| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton: were a little girl," he argued; and she had answered,
with her clearest look: "Yes; and that's what makes it
so hard to refuse the very last thing they'll ever ask of
me as a little girl."
That was the old New York note; that was the kind
of answer he would like always to be sure of his wife's
making. If one had habitually breathed the New York
air there were times when anything less crystalline seemed
stifling.
The papers he had retired to read did not tell him much
in fact; but they plunged him into an atmosphere in
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: to do?" On the last afternoon before he went abroad, he sat with Daisy
in his arms for a long, silent time. It was a cold fall day, with fire
in the room and her cheeks flushed. Now and then she moved and he
changed his arm a little, and once he kissed her dark shining hair. The
afternoon had made them tranquil for a while, as if to give them a deep
memory for the long parting the next day promised. They had never been
closer in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one
with another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat's
shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though
she were asleep.
He did extraordinarily well in the war. He was a captain before he went
The Great Gatsby |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Study of a Woman by Honore de Balzac: age,--a period of life when most women discover that they are the
dupes of social laws.
The marquis is a rather insignificant man. He stands well at court;
his good qualities are as negative as his defects; the former can no
more make him a reputation for virtue than the latter can give him the
sort of glamor cast by vice. As deputy, he never speaks, but he votes
RIGHT. He behaves in his own home as he does in the Chamber.
Consequently, he is held to be one of the best husbands in France.
Though not susceptible of lively interest, he never scolds, unless, to
be sure, he is kept waiting. His friends have named him "dull
weather,"--aptly enough, for there is neither clear light nor total
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