| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Z. Marcas by Honore de Balzac: of justice! What an insult to the distinguished youth, the ambitions
native to the soil of France! We looked upon these things as upon a
spectacle, and groaned over them, without taking upon ourselves to
act.
Juste, whom no one ever sought, and who never sought any one, was, at
five-and-twenty, a great politician, a man with a wonderful aptitude
for apprehending the correlation between remote history and the facts
of the present and of the future. In 1831, he told me exactly what
would and did happen--the murders, the conspiracies, the ascendency of
the Jews, the difficulty of doing anything in France, the scarcity of
talent in the higher circles, and the abundance of intellect in the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from St. Ives by Robert Louis Stevenson: blindfold, and you must make it over again. The Count's service is
a good one; what are you leaving it for? Are you not throwing away
the substance for the shadow? No, do not answer me yet. You
imagine that I am a prosperous nobleman, just declared my uncle's
heir, on the threshold of the best of good fortune, and, from the
point of view of a judicious servant, a jewel of a master to serve
and stick to? Well, my boy, I am nothing of the kind, nothing of
the kind.'
As I said the words, I came to a full stop and held up the lantern
to his face. He stood before me, brilliantly illuminated on the
background of impenetrable night and falling snow, stricken to
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton: fears.
On the rainy afternoon in question, tramping home from the
"cours" (to which she was to return at six), she had said to
herself that it was two months that very day since Nick had
known she was ready to release him--and that after such a delay
he was not likely to take any further steps. The thought filled
her with a vague ecstasy. She had had to fix an arbitrary date
as the term of her anguish, and she had fixed that one; and
behold she was justified. For what could his silence mean but
that he too ....
On the hall-table lay a typed envelope with the Paris postage-
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