| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Lesser Hippias by Plato: that on grounds either of language or philosophy we should lightly reject
them. Some difference of style, or inferiority of execution, or
inconsistency of thought, can hardly be considered decisive of their
spurious character. For who always does justice to himself, or who writes
with equal care at all times? Certainly not Plato, who exhibits the
greatest differences in dramatic power, in the formation of sentences, and
in the use of words, if his earlier writings are compared with his later
ones, say the Protagoras or Phaedrus with the Laws. Or who can be expected
to think in the same manner during a period of authorship extending over
above fifty years, in an age of great intellectual activity, as well as of
political and literary transition? Certainly not Plato, whose earlier
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Case of the Registered Letter by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner: station at G- in the early afternoon hours. Some impulse of loyalty
to her dead lover, some foolish feminine fear that I might have
spoken against him in my earlier interviews with the commissioner
had driven the girl to this step. A few questions sufficed to draw
from her the story of her secret engagement, of its ending, and of
my quarrel with John. I will say for her that I am certain she did
not realise that all these things were calculated to cast suspicion
on me. The poor girl is too unused to the ways of police courts, to
the devious ways of the law, to realise what she was doing. The
sight of my revolver broke her down completely and she acknowledged
that it was mine. That is all. Except that I was arrested and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: "Well, if I don't know who she was in love with, I know
who HE was."
"She was ten years older," said her husband.
"Raison de plus--at that age! But it's rather nice,
his long reticence."
"Forty years!" Griffin put in.
"With this outbreak at last."
"The outbreak," I returned, "will make a tremendous occasion
of Thursday night;" and everyone so agreed with me that,
in the light of it, we lost all attention for everything else.
The last story, however incomplete and like the mere opening
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