| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Coxon Fund by Henry James: had died a few weeks before.
"So she has come out to marry George Gravener?" I commented.
"Wouldn't it have been prettier of him to have saved her the
trouble?"
"Hasn't the House just met?" Adelaide replied. "And for Mr.
Gravener the House--!" Then she added: "I gather that her having
come is exactly a sign that the marriage is a little shaky. If it
were quite all right a self-respecting girl like Ruth would have
waited for him over there."
I noted that they were already Ruth and Adelaide, but what I said
was: "Do you mean she'll have had to return to MAKE it so?"
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: stretching their arms around it and not touching each other's
fingers, if one's pacing the shadow at noon and making it so many
hundred feet, die upon its leafy lips in the presence of the awful
ribbon which has strangled so many false pretensions.
As I rode along the pleasant way, watching eagerly for the object
of my journey, the rounded tops of the elms rose from time to time
at the road-side. Wherever one looked taller and fuller than the
rest, I asked myself, - "Is this it?" But as I drew nearer, they
grew smaller, - or it proved, perhaps, that two standing in a line
had looked like one, and so deceived me. At last, all at once,
when I was not thinking of it, - I declare to you it makes my flesh
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Another Study of Woman by Honore de Balzac: to the recesses of its landed estates, where it has hidden itself to
die--emigrating inland before the march of ideas, as of old to foreign
lands before that of the masses. The women who could have founded
European /salons/, could have guided opinion and turned it inside out
like a glove, could have ruled the world by ruling the men of art or
of intellect who ought to have ruled it, have committed the blunder of
abandoning their ground; they were ashamed of having to fight against
the citizen class drunk with power, and rushing out on to the stage of
the world, there to be cut to pieces perhaps by the barbarians who are
at its heels. Hence, where the middle class insist on seeing
princesses, these are really only ladylike young women. In these days
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