| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Altar of the Dead by Henry James: contentment he had given himself. They worshipped side by side so
often that there were moments when he wished he might be sure, so
straight did their prospect stretch away of growing old together in
their rites. She was younger than he, but she looked as if her
Dead were at least as numerous as his candles. She had no colour,
no sound, no fault, and another of the things about which he had
made up his mind was that she had no fortune. Always black-robed,
she must have had a succession of sorrows. People weren't poor,
after all, whom so many losses could overtake; they were positively
rich when they had had so much to give up. But the air of this
devoted and indifferent woman, who always made, in any attitude, a
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Bronte Sisters: Trembling with anger and agitation, and I don't know what besides,
I broke away, and got my candle, and rushed up-stairs to my room.
He would not have done so but for that hateful picture. And there
he had it still in his possession, an eternal monument to his pride
and my humiliation.
It was but little sleep I got that night, and in the morning I rose
perplexed and troubled with the thoughts of meeting him at
breakfast. I knew not how it was to be done. An assumption of
dignified, cold indifference would hardly do, after what he knew of
my devotion - to his face, at least. Yet something must be done to
check his presumption - I would not submit to be tyrannised over by
 The Tenant of Wildfell Hall |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from An Historical Mystery by Honore de Balzac: sort of pentagonal tower entered through a small arched door. The
interior of the ground-floor together with the rooms on the first
storey were modernized in the time of Louis XIV., and the whole
building is surmounted by an immense roof broken by casement windows
with carved triangular pediments. Before the castle lies a vast green
sward the trees of which had recently been cut down. On either side of
the entrance bridge are two small dwellings where the gardeners live,
connected across the road by a paltry iron railing without character,
evidently modern. To right and left of the lawn, which is divided in
two by a paved road-way, are the stables, cow-sheds, barns, wood-
house, bakery, poultry-yard, and the offices, placed in what were
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