| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Lesson of the Master by Henry James: Sunday solitude of Manchester Square, swinging his stick and with a
good deal of emotion fermenting in his soul, it appeared to him he
was living in a world strangely magnanimous. Miss Fancourt had
told him it was possible she should be away, and that her father
should be, on the following Sunday, but that she had the hope of a
visit from him in the other event. She promised to let him know
should their absence fail, and then he might act accordingly.
After he had passed into one of the streets that open from the
Square he stopped, without definite intentions, looking sceptically
for a cab. In a moment he saw a hansom roll through the place from
the other side and come a part of the way toward him. He was on
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Altar of the Dead by Henry James: safety, where was safety to be looked for? Not lightly nor often,
not without occasion nor without emotion, any more than in any
other reference by serious people to a mystery of their faith; but
when something had happened to warm, as it were, the air for it,
they came as near as they could come to calling their Dead by name.
They felt it was coming very near to utter their thought at all.
The word "they" expressed enough; it limited the mention, it had a
dignity of its own, and if, in their talk, you had heard our
friends use it, you might have taken them for a pair of pagans of
old alluding decently to the domesticated gods. They never knew -
at least Stransom never knew - how they had learned to be sure
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Silverado Squatters by Robert Louis Stevenson: the morning to the little brown shanty, where she taught the
young ones of the district, and returning thither pretty
weary in the afternoon. She had chosen this outlying
situation, I understood, for her health. Mr. Corwin was
consumptive; so was Rufe; so was Mr. Jennings, the engineer.
In short, the place was a kind of small Davos: consumptive
folk consorting on a hilltop in the most unbroken idleness.
Jennings never did anything that I could see, except now and
then to fish, and generally to sit about in the bar and the
verandah, waiting for something to happen. Corwin and Rufe
did as little as possible; and if the school-ma'am, poor
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