| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Figure in the Carpet by Henry James: consequence of complications, a turn that might give rise to
anxiety. Anxiety had indeed at the latest hour begun to be felt.
I was struck in the presence of these tidings with the fundamental
detachment that Mrs. Corvick's overt concern quite failed to hide:
it gave me the measure of her consummate independence. That
independence rested on her knowledge, the knowledge which nothing
now could destroy and which nothing could make different. The
figure in the carpet might take on another twist or two, but the
sentence had virtually been written. The writer might go down to
his grave: she was the person in the world to whom - as if she had
been his favoured heir - his continued existence was least of a
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Woman of No Importance by Oscar Wilde: trusted in him all the while. She loved him. - Before her child
was born - for she had a child - she implored him for the child's
sake to marry her, that the child might have a name, that her sin
might not be visited on the child, who was innocent. He refused.
After the child was born she left him, taking the child away, and
her life was ruined, and her soul ruined, and all that was sweet,
and good, and pure in her ruined also. She suffered terribly - she
suffers now. She will always suffer. For her there is no joy, no
peace, no atonement. She is a woman who drags a chain like a
guilty thing. She is a woman who wears a mask, like a thing that
is a leper. The fire cannot purify her. The waters cannot quench
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Weir of Hermiston by Robert Louis Stevenson: metrical psalms, and then remembered it was sermon-time. Last she put a
"sugar-bool" in her mouth, and the next moment repented of the step. It
was such a homely-like thing! Mr. Archie would never be eating sweeties
in kirk; and, with a palpable effort, she swallowed it whole, and her
colour flamed high. At this signal of distress Archie awoke to a sense
of his ill-behaviour. What had he been doing? He had been exquisitely
rude in church to the niece of his housekeeper; he had stared like a
lackey and a libertine at a beautiful and modest girl. It was possible,
it was even likely, he would be presented to her after service in the
kirk-yard, and then how was he to look? And there was no excuse. He
had marked the tokens of her shame, of her increasing indignation, and
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