| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Deputy of Arcis by Honore de Balzac: or wrong, he has the conviction that Monsieur Marie-Gaston has done
him an injury. We must always make certain allowances for wounded
self-interests; you can never get absolute justice from them."
"It comes to this, then," replied Monsieur Dorlange, "that Monsieur de
Rhetore may continue to calumniate my friend at his ease; in the first
place, because he is in Italy; and secondly, because Marie-Gaston
would always feel extreme repugnance to come to certain extremities
with the brother of his wife. It is precisely that powerlessness,
relatively speaking, to defend himself, which constitutes my right--I
will say more--my duty to interfere. It was not without a special
permission of Providence that I was enabled to catch a few of the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Death of the Lion by Henry James: portrait to a young painter, Mr. Rumble, whose little game, as we
also used to say at Mr. Pinhorn's, was to be the first to perch on
the shoulders of renown. Mr. Rumble's studio was a circus in which
the man of the hour, and still more the woman, leaped through the
hoops of his showy frames almost as electrically as they burst into
telegrams and "specials." He pranced into the exhibitions on their
back; he was the reporter on canvas, the Vandyke up to date, and
there was one roaring year in which Mrs. Bounder and Miss Braby,
Guy Walsingham and Dora Forbes proclaimed in chorus from the same
pictured walls that no one had yet got ahead of him.
Paraday had been promptly caught and saddled, accepting with
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Street of Seven Stars by Mary Roberts Rinehart: pair sat on the boot.
Her voice was strong, not sweet, spoiled by years of singing
against dishes and bottles in smoky music halls; spoiled by
cigarettes and absinthe and foreign cocktails that resembled
their American prototypes as the night resembles the day.
She wore the gold dress, decolletee, slashed to the knee over
rhinestone-spangled stockings. And back of her trailed the twelve
little darkies.
She sang "Dixie," of course, and the "Old Folks at Home"; then a
ragtime medley, with the chorus showing rows of white teeth and
clogging with all their short legs. Le Grande danced to that, a
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