| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Daughter of Eve by Honore de Balzac: very inferior boards. Her success and her money she owed to Raoul
Nathan. This association of their two fates, usual enough in the
dramatic and literary world, did no harm to Raoul, who kept up the
outward conventions of a man of the world. Moreover, Florine's actual
means were precarious; her revenues came from her salary and her
leaves of absence, and barely sufficed for her dress and her household
expenses. Nathan gave her certain perquisites which he managed to levy
as critic on several of the new enterprises of industrial art. But
although he was always gallant and protecting towards her, that
protection had nothing regular or solid about it.
This uncertainty, and this life on a bough, as it were, did not alarm
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from In the Cage by Henry James: she became aware that Captain Everard had apparently been in the
shop a minute and that Mr. Buckton had already seized him.
He had as usual half a dozen telegrams; and when he saw that she
saw him and their eyes met he gave, on bowing to her, an
exaggerated laugh in which she read a new consciousness. It was a
confession of awkwardness; it seemed to tell her that of course he
knew he ought better to have kept his head, ought to have been
clever enough to wait, on some pretext, till he should have found
her free. Mr. Buckton was a long time with him, and her attention
was soon demanded by other visitors; so that nothing passed between
them but the fulness of their silence. The look she took from him
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Recruit by Honore de Balzac: dragoons, at the age of eighteen, the young Comte de Dey had obeyed
the point of honor of the period by following the princes of the blood
in their emigration.
Thus Madame de Dey, noble, rich, and the mother of an emigre, could
not be unaware of the dangers of her cruel situation. Having no other
desire than to preserve a fortune for her son, she renounced the
happiness of emigrating with him; and when she read the vigorous laws
by virtue of which the Republic daily confiscated the property of
emigres, she congratulated herself on that act of courage; was she not
guarding the property of her son at the peril of her life? And when
she heard of the terrible executions ordered by the Convention, she
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