| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Lady Baltimore by Owen Wister: stood revealed at every turn, my thoughts dwelt upon this perfected
specimen of the latest American moment--so late that she contained
nothing of the past, and a great deal of to-morrow. I basked myself in
the memory of her achieved beauty, her achieved dress, her achieved
insolence, her luxurious complexity. She was even later than those quite
late athletic girls, the Amazons of the links, whose big, hard football
faces stare at one from public windows and from public punts, whose
giant, manly strides take them over leagues of country and square miles
of dance-floor, and whose bursting, blatant, immodest health glares upon
sea-beaches and round supper tables. Hortense knew that even now the hour
of such is striking, and that the American boy will presently turn with
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Russia in 1919 by Arthur Ransome: broke down altogether, and bent his head to hide his tears.
"I suffer doubly," he said, after excusing himself for the
weakness of a very old man. "I suffer as a Russian, and, if
I may say so, I suffer as an Englishman. I have English
blood in my veins. My mother, you see, looks quite
English," pointing to a daguerreotype on the wall, "and my
grandmother was actually English. I suffer as an
Englishman when I see the country that I love misled by
lies, and I suffer as a Russian because those lies concern
the country to which I belong, and the ideas which I am
proud to hold."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tour Through Eastern Counties of England by Daniel Defoe: honour.
Among all these regularities it is no wonder if we do not find
abundance of revelling, or that there is little encouragement to
assemblies, plays, and gaming meetings at Yarmouth as in some other
places; and yet I do not see that the ladies here come behind any
of the neighbouring counties, either in beauty, breeding, or
behaviour; to which may be added too, not at all to their
disadvantage, that they generally go beyond them in fortunes.
From Yarmouth I resolved to pursue my first design, viz., to view
the seaside on this coast, which is particularly famous for being
one of the most dangerous and most fatal to the sailors in all
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