| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Prince of Bohemia by Honore de Balzac: there, Cursy was not attacked too seriously--his plays succeeded. For
these reasons he would not have separated from Tullia for an empire.
If she had been unfaithful, he would probably have passed it over, on
condition that none of his accustomed joys should be retrenched; yet,
strange to say, Tullia caused him no twinges on this account. No fancy
was laid to her charge; if there had been any, she certainly had been
very careful of appearances.
" 'My dear fellow,' du Bruel would say, laying down the law to us on
the boulevard, 'there is nothing like one of these women who have sown
their wild oats and got over their passions. Such women as Claudine
have lived their bachelor life; they have been over head and ears in
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Aspern Papers by Henry James: I perceived that she felt that she should not really soon come
down again and wished therefore to protract the present.
She insisted too on making the talk between us personal to ourselves;
and altogether her behavior was such as would have been possible
only to a completely innocent woman.
"I shall like the flowers better now that I know they are also meant for me."
"How could you have doubted it? If you will tell me the kind you
like best I will send a double lot of them."
"Oh, I like them all best!" Then she went on, familiarly: "Shall you study--
shall you read and write--when you go up to your rooms?"
"I don't do that at night, at this season. The lamplight brings
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft: excruciating despair, uttered in such wild tones of indescribable
anguish as proved the total absence of reason, and roused phantoms
of horror in her mind, far more terrific than all that dreaming
superstition ever drew. Besides, there was frequently something
so inconceivably picturesque in the varying gestures of unrestrained
passion, so irresistibly comic in their sallies, or so
heart-piercingly pathetic in the little airs they would sing,
frequently bursting out after an awful silence, as to fascinate
the attention, and amuse the fancy, while torturing the soul. It
was the uproar of the passions which she was compelled to observe;
and to mark the lucid beam of reason, like a light trembling in a
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