| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Cousin Betty by Honore de Balzac: weeping, as stones, however large, are invisible in Alpine cataracts
swollen by the melting of the snows.
This is the inexperience of virtue. Vice asks for nothing, as we have
seen in Madame Marneffe; it gets everything offered to it. Women of
that stamp are never exacting till they have made themselves
indispensable, or when a man has to be worked as a quarry is worked
where the lime is rather scarce--going to ruin, as the quarry-men say.
On hearing these words, "Two hundred thousand francs," Crevel
understood all. He cheerfully raised the Baroness, saying insolently:
"Come, come, bear up, mother," which Adeline, in her distraction,
failed to hear. The scene was changing its character. Crevel was
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: having determined to do an unwise thing, one is thereby bound to go ahead
and make TWO unwise things of it, by carrying out that determination.
I tried various mollifying tactics upon them, with reasonably good success:
under which encouragement, I increased my efforts; and, to show them that I
had not created this annoying errand, and was in no way to blame for it,
I presently drifted into its history--substantially as follows:
Toward the end of last year, I spent a few months in Munich, Bavaria.
In November I was living in Fraulein Dahlweiner's PENSION,
1a, Karlstrasse; but my working quarters were a mile from there,
in the house of a widow who supported herself by taking lodgers.
She and her two young children used to drop in every morning and talk
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Mother by Owen Wister: has been slightly remodelled for separate publication.
June 7, 1907, OWEN WISTER
MOTHER
When handsome young Richard Field--he was very handsome and very young--
announced to our assembled company that if his turn should really come to
tell us a story, the story should be no invention of his fancy, but a
page of truth, a chapter from his own life, in which himself was the hero
and a lovely, innocent girl was the heroine, his wife at once looked
extremely uncomfortable. She changed the reclining position in which she
had been leaning back in her chair, and she sat erect, with a hand closed
upon each arm of the chair.
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