| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Nana, Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille by Emile Zola: "What, my lass, you don't know why he's doing that?" replied
Labordette solemnly. "There's nothing so good as champagne for
pianos. It gives 'em tone."
"Ah," murmured Tatan Nene with conviction.
And when the rest began laughing at her she grew angry. How should
she know? They were always confusing her.
Decidedly the evening was becoming a big failure. The night
threatened to end in the unloveliest way. In a corner by themselves
Maria Blond and Lea de Horn had begun squabbling at close quarters,
the former accusing the latter of consorting with people of
insufficient wealth. They were getting vastly abusive over it,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells: love, and on the other hand, the possible jealousy of so and so, the
disapproval of so and so, material risks and dangers. It is only in
the retrospect that we have been able to grasp something of the
effectual case against us. The social prohibition lit by the
intense glow of our passion, presented itself as preposterous,
irrational, arbitrary, and ugly, a monster fit only for mockery. We
might be ruined! Well, there is a phase in every love affair, a
sort of heroic hysteria, when death and ruin are agreeable additions
to the prospect. It gives the business a gravity, a solemnity.
Timid people may hesitate and draw back with a vague instinctive
terror of the immensity of the oppositions they challenge, but
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Bureaucracy by Honore de Balzac: as a tomb out of which nought issues to contradict the epitaph
intended for the passer's eye, bold and fearless when soliciting,
good-natured and witty in all acceptations of the word, a timely
jester, full of tact, knowing how to compromise others by a glance or
a nudge, shrinking from no mudhole, but gracefully leaping it,
intrepid Voltairean, yet punctual at mass if a fashionable company
could be met in Saint Thomas Aquinas,--such a man as this secretary-
general resembled, in one way or another, all the mediocrities who
form the kernel of the political world. Knowing in the science of
human nature, he assumed the character of a listener, and none was
ever more attentive. Not to awaken suspicion he was flattering ad
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