| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken: Let us return, hear music, and forget . . .
IV. ILLICIT
Of what she said to me that night--no matter.
The strange thing came next day.
My brain was full of music--something she played me--;
I couldn't remember it all, but phrases of it
Wreathed and wreathed among faint memories,
Seeking for something, trying to tell me something,
Urging to restlessness: verging on grief.
I tried to play the tune, from memory,--
But memory failed: the chords and discords climbed
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Red Inn by Honore de Balzac: luxury, to elegance, to a life fruitful of all enjoyments of art, a
young girl who loves to idly listen at the opera to Rossini's music,--
if to her I should propose that she deprive herself of fifteen hundred
thousand francs in favor of broken-down old men, or scrofulous
paupers, she would turn her back on me and laugh, or her confidential
friend would tell her that I'm a crazy jester. If in an ecstasy of
love, I should paint to her the charms of a modest life, and a little
home on the banks of the Loire; if I were to ask her to sacrifice her
Parisian life on the altar of our love, it would be, in the first
place, a virtuous lie; in the next, I might only be opening the way to
some painful experience; I might lose the heart of a girl who loves
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Copy-Cat & Other Stories by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: actual effect. Viola had doubtless, as she had said,
struggled to keep her slim shape, but she had kept
it, and, what was more, kept it without evidence
of struggle. If she was in the least hampered by
tight lacing and length of undergarment, she gave
no evidence of it as she curled herself up in a big
chair and (Jane wondered how she could bring her-
self to do it) crossed her legs, revealing one delicate
foot and ankle, silk-stockinged with taupe, and shod
with a coral satin slipper with a silver heel and a
great silver buckle. On Viola's fair round neck the
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