| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: as this fact that my real beginning of fear was one,
as I may say, with the instinct of sparing my companion.
On the spot, accordingly, in the pleasant hall and with her
eyes on me, I, for a reason that I couldn't then have phrased,
achieved an inward resolution--offered a vague pretext
for my lateness and, with the plea of the beauty of the night
and of the heavy dew and wet feet, went as soon as possible
to my room.
Here it was another affair; here, for many days after,
it was a queer affair enough. There were hours, from day
to day--or at least there were moments, snatched even from
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain: and the muttered words, "A nigger! I am a nigger! Oh, I wish I was dead!"
He woke at dawn with one more repetition of this horror, and then he
resolved to meddle no more with that treacherous sleep.
He began to think. Sufficiently bitter thinkings they were.
They wandered along something after this fashion:
Why were niggers _and_ whites made? What crime did the uncreated
first nigger commit that the curse of birth was decreed for him?
And why is this awful difference made between white and black? . . .
How hard the nigger's fate seems, this morning!--yet until last night
such a thought never entered my head."
He sighed and groaned an hour or more away. Then "Chambers" came humbly
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde: I only wish I did. The plain facts of the case are these. On the
morning of the day you mention, a day that is for ever branded on
my memory, I prepared as usual to take the baby out in its
perambulator. I had also with me a somewhat old, but capacious
hand-bag in which I had intended to place the manuscript of a work
of fiction that I had written during my few unoccupied hours. In a
moment of mental abstraction, for which I never can forgive myself,
I deposited the manuscript in the basinette, and placed the baby in
the hand-bag.
JACK. [Who has been listening attentively.] But where did you
deposit the hand-bag?
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