| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Padre Ignacio by Owen Wister: "And, sir--pardon me if I do say this--are you not wasted at Santa
Ysabel del Mar? I have seen the priests at the other missions. They are--
the sort of good men that I expected. But are you needed to save such
souls as these?"
"There is no aristocracy of souls," said the Padre, again whispering.
"But the body and the mind!" cried Gaston. "My God, are they nothing? Do
you think that they are given to us for nothing but a trap? You cannot
teach such a doctrine with your library there. And how about all the
cultivated men and women away from whose quickening society the brightest
of us grow numb? You have held out. But will it be for long? Are you
never to save any souls of your own kind? Are not twenty years of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from An Old Maid by Honore de Balzac: beginning to neglect things."
Mademoiselle inquired for eight days running whether Penelope had had
her oats at two o'clock, because on one occasion Jacquelin was a
trifle late. Her narrow imagination spent itself on trifles. A layer
of dust forgotten by the feather-duster, a slice of toast ill-made by
Mariette, Josette's delay in closing the blinds when the sun came
round to fade the colors of the furniture,--all these great little
things gave rise to serious quarrels in which mademoiselle grew angry.
"Everything was changing," she would cry; "she did not know her own
servants; the fact was she spoiled them!" On one occasion Josette gave
her the "Journee du Chretien" instead of the "Quinzaine de Paques."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: escape from the obsession of moral problems, which somehow could
no more be worn in Flamel's presence than a surplice in the
street.
"Where are you going? To the club?" Flamel asked; adding, as the
younger man assented, "Why not come to my studio instead? You'll
see one bore instead of twenty."
The apartment which Flamel described as his studio showed, as its
one claim to the designation, a perennially empty easel; the rest
of its space being filled with the evidences of a comprehensive
dilettanteism. Against this background, which seemed the visible
expression of its owner's intellectual tolerance, rows of fine
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