| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: surroundings. Their love as yet was but the gay tent of holiday-
makers.
His wife looked up with a smile. The country life suited her, and
her beauty had gained depth from a stillness in which certain
faces might have grown opaque.
"Are you very tired?" she asked, pouring his tea.
"Just enough to enjoy this." He rose from the chair in which he
had thrown himself and bent over the tray for his cream. "You've
had a visitor?" he commented, noticing a half-empty cup beside her
own.
"Only Mr. Flamel," she said, indifferently.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Menexenus by Plato: nineteen-twentieths of all the writings which have ever been ascribed to
Plato, are undoubtedly genuine. There is another portion of them,
including the Epistles, the Epinomis, the dialogues rejected by the
ancients themselves, namely, the Axiochus, De justo, De virtute, Demodocus,
Sisyphus, Eryxias, which on grounds, both of internal and external
evidence, we are able with equal certainty to reject. But there still
remains a small portion of which we are unable to affirm either that they
are genuine or spurious. They may have been written in youth, or possibly
like the works of some painters, may be partly or wholly the compositions
of pupils; or they may have been the writings of some contemporary
transferred by accident to the more celebrated name of Plato, or of some
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Blue Flower by Henry van Dyke: moment, evidently in conflict with himself. Then a look of
shame and regret came into his eyes. He made some excuse for
not going with us to the picnic, at the Black Brook Falls,
with which the day was celebrated. In the afternoon, as we
all sat around the camp-fire, he came swinging through the
woods with his long, swift stride, and going at once to
Dorothy laid a little brooch of pearl and opal in her hand.
"Will you forgive me?" he said. "I hope this is not too
late. But I lost the train back from Newburg and walked home.
I pray that you may never know any tears but pearls, and that
there may be nothing changeable about you but the opal."
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