| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from House of Mirth by Edith Wharton: running. Not that I ought to complain to-day, though," he went on
after a moment, "for I did a very neat stroke of business, thanks
to Stepney's friend Rosedale: by the way, Miss Lily, I wish you'd
try to persuade Judy to be decently civil to that chap. He's
going to be rich enough to buy us all out one of these
days, and if she'd only ask him to dine now and then I could get
almost anything out of him. The man is mad to know the people who
don't want to know him, and when a fellow's in that state there
is nothing he won't do for the first woman who takes him up."
Lily hesitated a moment. The first part of her companion's
discourse had started an interesting train of thought, which was
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Extracts From Adam's Diary by Mark Twain: Ten Days Later
She accuses me of being the cause of our disaster! She says, with
apparent sincerity and truth, that the Serpent assured her that
the forbidden fruit was not apples, it was chestnuts. I said I
was innocent, then, for I had not eaten any chestnuts. She said
the Serpent informed her that "chestnut" was a figurative term
meaning an aged and mouldy joke. I turned pale at that, for I
have made many jokes to pass the weary time, and some of them could
have been of that sort, though I had honestly supposed that they
were new when I made them. She asked me if I had made one just
at the time of the catastrophe. I was obliged to admit that I had
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Coxon Fund by Henry James: persuadability. I'm bound to say he didn't criticise his
benefactors, though practically he got tired of them; she, however,
had the highest standards about eleemosynary forms. She offered
the odd spectacle of a spirit puffed up by dependence, and indeed
it had introduced her to some excellent society. She pitied me for
not knowing certain people who aided her and whom she doubtless
patronised in turn for their luck in not knowing me. I dare say I
should have got on with her better if she had had a ray of
imagination--if it had occasionally seemed to occur to her to
regard Saltram's expressions of his nature in any other manner than
as separate subjects of woe. They were all flowers of his
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