| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Commission in Lunacy by Honore de Balzac: money, because they were all ready to allow an enriched bourgeois to
usurp them. Thus the lack of communion between this family and other
persons was as much moral as it was physical.
In the father and the children alike, their personality harmonized
with the spirit within. M. d'Espard, at this time about fifty, might
have sat as a model to represent the aristocracy of birth in the
nineteenth century. He was slight and fair; there was in the outline
and general expression of his face a native distinction which spoke of
lofty sentiments, but it bore the impress of a deliberate coldness
which commanded respect a little too decidedly. His aquiline nose bent
at the tip from left to right, a slight crookedness which was not
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Weir of Hermiston by Robert Louis Stevenson: best of Archie's education. Assuredly it did not attract him; assuredly
it rather rebutted and depressed. Yet it was still present, unobserved
like the ticking of a clock, an arid ideal, a tasteless stimulant in the
boy's life.
But Hermiston was not all of one piece. He was, besides, a mighty
toper; he could sit at wine until the day dawned, and pass directly from
the table to the bench with a steady hand and a clear head. Beyond the
third bottle, he showed the plebeian in a larger print; the low, gross
accent, the low, foul mirth, grew broader and commoner; he became less
formidable, and infinitely more disgusting. Now, the boy had inherited
from Jean Rutherford a shivering delicacy, unequally mated with
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Altar of the Dead by Henry James: maintained; all that Stransom reserved to himself was the number of
his lights and the free enjoyment of his intention. When the
intention had taken complete effect the enjoyment became even
greater than he had ventured to hope. He liked to think of this
effect when far from it, liked to convince himself of it yet again
when near. He was not often indeed so near as that a visit to it
hadn't perforce something of the patience of a pilgrimage; but the
time he gave to his devotion came to seem to him more a
contribution to his other interests than a betrayal of them. Even
a loaded life might be easier when one had added a new necessity to
it.
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