| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from La Grenadiere by Honore de Balzac: their mother's voice, they grew heedful, turned to look at her and
listened, and did at once what they were bidden, or asked, or
recommended to do. Mme. Willemsens had so accustomed them to
understand her wishes and desires, that the three seemed to have their
thoughts in common. When they went for a walk, and the children,
absorbed in their play, ran away to gather a flower or to look at some
insect, she watched them with such deep tenderness in her eyes, that
the most indifferent passer-by would feel moved, and stop and smile at
the children, and give the mother a glance of friendly greeting. Who
would not have admired the dainty neatness of their dress, their
sweet, childish voices, the grace of their movements, the promise in
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from In the Cage by Henry James: her chances at Cocker's, there were still strange gaps in her
learning--she could never, like Mrs. Jordan, have found her way
about one of the "homes." Little by little, however, she had
caught on, above all in the light of what Mrs. Jordan's redemption
had materially made of that lady, giving her, though the years and
the struggles had naturally not straightened a feature, an almost
super-eminent air. There were women in and out of Cocker's who
were quite nice and who yet didn't look well; whereas Mrs. Jordan
looked well and yet, with her extraordinarily protrusive teeth, was
by no means quite nice. It would seem, mystifyingly, that it might
really come from all the greatness she could live with. It was
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: the ideal it realizes; whose eye disparages, whose resonant voice
denounces, whose cold shoulder jostles every decency, every delicacy,
every amenity, every dignity, every sweet usage of that quiet life of
mutual admiration in which perfect Shakespearian appreciation is
expected to arise, that man is Frank Harris. Here is one who is
extraordinarily qualified, by a range of sympathy and understanding
that extends from the ribaldry of a buccaneer to the shyest
tendernesses of the most sensitive poetry, to be all things to all
men, yet whose proud humor it is to be to every man, provided the man
is eminent and pretentious, the champion of his enemies. To the
Archbishop he is an atheist, to the atheist a Catholic mystic, to the
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