| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Message by Honore de Balzac: and love. Then, with all the circumspection demanded in such
matters, we proceeded naturally to the topic of our lady-loves.
Young as we both were, we still admired "the woman of a certain
age," that is to say, the woman between thirty-five and forty.
Oh! any poet who should have listened to our talk, for heaven
knows how many stages beyond Montargis, would have reaped a
harvest of flaming epithet, rapturous description, and very
tender confidences. Our bashful fears, our silent interjections,
our blushes, as we met each other's eyes, were expressive with an
eloquence, a boyish charm, which I have ceased to feel. One must
remain young, no doubt, to understand youth.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Ball at Sceaux by Honore de Balzac: year, the income from the Longueville property."
If Mademoiselle de Fontaine had the benefit of these important
revelations, it was partly due to the skill with which she continued
to question her confiding partner from the moment when she found that
he was the brother of her scorned lover.
"And could you, without being grieved, see your brother selling muslin
and calico?" asked Emilie, at the end of the third figure of the
quadrille.
"How do you know that?" asked the attache. "Thank God, though I pour
out a flood of words, I have already acquired the art of not telling
more than I intend, like all the other diplomatic apprentices I know."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: youth is the time of free fancy and poetry; manhood of calm and strong
induction; old age of deduction, when men settle down upon their lees,
and content themselves with reaffirming and verifying the conclusions of
their earlier years, and too often, alas! with denying and
anathematising all conclusions which have been arrived at since their
own meridian. It is sad: but it is patent and common. It is sad to
think that the day may come to each of us, when we shall have ceased to
hope for discovery and for progress; when a thing will seem e priori
false to us, simply because it is new; and we shall be saying
querulously to the Divine Light which lightens every man who comes into
the world: "Hitherto shalt thou come, and no further. Thou hast taught
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