| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Weir of Hermiston by Robert Louis Stevenson: beauty that surrounded him - the chill there was in the warmth, the
gross black clods about the opening primroses, the damp earthy smell
that was everywhere intermingled with the scents. The voice of the aged
Torrance within rose in an ecstasy. And he wondered if Torrance also
felt in his old bones the joyous influence of the spring morning;
Torrance, or the shadow of what once was Torrance, that must come so
soon to lie outside here in the sun and rain with all his rheumatisms,
while a new minister stood in his room and thundered from his own
familiar pulpit? The pity of it, and something of the chill of the
grave, shook him for a moment as he made haste to enter.
He went up the aisle reverently, and took his place in the pew with
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: "Won't it do you good?"
"It won't do THEM--! I nodded at the house.
"The children?"
"I can't leave them now."
"You're afraid--?"
I spoke boldly. "I'm afraid of HIM."
Mrs. Grose's large face showed me, at this, for the first time,
the faraway faint glimmer of a consciousness more acute:
I somehow made out in it the delayed dawn of an idea I myself
had not given her and that was as yet quite obscure to me.
It comes back to me that I thought instantly of this
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Firm of Nucingen by Honore de Balzac: neither too pink, like a grocer's assistant, nor yet too brown, like a
Calabrese. Finally, and this is an essential point, Beaudenord was not
too handsome, like some of our friends that look rather too much of
professional beauties to be anything else; but no more of that; we
have said it, it is shocking! Well, he was a crack shot, and sat a
horse to admiration; he had fought a duel for a trifle, and had not
killed his man.
"If you wish to know in what pure, complete, and unadulterated
happiness consists in this Nineteenth Century in Paris--the happiness,
that is to say, of a young man of twenty-six--do you realize that you
must enter into the infinitely small details of existence?
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