| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Vision Splendid by William MacLeod Raine: drays lumbering along, the thronged sidewalks of Powers Avenue. A
door that had for years been ajar in his heart had swung to with a
crash. The incredible folly of his dream was laid bare to him.
Despised, distrusted and disgraced, there was no chance that he
might be even a friend to her. She moved in another world, one he
could not reach if he would and would not if he could. All that he
believed in she had been brought up to disregard. Much that was
dear to her he must hammer down so long as there was life in him.
But James--he had fought his way up to her. Why shouldn't he have
his chance? Better--far better James than Ned Merrill. He had
heard the echoes of a disgraceful story about that young man in
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Village Rector by Honore de Balzac: ancient literature. She learned to ride a horse, and to dance and to
draw. She painted water-colors and made sepia sketches, turning
ardently to all those resources which women employ to bear the
weariness of their solitude. She gave herself that second education
which most women derive from a man, but which she derived from herself
only.
The natural superiority of a free, sincere spirit, brought up, as it
were in a desert and strengthened by religion, had given her a sort of
untrammelled grandeur and certain needs, to which the provincial world
she lived in offered no sustenance. All books pictured Love to her,
and she sought for the evidence of its existence, but nowhere could
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: uncle Toby, who (honest man!) generally took every thing as it happened;--
and who, of all things in the world, troubled his brain the least with
abstruse thinking;--the ideas of time and space--or how we came by those
ideas--or of what stuff they were made--or whether they were born with us--
or we picked them up afterwards as we went along--or whether we did it in
frocks--or not till we had got into breeches--with a thousand other
inquiries and disputes about Infinity Prescience, Liberty, Necessity, and
so forth, upon whose desperate and unconquerable theories so many fine
heads have been turned and cracked--never did my uncle Toby's the least
injury at all; my father knew it--and was no less surprized than he was
disappointed, with my uncle's fortuitous solution.
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