| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Coxon Fund by Henry James: Frank Saltram. I had at this moment my first glimpse of the fact
that she was a person who could carry a responsibility; but I leave
the reader to judge of my sense of the aggravation, for either of
us, of such a burden, when I heard the servant announce Mrs.
Saltram. From what immediately passed between the two ladies I
gathered that the latter had been sent for post-haste to fill the
gap created by the absence of the mistress of the house. "Good!" I
remember crying, "she'll be put by ME;" and my apprehension was
promptly justified. Mrs. Saltram taken in to dinner, and taken in
as a consequence of an appeal to her amiability, was Mrs. Saltram
with a vengeance. I asked myself what Miss Anvoy meant by doing
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Stories From the Old Attic by Robert Harris: not far away at the time, he overheard the conversation. "Have you
seen anyone with a baby in the past week?" demanded the rider roughly.
"Who's asking?" asked the neighbor, without excessive politeness.
As the woodcutter heard the angry, cursing, threatening reply of the
rider, he ambled back to his hut to inform his wife of what was
going on. The couple was quite shrewd enough not to reveal anything
to a rude, angry, and ill-dressed man on horseback, because, they
concluded that, however deficient their own hospitality to the
child, it was likely to be better than whatever would be offered by
such a ruffian. "And besides," the woodcutter's wife said, "I
already love the child too much to give him up."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from An International Episode by Henry James: was to sit out on one of the great white decks of the steamer,
in the warm breezy darkness, and, in the vague starlight,
to make out the line of low, mysterious coast. The young
Englishmen tried American cigars--those of Mr. Westgate--
and talked together as they usually talked, with many
odd silences, lapses of logic, and incongruities of transition;
like people who have grown old together and learned to
supply each other's missing phrases; or, more especially,
like people thoroughly conscious of a common point of view,
so that a style of conversation superficially lacking in finish
might suffice for reference to a fund of associations in the light
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