| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Letters of Two Brides by Honore de Balzac: level highroad on a gray day. The only event here, my sweet, is that I
am playing cross-purposes with myself. But I don't want to tell you
about it just now; it must wait for another day. With dogged
obstinacy, I pass from despair to hope, now yielding, now holding
back. It may be that I ask from life more than we have a right to
claim. In youth we are so ready to believe that the ideal and the real
will harmonize!
I have been pondering alone, seated beneath a rock in my park, and the
fruit of my pondering is that love in marriage is a happy accident on
which it is impossible to base a universal law. My Aveyron philosopher
is right in looking on the family as the only possible unit in
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Old Indian Legends by Zitkala-Sa: "How! how!" nodded the kind-faced chieftain, listening to the
queer story. Then rising, he took the infant in his strong arms;
gently he laid the black-eyed babe in his daughter's lap. "This is
to be your little son!" said he, smiling.
"Yes, father," she replied. Pleased with the child, she
smoothed the long black hair fringing his round brown face.
"Tell the people that I give a feast and dance this day for
the naming of my daughter's little son," bade the chieftain.
In the meanwhile among the men waiting by the entrance way,
one said in a low voice: "I have heard that bad spirits come as
little children into a camp which they mean to destroy."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from An Old Maid by Honore de Balzac: by four young men, comrades whom Athanase had liked the best. A few
friends of Madame Granson, women dressed in black, and veiled, were
present; and half a dozen other young men who had been somewhat
intimate with this lost genius. Four torches flickered on the coffin,
which was covered with crape. The rector, assisted by one discreet
choirboy, said the mortuary mass. Then the body of the suicide was
noiselessly carried to a corner of the cemetery, where a black wooden
cross, without inscription, was all that indicated its place hereafter
to the mother. Athanase lived and died in shadow. No voice was raised
to blame the rector; the bishop kept silence. The piety of the mother
redeemed the impiety of the son's last act.
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