| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Purse by Honore de Balzac: fall," said the old lady, rising from an antique armchair that
stood by the chimney, and offering him a seat.
"No, madame. I have come to thank you for the kind care you gave
me, and above all mademoiselle, who heard me fall."
As he uttered this speech, stamped with the exquisite stupidity
given to the mind by the first disturbing symptoms of true love,
Hippolyte looked at the young girl. Adelaide was lighting the
Argand lamp, no doubt that she might get rid of a tallow candle
fixed in a large copper flat candlestick, and graced with a heavy
fluting of grease from its guttering. She answered with a slight
bow, carried the flat candlestick into the ante-room, came back,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: must continue to exist, a certain number of hereditarily sacred
persons to whom the earth, air, and water of the world belong, as
personal property; of which earth, air, and water, these persons
may, at their pleasure, permit, or forbid, the rest of the human
race to eat, to breathe, or to drink. This theory is not for many
years longer tenable. The adverse theory is that a division of the
land of the world among the mob of the world would immediately
elevate the said mob into sacred personages; that houses would then
build themselves, and corn grow of itself; and that everybody would
be able to live, without doing any work for his living. This theory
would also be found highly untenable in practice.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Records of a Family of Engineers by Robert Louis Stevenson: but she comes in usefully as an example. Amongst the
treasures of the ladies of my family, her letters have been
honoured with a volume to themselves. I read about a half of
them myself; then handed over the task to one of stauncher
resolution, with orders to communicate any fact that should be
found to illuminate these pages. Not one was found; it was
her only art to communicate by post second-rate sermons at
second-hand; and such, I take it, was the correspondence in
which my grandmother delighted. If I am right, that of Robert
Stevenson, with his quaint smack of the contemporary `Sandford
and Merton,' his interest in the whole page of experience, his
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