| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Foolish Virgin by Thomas Dixon: number. He raised his hand and ran his fingers
nervously through the short, thick, red hair which
covered his well-shaped head.
The girl's attention was first fixed by the strange
contrast between his massive jaw and short neck which
spoke the physical strength of an ox, and the slender
gracefully tapering fingers of his small hand. The
wrist was small, the fingers almost feminine in their
lines.
He caught her look of curious interest and to her
horror, smiled and walked straight to her seat.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: unfolds incidental illustrations which a modern writer would look
at the back of, and toss each to its pigeon-hole. I think ancient
classics and ancient people are alike in the tendency to this kind
of expansion.
An old doctor came to me once (this is literal fact) with some
contrivance or other for people with broken kneepans. As the
patient would be confined for a good while, he might find it dull
work to sit with his hands in his lap. Reading, the ingenious
inventor suggested, would be an agreeable mode of passing the time.
He mentioned, in his written account of his contrivance, various
works that might amuse the weary hour. I remember only three, -
 The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson: pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation
of these elements. If each, I told myself, could be housed in
separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was
unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the
aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just
could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the
good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed
to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil.
It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were
thus bound together--that in the agonised womb of consciousness,
these polar twins should be continuously struggling. How, then
 The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde |