| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Hero of Our Time by M.Y. Lermontov: give her a present of some kind every day. At
first she didn't utter a word, but haughtily
thrust away the gifts, which then fell to the lot
of the dukhan-keeper's wife and aroused her
eloquence. Ah, presents! What won't a woman
do for a coloured rag! . . . But that is by the
way. . . For a long time Grigori Aleksandro-
vich persevered with her, and meanwhile he
studied the Tartar language and she began to
understand ours. Little by little she grew
accustomed to looking at him, at first furtively,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: Glyde, but Miss Van Vluyck said dogmatically: "Excuse me if I
tell you that you're all mistaken. Xingu happens to be a
language."
"A language!" the Lunch Club cried.
"Certainly. Don't you remember Fanny Roby's saying that there
were several branches, and that some were hard to trace? What
could that apply to but dialects?"
Mrs. Ballinger could no longer restrain a contemptuous laugh.
"Really, if the Lunch Club has reached such a pass that it has to
go to Fanny Roby for instruction on a subject like Xingu, it had
almost better cease to exist!"
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: the age and community in which he lived. In their heavy
inaccessibility to ideas, their dull respectability, their tedious
orthodoxy, their worship of vulgar success, their entire
preoccupation with the gross materialistic side of life, and their
ridiculous estimate of themselves and their importance, the Jews of
Jerusalem in Christ's day were the exact counterpart of the British
Philistine of our own. Christ mocked at the 'whited sepulchre' of
respectability, and fixed that phrase for ever. He treated worldly
success as a thing absolutely to be despised. He saw nothing in it
at all. He looked on wealth as an encumbrance to a man. He would
not hear of life being sacrificed to any system of thought or
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