is her task.
"For in our day a woman repudiated by her husband, reduced to a meagre
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
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton: letter he had already written, except indeed the statement that
he was cruising with the Hickses. And he saw no pressing reason
for communicating that.
To the Hickses he had given no hint of his situation. When
Coral Hicks, a fortnight earlier, had picked him up in the
broiling streets of Genoa, and carried him off to the Ibis, he
had thought only of a cool dinner and perhaps a moonlight sail.
Then, in reply to their friendly urging, he had confessed that
he had not been well--had indeed gone off hurriedly for a few
days' change of air--and that left him without defence against
the immediate proposal that he should take his change of air on
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