| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: changed life now made for his family, the elders dead, the sons
going from home upon their education, even their tried domestic
(Mrs. Alice Dunns) leaving the house after twenty-two years of
service, it was not unnatural that he should return to dreams of
Italy. He and his wife were to go (as he told me) on 'a real
honeymoon tour.' He had not been alone with his wife 'to speak
of,' he added, since the birth of his children. But now he was to
enjoy the society of her to whom he wrote, in these last days, that
she was his 'Heaven on earth.' Now he was to revisit Italy, and
see all the pictures and the buildings and the scenes that he
admired so warmly, and lay aside for a time the irritations of his
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: but on condition that one is always open to the public."
"I don't see that that exonerates the man who gives up the keys of
the sanctuary, as it were."
"Who WAS he?" another voice inquired.
"Who was he? Oh, nobody, I fancy--the letter-box, the slit in the
wall through which the letters passed to posterity. . . ."
"But she never meant them for posterity!"
"A woman shouldn't write such letters if she doesn't mean them to
be published. . . ."
"She shouldn't write them to such a man!" Mrs. Touchett scornfully
corrected.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Voyage to Abyssinia by Father Lobo: worship. The severity of their fasts is equal to that of the
primitive church. In Lent they never eat till after sunset; their
fasts are the more severe because milk and butter are forbidden
them, and no reason or necessity whatsoever can procure them a
permission to eat meat, and their country affording no fish, they
live only on roots and pulse. On fast-days they never drink but at
their meat, and the priests never communicate till evening, for fear
of profaning them. They do not think themselves obliged to fast
till they have children either married or fit to be married, which
yet doth not secure them very long from these mortifications,
because their youths marry at the age of ten years, and their girls
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