| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Cousin Pons by Honore de Balzac: must combine his role of listener with a second part; he must applaud
continually, smile on every one, accuse nobody, defend nobody; from
his point of view, every one must be in the right. And so, in the
house of his kinsman, Pons no longer counted as a man; he was a
digestive apparatus.
In the course of a long tirade, Mme. Camusot de Marville avowed with
due circumspection that she was prepared to take almost any son-in-law
with her eyes shut. She was even disposed to think that at eight-and-
forty or so a man with twenty thousand francs a year was a good match.
"Cecile is in her twenty-third year. If it should fall out so
unfortunately that she is not married before she is five or six-and-
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Phoenix and the Turtle by William Shakespeare: That thy sable gender mak'st
With the breath thou giv'st and tak'st,
'Mongst our mourners shalt thou go.
Here the anthem doth commence:
Love and constancy is dead;
Phoenix and the turtle fled
In a mutual flame from hence.
So they lov'd, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none:
Number there in love was slain.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from American Notes by Rudyard Kipling: "That's the very thing that interests us," he said. "Have you
got reporters anything like our reporters on Indian newspapers?"
"We have not," I said, and suppressed the "thank God" rising to
my lips.
"Why haven't you?" said he.
"Because they would die," I said.
It was exactly like talking to a child--a very rude little child.
He would begin almost every sentence with, "Now tell me something
about India," and would turn aimlessly from one question to the
other without the least continuity. I was not angry, but keenly
interested. The man was a revelation to me. To his questions I
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