| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The American by Henry James: her a few moments in silence. "Your daughter is very beautiful,"
he said at last.
"She is very strange," said Madame de Bellegarde.
"I am glad to hear it," Newman rejoined, smiling. "It makes me hope."
"Hope what?"
"That she will consent, some day, to marry me."
The old lady slowly rose to her feet. "That really is your project, then?"
"Yes; will you favor it?"
"Favor it?" Madame de Bellegarde looked at him a moment and then
shook her head. "No!" she said, softly.
"Will you suffer it, then? Will you let it pass?"
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Malbone: An Oldport Romance by Thomas Wentworth Higginson: "Certainly," said her aunt. "Ruth, go to my chamber, and get
me a pin."
"What kind of a pin, ma'am?" asked that meek handmaiden, from
the doorway.
"What a question!" said her indignant mistress. "Any kind. The
common pin of North America. Now, Hope?" as the door closed.
"I think it better, auntie," said Hope, "that Philip should not
stay here longer at present. You can truly say that the house
is full, and--"
"I have just had a note from him," said Aunt Jane severely. "He
has gone to lodge at the hotel. What next?"
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: a real banquet after all, at which love is the theme of discourse, and huge
quantities of wine are drunk.
The discourse of Phaedrus is half-mythical, half-ethical; and he himself,
true to the character which is given him in the Dialogue bearing his name,
is half-sophist, half-enthusiast. He is the critic of poetry also, who
compares Homer and Aeschylus in the insipid and irrational manner of the
schools of the day, characteristically reasoning about the probability of
matters which do not admit of reasoning. He starts from a noble text:
'That without the sense of honour and dishonour neither states nor
individuals ever do any good or great work.' But he soon passes on to more
common-place topics. The antiquity of love, the blessing of having a
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