| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Octopus by Frank Norris: stranger coming up to where she sat and speaking to her.
"Here is a coincidence," exclaimed the new-comer, as she sat
down; "surely you are the young girl who sat opposite me on the
boat. Strange I should come across you again. I've had you in
mind ever since."
On this nearer view Minna observed that the woman's face bore
rather more than a trace of enamel and that the atmosphere about
was impregnated with sachet. She was not otherwise conspicuous,
but there was a certain hardness about her mouth and a certain
droop of fatigue in her eyelids which, combined with an
indefinite self-confidence of manner, held Minna's attention.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Prince of Bohemia by Honore de Balzac: gallantry after the fashion of the Marechal de Richelieu, high spirits
and frolic carried rather too far; perhaps we may see in it the
/outrances/ of another age, the Eighteenth Century pushed to extremes;
it harks back to the Musketeers; it is an exploit stolen from
Champcenetz; nay, such light-hearted inconstancy takes us back to the
festooned and ornate period of the old court of the Valois. In an age
as moral as the present, we are bound to regard audacity of this kind
sternly; still, at the same time that 'cornet of sugar-plums' may
serve to warn young girls of the perils of lingering where fancies,
more charming than chastened, come thickly from the first; on the rosy
flowery unguarded slopes, where trespasses ripen into errors full of
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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: my having, in a postscript to my very first letter to her after the
receipt of the hideous news, asked Mrs. Corvick whether her husband
mightn't at least have finished the great article on Vereker. Her
answer was as prompt as my question: the article, which had been
barely begun, was a mere heartbreaking scrap. She explained that
our friend, abroad, had just settled down to it when interrupted by
her mother's death, and that then, on his return, he had been kept
from work by the engrossments into which that calamity was to
plunge them. The opening pages were all that existed; they were
striking, they were promising, but they didn't unveil the idol.
That great intellectual feat was obviously to have formed his
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