| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Master of Ballantrae by Robert Louis Stevenson: "Ah! Mackellar," said he, "do you think I have never a regret?"
"I do not think you could be so bad a man," said I, "if you had not
all the machinery to be a good one."
"No, not all," says he: "not all. You are there in error. The
malady of not wanting, my evangelist." But methought he sighed as
he mounted again into the chaise.
All day long we journeyed in the same miserable weather: the mist
besetting us closely, the heavens incessantly weeping on my head.
The road lay over moorish hills, where was no sound but the crying
of moor-fowl in the wet heather and the pouring of the swollen
burns. Sometimes I would doze off in slumber, when I would find
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: Flora was so markedly feverish that an illness was perhaps at hand;
she had passed a night of extreme unrest, a night agitated above
all by fears that had for their subject not in the least her former,
but wholly her present, governess. It was not against the possible
re-entrance of Miss Jessel on the scene that she protested--
it was conspicuously and passionately against mine. I was promptly
on my feet of course, and with an immense deal to ask; the more that my
friend had discernibly now girded her loins to meet me once more.
This I felt as soon as I had put to her the question of her sense
of the child's sincerity as against my own. "She persists in denying
to you that she saw, or has ever seen, anything?"
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Start in Life by Honore de Balzac: herself in Cardot's place and see the matter from his point of view;
she thought he must certainly be interested in so sweet a child, who
bore the maiden name of his late wife.
"Monsieur," said old Cardot's maid-servant, coming out to him as he
walked about the garden while awaiting his breakfast, after his
hairdresser had duly shaved him and powdered his queue, "the mother of
your nephew, Oscar, is here."
"Good-day, fair lady," said the old man, bowing to Madame Clapart, and
wrapping his white pique dressing-gown about him. "Hey, hey! how this
little fellow grows," he added, taking Oscar by the ear.
"He has finished school, and he regretted so much that his dear uncle
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