| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Recruit by Honore de Balzac: this occasion the Norman countenances of all these rejected visitors,
but more especially to enter into Madame de Dey's secret anxieties, it
is necessary to explain the role she played at Carentan. The critical
position in which she stood at this moment being that of many others
during the Revolution the sympathies and recollections of more than
one reader will help to give color to this narrative.
Madame de Dey, widow of a lieutenant-general, chevalier of the Orders,
had left the court at the time of the emigration. Possessing a good
deal of property in the neighborhood of Carentan, she took refuge in
that town, hoping that the influence of the Terror would be little
felt there. This expectation, based on a knowledge of the region, was
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Case of the Registered Letter by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner: Chicago. There was nothing of more recent date and no personal
correspondence whatever. The same was true of the pockets of the
suit Siders had been wearing at the time of his death. A man of
any property or position at all in the world gathers about him so
much of this kind of material that its absence shows premeditation.
The suit Siders had been wearing when he was killed was lying on
the table in the room. It was a plain grey business suit of good
cut and material. The body had been prepared for burial in a
beseeming suit of black. Muller made a careful examination of the
clothes, and found only what the police reports showed him had
already been found by the examination made by the local authorities.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Critias by Plato: heights of Parnes and Cithaeron, and between them and the sea included the
district of Oropus. The country was then, as what remains of it still is,
the most fertile in the world, and abounded in rich plains and pastures.
But in the course of ages much of the soil was washed away and disappeared
in the deep sea. And the inhabitants of this fair land were endowed with
intelligence and the love of beauty.
The Acropolis of the ancient Athens extended to the Ilissus and Eridanus,
and included the Pnyx, and the Lycabettus on the opposite side to the Pnyx,
having a level surface and deep soil. The side of the hill was inhabited
by craftsmen and husbandmen; and the warriors dwelt by themselves on the
summit, around the temples of Hephaestus and Athene, in an enclosure which
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