| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Lady Baltimore by Owen Wister: were pink sunbonnets from (I should imagine) Spartanburg, or Charlotte,
or Greenville; there were masculine boots which yet bore incrusted upon
their heels the red mud of Aiken or of Camden; there was one fat,
jewelled exhalation who spoke of Palm Beach with the true stockyard
twang, and looked as if she swallowed a million every morning for
breakfast, and God knows how many more for the ensuing repasts; she was
the only detestable specimen among us; sunbonnets, boots, and even
ungenial New England proved on acquaintance kindly, simple, enterprising
Americans; yet who knows if sunbonnets and boots and all of us wouldn't
have become just as detestable had we but been as she was, swollen and
puffy with the acute indigestion of sudden wealth?
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from An Inland Voyage by Robert Louis Stevenson: on the water-side. But what tickled me was the gravity of the
peril to be conjured. You might hang up the model of a sea-going
ship, and welcome: one that is to plough a furrow round the world,
and visit the tropic or the frosty poles, runs dangers that are
well worth a candle and a mass. But the SAINT NICOLAS of Creil,
which was to be tugged for some ten years by patient draught-
horses, in a weedy canal, with the poplars chattering overhead, and
the skipper whistling at the tiller; which was to do all its
errands in green inland places, and never get out of sight of a
village belfry in all its cruising; why, you would have thought if
anything could be done without the intervention of Providence, it
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Purse by Honore de Balzac: outline, in a word, the skeleton of a countenance of which the
whole effect indicated great shrewdness with much grace in the
play of the eyes, in which could be discerned the expression
peculiar to women of the old Court; an expression that cannot be
defined in words. Those fine and mobile features might quite as
well indicate bad feelings, and suggest astuteness and womanly
artifice carried to a high pitch of wickedness, as reveal the
refined delicacy of a beautiful soul.
Indeed, the face of a woman has this element of mystery to puzzle
the ordinary observer, that the difference between frankness and
duplicity, the genius for intrigue and the genius of the heart,
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