| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde: is found.
[Enter LANE with the cigarette case on a salver. ALGERNON takes it
at once. LANE goes out.]
ALGERNON. I think that is rather mean of you, Ernest, I must say.
[Opens case and examines it.] However, it makes no matter, for,
now that I look at the inscription inside, I find that the thing
isn't yours after all.
JACK. Of course it's mine. [Moving to him.] You have seen me
with it a hundred times, and you have no right whatsoever to read
what is written inside. It is a very ungentlemanly thing to read a
private cigarette case.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from House of Mirth by Edith Wharton: possibility of a direct encounter.
Dorset, swinging along with bent head, in moody abstraction, did
not see Miss Bart till he was close upon her; but the sight,
instead of bringing him to a halt, as she had half-expected, sent
him toward her with an eagerness which found expression in his
opening words.
"Miss Bart!--You'll shake hands, won't you? I've been hoping to
meet you--I should have written to you if I'd dared." His face,
with its tossed red hair and straggling moustache, had a driven
uneasy look, as though life had become an unceasing race between
himself and the thoughts at his heels.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Edingburgh Picturesque Notes by Robert Louis Stevenson: horrors, the figures rising headless from the grave, and
all the traditional ingenuities in which it pleased our
fathers to set forth their sorrow for the dead and their
sense of earthly mutability. But it is not a hearty sort
of mirth. Each ornament may have been executed by the
merriest apprentice, whistling as he plied the mallet;
but the original meaning of each, and the combined effect
of so many of them in this quiet enclosure, is serious to
the point of melancholy.
Round a great part of the circuit, houses of a low
class present their backs to the churchyard. Only a few
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