| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Country Doctor by Honore de Balzac: have abused the indulgence. But ought we not to aim, at any rate, at
perfection? Is not virtue a fair ideal which the soul must always keep
before it, a standard set up by Heaven?"
"Amen," said the soldier. "An upright man is a magnificent thing, I
grant you; but, on the other hand, you must admit that virtue is a
divinity who may indulge in a scrap of gossip now and then in the
strictest propriety."
The doctor smiled, but there was a melancholy bitterness in his tone
as he said, "Ah! sir, you regard things with the lenience natural to
those who live at peace with themselves; and I with all the severity
of one who sees much that he would fain obliterate in the story of his
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: Staverton for the instant on the point of asking him, with a
divination, if he ever so prowled. There were divinations he was
unprepared for, and he had at all events averted enquiry by the
time Mrs. Muldoon had left them, passing on to other parts.
There was happily enough to say, on so consecrated a spot, that
could be said freely and fairly; so that a whole train of
declarations was precipitated by his friend's having herself broken
out, after a yearning look round: "But I hope you don't mean they
want you to pull THIS to pieces!" His answer came, promptly, with
his re-awakened wrath: it was of course exactly what they wanted,
and what they were "at" him for, daily, with the iteration of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Lesson of the Master by Henry James: declined to come in, and then felt regret, for Miss Fancourt, so
late in the afternoon, might return at any moment. But her father
gave him no second chance; he appeared mainly to wish not to have
struck him as ungracious. A further look at the visitor had
recalled something, enough at least to enable him to say: "You've
come back, you've come back?" Paul was on the point of replying
that he had come back the night before, but he suppressed, the next
instant, this strong light on the immediacy of his visit and,
giving merely a general assent, alluded to the young lady he
deplored not having found. He had come late in the hope she would
be in. "I'll tell her - I'll tell her," said the old man; and then
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