| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Lock and Key Library by Julian Hawthorne, Ed.: circumstance. He was interred in a neighboring convent; and the
reputation of his sanctity, joined to the interest caused by his
extraordinary death, collected vast numbers at the ceremony. His
funeral sermon was preached by a monk of distinguished eloquence,
appointed for the purpose. To render the effect of his discourse
more powerful, the corse, extended on a bier, with its face
uncovered, was placed in the aisle. The monk took his text from
one of the prophets,--"Death is gone up into our palaces." He
expatiated on mortality, whose approach, whether abrupt or
lingering, is alike awful to man.--He spoke of the vicisstudes of
empires with much eloquence and learning, but his audience were not
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Foolish Virgin by Thomas Dixon: to the man who choked me into insensibility?"
"I am telling you that he is the father of your
son--that he has rights which you cannot deny; that
when you gave yourself to him in the first impulse of
love a deed was done which Almighty God can never undo.
Your tragic blunder was the rush into marriage with a
man about whose character you knew so little. It's the
timid, shrinking, home-loving girl that makes this
mistake. You must face it now. You are responsible as
deeply and truly as the man who married you. That he
happened at that moment to be a brute and a criminal is
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Recruit by Honore de Balzac: mixed society, without humiliating the touchy pride of the parvenus,
or shocking that of her own friends.
Then about thirty-eight years of age, she still preserved, not the
fresh plump beauty which distinguishes the daughters of Lower
Normandy, but a fragile and, so to speak, aristocratic beauty. Her
features were delicate and refined, her figure supple and easy. When
she spoke, her pale face lighted and seemed to acquire fresh life. Her
large dark eyes were full of affability and kindness, and yet their
calm, religious expression seemed to say that the springs of her
existence were no longer in her.
Married in the flower of her age to an old and jealous soldier, the
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