| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Message by Honore de Balzac: miscalculated in some way, or he slipped; how it happened, I do
not know, but the coach fell over upon him, and he was crushed
under it.
We carried him into a peasant's cottage, and there, amid the
moans wrung from him by horrible sufferings, he contrived to give
me a commission--a sacred task, in that it was laid upon me by a
dying man's last wish. Poor boy, all through his agony he was
torturing himself in his young simplicity of heart with the
thought of the painful shock to his mistress when she should
suddenly read of his death in a newspaper. He begged me to go
myself to break the news to her. He bade me look for a key which
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: of doors - the opposite extreme to the modern, the actual almost
complete proscription of them; but it had fairly contributed to
provoke this obsession of the presence encountered telescopically,
as he might say, focused and studied in diminishing perspective and
as by a rest for the elbow.
It was with these considerations that his present attention was
charged - they perfectly availed to make what he saw portentous.
He COULDN'T, by any lapse, have blocked that aperture; and if he
hadn't, if it was unthinkable, why what else was clear but that
there had been another agent? Another agent? - he had been
catching, as he felt, a moment back, the very breath of him; but
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Figure in the Carpet by Henry James: as he said, or overlooked, but he never told the only truth that
seemed to me in these days to signify. I met the couple in those
literary circles referred to in the papers: I have sufficiently
intimated that it was only in such circles we were all constructed
to revolve. Gwendolen was more than ever committed to them by the
publication of her third novel, and I myself definitely classed by
holding the opinion that this work was inferior to its immediate
predecessor. Was it worse because she had been keeping worse
company? If her secret was, as she had told me, her life - a fact
discernible in her increasing bloom, an air of conscious privilege
that, cleverly corrected by pretty charities, gave distinction to
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