| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Confidence by Henry James: succeeded in extracting from his friend. What did he mean
by a "traceable" connection? Gordon never used words idly,
and he meant to make of this point an intelligible distinction.
It was this sense of his usual accuracy of expression
that assisted Bernard in fitting a meaning to his late
companion's letter. He intended to intimate that he had come
back to Baden with his mind made up to relinquish his suit,
and that he had questioned Bernard simply from moral curiosity--
for the sake of intellectual satisfaction. Nothing was altered
by the fact that Bernard had told him a sorry tale; it had not
modified his behavior--that effect would have been traceable.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Alkahest by Honore de Balzac: considerations of money count for little in matters of feeling and are
reluctantly associated with them. Nevertheless, Josephine did not hear
without distress that her husband had borrowed three hundred thousand
francs upon his property. The apparent authenticity of the
transaction, the rumors and conjectures spread through the town,
forced Madame Claes, naturally much alarmed, to question her husband's
notary and, disregarding her pride, to reveal to him her secret
anxieties or let him guess them, and even ask her the humiliating
question,--
"How is it that Monsieur Claes has not told you of this?"
Happily, the notary was almost a relation,--in this wise: The
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: Saint-Simon, but it is certainly true that their ideal principle
was order and permanence, not indefinite progress. For, setting
aside the artistic prejudices which would have led the Greeks to
reject this idea of unlimited improvement, we may note that the
modern conception of progress rests partly on the new enthusiasm
and worship of humanity, partly on the splendid hopes of material
improvements in civilisation which applied science has held out to
us, two influences from which ancient Greek thought seems to have
been strangely free. For the Greeks marred the perfect humanism of
the great men whom they worshipped, by imputing to them divinity
and its supernatural powers; while their science was eminently
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