| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis: sonorously of Unselfish Public Service, the Broker's Obligation to Keep
Inviolate the Trust of His Clients, and a thing called Ethics, whose nature
was confusing but if you had it you were a High-class Realtor and if you
hadn't you were a shyster, a piker, and a fly-by-night. These virtues awakened
Confidence, and enabled you to handle Bigger Propositions. But they didn't
imply that you were to be impractical and refuse to take twice the value of a
house if a buyer was such an idiot that he didn't jew you down on the
asking-price.
Babbitt spoke well--and often--at these orgies of commercial righteousness
about the "realtor's function as a seer of the future development of the
community, and as a prophetic engineer clearing the pathway for inevitable
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Princess of Parms by Edgar Rice Burroughs: heavily padded and nailless, which fact had also contributed
to the noiselessness of their approach, and, in common
with a multiplicity of legs, is a characteristic feature of the
fauna of Mars. The highest type of man and one other animal,
the only mammal existing on Mars, alone have well-formed
nails, and there are absolutely no hoofed animals in existence
there.
Behind this first charging demon trailed nineteen others,
similar in all respects, but, as I learned later, bearing
individual characteristics peculiar to themselves; precisely as
no two of us are identical although we are all cast in a similar
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tales and Fantasies by Robert Louis Stevenson: question whether he were really growing intoxicated, or
whether at first the spirits did not even sober him. For it
was even as he drained this last glass that his father's
ambiguous and menacing words - popping from their hiding-
place in memory - startled him like a hand laid upon his
shoulder. 'Crimes, hunted, the gallows.' They were ugly
words; in the ears of an innocent man, perhaps all the
uglier; for if some judicial error were in act against him,
who should set a limit to its grossness or to how far it
might be pushed? Not John, indeed; he was no believer in the
powers of innocence, his cursed experience pointing in quite
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