| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Juana by Honore de Balzac: economical. To spare herself the troubles of material life, she
arranged with a "traiteur" the day after Diard's departure to send in
their meals. Her maid then sufficed for the service of the house, and
she thus found herself without money, but her wants all provided for
until her husband's return. Her pleasures consisted in taking walks
with the children. She was then thirty-three years old. Her beauty,
greatly developed, was in all its lustre. Therefore as soon as she
appeared, much talk was made in Bordeaux about the beautiful Spanish
stranger. At the first advances made to her Juana ceased to walk
abroad, and confined herself wholly to her own large garden.
Diard at first made a fortune at the baths. In two months he won three
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: one woman knew but did not understand; the other, it sometimes
seemed, understood without knowing.
In its last disguise of retrospective remorse, his self-pity
affected a desire for solitude and meditation. He lost himself in
morbid musings, in futile visions of what life with Margaret Aubyn
might have been. There were moments when, in the strange
dislocation of his view, the wrong he had done her seemed a tie
between them.
To indulge these emotions he fell into the habit, on Sunday
afternoons, of solitary walks prolonged till after dusk. The days
were lengthening, there was a touch of spring in the air, and his
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner: Late that night, when every one else had gone to bed, the yellow-haired
little woman stood alone in the kitchen. She had come to fill the kettle
for the next morning's coffee, and now stood before the fire. The warm
reflection lit the grave old-womanish little face, that was so unusually
thoughtful this evening.
"Better than all the world; better than everything; he loves me better than
everything!" She said the words aloud, as if they were more easy to
believe if she spoke them so. She had given out so much love in her little
life, and had got none of it back with interest. Now one said, "I love you
better than all the world." One loved her better than she loved him. How
suddenly rich she was. She kept clasping and unclasping her hands. So a
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