| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Hellenica by Xenophon: the polemarch Geranor, who was a Spartan, to the sword, and sacking
the suburbs of the town. Indeed, whenever or wherever they had a mind
to send an invading force, neither night nor wintry weather, nor
length of road nor mountain barrier could stay their march. So that at
this date they regarded their prowess as invincible.[25] The Thebans,
it will be understood, could not but feel a touch of jealousy at these
pretensions, and their former friendship to the Arcadians lost its
ardour. With the Eleians, indeed, matters were worse. The revelation
came to them when they demanded back from the Arcadians certain
cities[26] of which the Lacedaemonians had deprived them. They
discovered that their views were held of no account, but that the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie: Coroner proceeded with his task. Having elicited from Dorcas how
she had been awakened by the violent ringing of her mistress's
bell, and had subsequently roused the household, he passed to the
subject of the quarrel on the preceding afternoon.
Dorcas's evidence on this point was substantially what Poirot and
I had already heard, so I will not repeat it here.
The next witness was Mary Cavendish. She stood very upright, and
spoke in a low, clear, and perfectly composed voice. In answer
to the Coroner's question, she told how, her alarm clock having
aroused her at 4.30 as usual, she was dressing, when she was
startled by the sound of something heavy falling.
 The Mysterious Affair at Styles |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Call of the Canyon by Zane Grey: trying to tell you why."
"My dear, let me get a word in, will you," complained Eleanor. "You don't
know it all. There are as many different points of view as there are
people. . . . Well, if this girl happened to have a new frock, and a new
beau to show it to, she'd say, 'I'm the happiest girl in the world.' But
she is nothing of the kind. Only she doesn't know that. She approaches
marriage, or, for that matter, a more matured life, having had too much,
having been too well taken care of, knowing too much. Her masculine
satellites--father, brothers, uncles, friends, lovers--all utterly spoil
her. Mind you, I mean, girls like us, of the middle class--which is to say
the largest and best class of Americans. We are spoiled. . . . This girl
 The Call of the Canyon |