| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Father Goriot by Honore de Balzac: poor old man for his own sake?"
"You would not have said so if you had seen me this morning,"
returned Bianchon, who did not take offence at this speech.
"Doctors who have seen a good deal of practice never see anything
but the disease, but, my dear fellow, I can see the patient
still."
He went. Eugene was left alone with the old man, and with an
apprehension of a crisis that set in, in fact, before very long.
"Ah! dear boy, is that you?" said Father Goriot, recognizing
Eugene.
"Do you feel better?" asked the law student, taking his hand.
 Father Goriot |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from When the World Shook by H. Rider Haggard: and he stopped.
When we had finished these vain adornments and Bastin had put
away the things and tidied up, we sat down, rather at a loose
end. We should have liked to walk but refrained from doing so for
fear lest we might dirty our clean clothes. So we just sat and
thought. At least Bickley thought, and so did I for a while until
I gave it up. What was the use of thinking, seeing that we were
face to face with circumstances which baffled reason and beggared
all recorded human experience? What Bastin did I am sure I do not
know, but I think from the expression of his countenance that he
was engaged in composing sermons for the benefit of Oro and the
 When the World Shook |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from On Revenues by Xenophon: marvellous is that the state, with the fact of so many private persons
growing wealthy at her expense, and under her very eyes, should have
failed to imitate them. It is an old story, trite enough to those of
us who have cared to attend to it, how once on a time Nicias, the son
of Niceratus, owned a thousand men in the silver mines,[11] whom he
let out to Sosias, a Thracian, on the following terms. Sosias was to
pay him a net obol a day, without charge or deduction, for every slave
of the thousand, and be[12] responsible for keeping up the number
perpetually at that figure. So again Hipponicus[13] had six hundred
slaves let out on the same principle, which brought him in a net
mina[14] a day without charge or deduction. Then there was
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