| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Confidence by Henry James: Could n't he have found a thousand other women?"
"It is not for me to think so," said Angela, smiling a little.
Gordon looked at her a moment.
"Ah, you cared for him from the first!" he cried.
"I had seen him before I ever saw you," said the girl.
Bernard suppressed an exclamation. There seemed to flash through these
words a sort of retrospective confession which told him something that she
had never directly told him. She blushed as soon as she had spoken,
and Bernard found a beauty in this of which the brightness blinded him
to the awkward aspect of the fact she had just presented to Gordon.
At this fact Gordon stood staring; then at last he apprehended it--largely.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Works of Samuel Johnson by Samuel Johnson: mistress, and parts from them with the same regret
when they can no longer be enjoyed.
Of this kind are many descriptions which the
poets have transcribed from each other, and their
successors will probably copy to the end of time;
which will continue to engage, or, as the French
term it, to flatter the imagination, as long as
human nature shall remain the same.
When a poet mentions the spring, we know that
the zephyrs are about to whisper, that the groves
are to recover their verdure, the linnets to warble
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Main Street by Sinclair Lewis: suffering she ran to him, kissed his forehead, cried, "You poor
forced tube-rose that wants to be a decent turnip!"
"Look here now, that ain't----"
"Anyway, I sha'n't torture you any longer."
She could not quite give up. She read Kipling, with a great
deal of emphasis:
There's a REGIMENT a-COMING down the
GRAND Trunk ROAD.
He tapped his foot to the rhythm; he looked normal and
reassured. But when he complimented her, "That was fine.
I don't know but what you can elocute just as good as Ella
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