| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from House of Mirth by Edith Wharton: chimney-piece between two malachite vases, passed her lace
handkerchief between the helmet and its visor.
"I knew it--the parlour-maid never dusts there!" she exclaimed,
triumphantly displaying a minute spot on the handkerchief; then,
reseating herself, she went on: "Molly thought Mrs. Dorset the
best-dressed woman at the wedding. I've no doubt her dress DID
cost more than any one else's, but I can't quite like the idea--a
combination of sable and POINT DE MILAN. It seems she goes to a
new man in Paris, who won't take an order till his client has
spent a day with him at his villa at Neuilly. He says he must
study his subject's home life--a most peculiar
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: cook in the newly painted house, whose mistress bullied her, and
who secretly fed the stray cats at nightfall, Mrs. Manstey's
warmest sympathies were given. On one occasion her feelings were
racked by the neglect of a housemaid, who for two days forgot to
feed the parrot committed to her care. On the third day, Mrs.
Manstey, in spite of her gouty hand, had just penned a letter,
beginning: "Madam, it is now three days since your parrot has
been fed," when the forgetful maid appeared at the window with a
cup of seed in her hand.
But in Mrs. Manstey's more meditative moods it was the narrowing
perspective of far-off yards which pleased her best. She loved,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: my Amandus enter'd?--till,--going round, and round, and round the world--
chance unexpected bringing them at the same moment of the night, though by
different ways, to the gate of Lyons, their native city, and each in well-
known accents calling out aloud,
Is Amandus / Is my Amanda still alive?
they fly into each other's arms, and both drop down dead for joy.
There is a soft aera in every gentle mortal's life, where such a story
affords more pabulum to the brain, than all the Frusts, and Crusts, and
Rusts of antiquity, which travellers can cook up for it.
--'Twas all that stuck on the right side of the cullender in my own, of
what Spon and others, in their accounts of Lyons, had strained into it; and
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