| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Aspern Papers by Henry James: I exclaimed, laughing.
"I don't compare--I don't compare. If I did that I should have given
everything up long ago."
I liked to think that this was a subtle allusion to the rapture
she had known in the society of Jeffrey Aspern--though it
was true that such an allusion would have accorded ill with
the wish I imputed to her to keep him buried in her soul.
What it accorded with was my constant conviction that no human
being had ever had a more delightful social gift than his,
and what it seemed to convey was that nothing in the world
was worth speaking of if one pretended to speak of that.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Paz by Honore de Balzac: troop, and we charged the battery like a lot of foragers. I got Paz--I
was the seventh man; we started twenty and came back eight, counting
Paz. After Warsaw was sold we were forced to escape those Russians. By
a curious chance, Paz and I happened to come together again, at the
same hour and the same place, on the other side of the Vistula. I saw
the poor captain arrested by some Prussians, who made themselves the
blood-hounds of the Russians. When we have fished a man out of the
Styx we cling to him. This new danger for poor Paz made me so unhappy
that I let myself be taken too, thinking I could help him. Two men can
get away where one will perish. Thanks to my name and some family
connections in Prussia, the authorities shut their eyes to my escape.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from New Arabian Nights by Robert Louis Stevenson: Maletroit."
"You have a sweet nature, madam, and you are pleased to estimate a
little service far beyond its worth."
"It is not that," she answered. "You mistake me if you think I am
so easily touched by my own concerns. I say so, because you are
the noblest man I have ever met; because I recognise in you a
spirit that would have made even a common person famous in the
land."
"And yet here I die in a mouse-trap - with no more noise about it
than my own squeaking," answered he.
A look of pain crossed her face, and she was silent for a little
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