| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Melmoth Reconciled by Honore de Balzac: imperial curl of the stranger's lips. Castanier turned away, took up
fifty packets each containing ten thousand francs in bank-notes, and
held them out to the stranger, receiving in exchange for them a bill
accepted by the Baron de Nucingen. A sort of convulsive tremor ran
through him as he saw a red gleam in the stranger's eyes when they
fell on the forged signature on the letter of credit.
"It . . . it wants your signature . . ." stammered Castanier, handing
back the bill.
"Hand me your pen," answered the Englishman.
Castanier handed him the pen with which he had just committed forgery.
The stranger wrote JOHN MELMOTH, then he returned the slip of paper
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Weir of Hermiston by Robert Louis Stevenson: On this particular Sunday, there was no doubt but that the spring had
come at last. It was warm, with a latent shiver in the air that made
the warmth only the more welcome. The shallows of the stream glittered
and tinkled among bunches of primrose. Vagrant scents of the earth
arrested Archie by the way with moments of ethereal intoxication. The
grey Quakerish dale was still only awakened in places and patches from
the sobriety of its winter colouring; and he wondered at its beauty; an
essential beauty of the old earth it seemed to him, not resident in
particulars but breathing to him from the whole. He surprised himself
by a sudden impulse to write poetry - he did so sometimes, loose,
galloping octo-syllabics in the vein of Scott - and when he had taken
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Ursula by Honore de Balzac: one physiologist the existence of an intangible fluid which is the
basis of the phenomena of the human will, and from which result
passions, habits, the shape of faces and of skulls. Magnetic facts,
the miracles of somnambulism, those of divination and ecstasy, which
open a way to the spiritual world, were fast accumulating. The strange
tale of the apparitions of the farmer Martin, so clearly proved, and
his interview with Louis XVIII.; a knowledge of the intercourse of
Swedenborg with the departed, carefully investigated in Germany; the
tales of Walter Scott on the effects of "second sight"; the
extraordinary faculties of some fortune-tellers, who practice as a
single science chiromancy, cartomancy, and the horoscope; the facts of
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