| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Pool in the Desert by Sara Jeanette Duncan: I used to take, I fear, but a perfunctory joy in these letters.
When we went home again I stipulated absolutely that she was to
write to us without any sort of supervision--the child was ten.
'But the spelling!' cried Aunt Emma, with lifted eyebrows.
'Her letters aren't exercises,' I was obliged to retort; 'she will
do the best she can.'
We found her a docile little girl, with nice manners, a thoroughly
unobjectionable child. I saw quite clearly that I could not have
brought her up so well; indeed, there were moments when I fancied
that Cecily, contrasting me with her aunts, wondered a little what
my bringing up could have been like. With this reserve of criticism
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: honesty is virtue, and whatever is devoid of justice is vice.
MENO: It cannot be otherwise, in my judgment.
SOCRATES: And were we not saying just now that justice, temperance, and
the like, were each of them a part of virtue?
MENO: Yes.
SOCRATES: And so, Meno, this is the way in which you mock me.
MENO: Why do you say that, Socrates?
SOCRATES: Why, because I asked you to deliver virtue into my hands whole
and unbroken, and I gave you a pattern according to which you were to frame
your answer; and you have forgotten already, and tell me that virtue is the
power of attaining good justly, or with justice; and justice you
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Distinguished Provincial at Paris by Honore de Balzac: besides."
"And there sits that honest tradesman, gaping with open-mouthed
admiration at Florine, little suspecting that you are about to get
thirty thousand francs out of him!----"
"More twaddle! Anybody might think that the man was going to be
robbed!" cried Lousteau. "Why, my dear boy, if the minister buys the
newspaper, the druggist may make twenty thousand francs in six months
on an investment of thirty thousand. Matifat is not looking at the
newspaper, but at Florine's prospects. As soon as it is known that
Matifat and Camusot--(for they will go shares)--that Matifat and
Camusot are proprietors of a review, the newspapers will be full of
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