| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy: loneliness, child-bearing, and bereavement, their minds would revert
to this experience as to something which had been allowed to slip past them
insufficiently regarded.
One of the mistresses came in to turn out the lights, and before
doing so gave a final glance at Sue's cot, which remained empty,
and at her little dressing-table at the foot, which, like all
the rest, was ornamented with various girlish trifles,
framed photographs being not the least conspicuous among them.
Sue's table had a moderate show, two men in their filigree and
velvet frames standing together beside her looking-glass.
"Who are these men--did she ever say?" asked the mistress.
 Jude the Obscure |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Master of the World by Jules Verne: avoid crowding and the accidents which must result from it, the
automobiles were to follow each other at two minute intervals, along
the roads whose borders were black with spectators.
The first ten racers, numbered by lot, were dispatched between eight
o'clock and twenty minutes past. Unless there was some disastrous
accident, some of these machines would surely arrive at the goal by
eleven o'clock. The others followed in order.
An hour and a half had passed. There remained but a single contestant
at Prairie-du-chien. Word was sent back and forth by telephone every
five minutes as to the order of the racers. Midway between Madison
and Milwaukee, the lead was held by a machine of Renault brothers,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Two Brothers by Honore de Balzac: management for the edification of old bachelors.
Fanchette, the cook, was the only person in Issoudun who thought it
wrong that Flore Brazier should be queen over Jean-Jacques Rouget and
his home. She protested against the immorality of the connection, and
took a tone of injured virtue; the fact being that she was humiliated
by having, at her age, a crab-girl for a mistress,--a child who had
been brought barefoot into the house. Fanchette owned three hundred
francs a year in the Funds, for the doctor made her invest her savings
in that way, and he had left her as much more in an annuity; she could
therefore live at her ease without the necessity of working, and she
quitted the house nine months after the funeral of her old master,
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