| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Altar of the Dead by Henry James: Scanned and proofed by David Price
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
The Altar of the Dead
CHAPTER I.
HE had a mortal dislike, poor Stransom, to lean anniversaries, and
loved them still less when they made a pretence of a figure.
Celebrations and suppressions were equally painful to him, and but
one of the former found a place in his life. He had kept each year
in his own fashion the date of Mary Antrim's death. It would be
more to the point perhaps to say that this occasion kept HIM: it
kept him at least effectually from doing anything else. It took
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Scenes from a Courtesan's Life by Honore de Balzac: police to seek the unknown beauty, were indeed events of sufficient
importance to be at once communicated to the man who had sought, under
a priest's robe, the shelter which criminals of old could find in a
church. And Lucien's road from the Rue Saint-Lazare, where Nucingen at
that time lived, to the Rue Saint-Dominique, where was the Hotel
Grandlieu, led him past his lodgings on the Quai Malaquais.
Lucien found his formidable friend smoking his breviary--that is to
say, coloring a short pipe before retiring to bed. The man, strange
rather than foreign, had given up Spanish cigarettes, finding them too
mild.
"Matters look serious," said the Spaniard, when Lucien had told him
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Aspern Papers by Henry James: Miss Bordereau sailed with her family on a tossing brig,
in the days of long voyages and sharp differences; she had her
emotions on the top of yellow diligences, passed the night
at inns where she dreamed of travelers' tales, and was struck,
on reaching the Eternal City, with the elegance of Roman pearls
and scarfs. There was something touching to me in all that,
and my imagination frequently went back to the period.
If Miss Bordereau carried it there of course Jeffrey Aspern
at other times had done so a great deal more. It was a much
more important fact, if one were looking at his genius critically,
that he had lived in the days before the general transfusion.
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