The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Amazing Interlude by Mary Roberts Rinehart: produced from his pocket a few small and withered oranges.
"A gift!" he said gayly, and piled them in a precarious heap in the
center of the table. On the exact top he placed a walnut.
"Now speak gently and walk softly," he said. "It is a work of art and
not to be lightly demolished."
He was alternately gay and silent during the meal, and more than once
Sara Lee found his eyes on her, with something new and different in them.
"Just you and I together!" he said once. "It is very wonderful."
And again: "When you go back to him, shall you tell him of your good
friend who has tried hard to serve you?"
"Of course I shall," said Sara Lee. "And he will write you, I know. He
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Mountains by Stewart Edward White: Algernon always overdoes the equipment question.
If it is bird-shooting, he accumulates leggings and
canvas caps and belts and dog-whistles and things
until he looks like a picture from a department-store
catalogue. In the cow country he wears Stetson hats,
snake bands, red handkerchiefs, six-shooters, chaps,
and huge spurs that do not match his face. If it is
yachting, he has a chronometer with a gong in the
cabin of a five-ton sailboat, possesses a nickle-plated
machine to register the heel of his craft, sports a
brass-bound yachting-cap and all the regalia. This
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Adam Bede by George Eliot: pleasant thing on such a morning to walk along the well-rolled
gravel on one's way to the stables, meditating an excursion. But
the scent of the stables, which, in a natural state of things,
ought to be among the soothing influences of a man's life, always
brought with it some irritation to Arthur. There was no having
his own way in the stables; everything was managed in the
stingiest fashion. His grandfather persisted in retaining as head
groom an old dolt whom no sort of lever could move out of his old
habits, and who was allowed to hire a succession of raw Loamshire
lads as his subordinates, one of whom had lately tested a new pair
of shears by clipping an oblong patch on Arthur's bay mare. This
Adam Bede |