| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: man in the club was Flamel.
Glennard, as he heard himself almost involuntarily pressing Flamel
to come and dine, felt the full irony of the situation. To use
Flamel as a shield against his wife's scrutiny was only a shade
less humiliating than to reckon on his wife as a defence against
Flamel.
He felt a contradictory movement of annoyance at the latter's
ready acceptance, and the two men drove in silence to the station.
As they passed the bookstall in the waiting-room Flamel lingered a
moment and the eyes of both fell on Margaret Aubyn's name,
conspicuously displayed above a counter stacked with the familiar
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Exiles by Honore de Balzac: hand touched that of the elder man, who, looking round, confessed his
emotion. But thinking his dignity as a man compromised, no doubt, to
redeem it, he said in a deep voice:
"I weep for my native land. I am an exile! Young man, in such an hour
as this I left my home. There, at this hour, the fireflies are coming
out of their fragile dwellings and clinging like diamond sparks to the
leaves of the iris. At this hour the breeze, as sweet as the sweetest
poetry, rises up from a valley bathed in light, bearing on its wings
the richest fragrance. On the horizon I could see a golden city like
the Heavenly Jerusalem--a city whose name I may not speak. There, too,
a river winds. But that city and its buildings, that river of which
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Hated Son by Honore de Balzac: steeples, Marquis de Saint-Sever. You shall take to wife the daughter
of a prince. Would you have me die of grief? Come! come to me! or here
I kneel until I see you. Your old father prays you, he humbles himself
before his child as before God himself."
The hated son paid no heed to this language bristling with social
ideas and vanities he did not comprehend; his soul remained under the
impressions of unconquerable terror. He was silent, suffering great
agony. Towards evening the old seigneur, after exhausting all formulas
of language, all resources of entreaty, all repentant promises, was
overcome by a sort of religious contrition. He knelt down upon the
sand and made a vow:--
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