| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton: London?"
"Ah, to be sure: in London!" Archer grasped his
hand with curiosity and sympathy. "So you DID get
here, after all?" he exclaimed, casting a wondering eye
on the astute and haggard little countenance of young
Carfry's French tutor.
"Oh, I got here--yes," M. Riviere smiled with drawn
lips. "But not for long; I return the day after tomorrow."
He stood grasping his light valise in one neatly
gloved hand, and gazing anxiously, perplexedly, almost
appealingly, into Archer's face.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Man against the Sky by Edwin Arlington Robinson: And you mine that I don't know Aristotle."
He's all at odds with all the unities,
And what's yet worse, it doesn't seem to matter;
He treads along through Time's old wilderness
As if the tramp of all the centuries
Had left no roads -- and there are none, for him;
He doesn't see them, even with those eyes, --
And that's a pity, or I say it is.
Accordingly we have him as we have him --
Going his way, the way that he goes best,
A pleasant animal with no great noise
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Illustrious Gaudissart by Honore de Balzac: living by his receipt of custom, lards the public with new ideas,
turns it on the spit of lively projects, roasts it with prospectuses
(basting all the while with flattery), and finally gobbles it up with
some toothsome sauce in which it is caught and intoxicated like a fly
with a black-lead. Moreover, since 1830 what honors and emoluments
have been scattered throughout France to stimulate the zeal and self-
love of the "progressive and intelligent masses"! Titles, medals,
diplomas, a sort of legion of honor invented for the army of martyrs,
have followed each other with marvellous rapidity. Speculators in the
manufactured products of the intellect have developed a spice, a
ginger, all their own. From this have come premiums, forestalled
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