| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Madame Firmiani by Honore de Balzac: individual in the forties) in 1813, at the age of sixteen, she must be
at least twenty-eight in 1825. However the same persons also asserted
that at no period of her life had she ever been so desirable or so
completely a woman. She was now at an age when women are most prone to
conceive a passion, and to desire it, perhaps, in their pensive hours.
She possessed all that earth sells, all that it lends, all that it
gives. The Attaches declared there was nothing of which she was
ignorant; the Contradictors asserted that there was much she ought to
learn; the Observers remarked that her hands were white, her feet
small, her movements a trifle too undulating. But, nevertheless,
individuals of all species envied or disputed Octave's happiness,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Hidden Masterpiece by Honore de Balzac: transports, and its dreams.
"Yes, my dear Porbus," said Frenhofer, speaking half in reverie, "I
have never yet beheld a perfect woman; a body whose outlines were
faultless and whose flesh-tints--Ah! where lives she?" he cried,
interrupting his own words; "where lives the lost Venus of the
ancients, so long sought for, whose scattered beauty we snatch by
glimpses? Oh! to see for a moment, a single moment, the divine
completed nature,--the ideal,--I would give my all of fortune. Yes; I
would search thee out, celestial Beauty! in thy farthest sphere. Like
Orpheus, I would go down to hell to win back the life of art--"
"Let us go," said Porbus to Poussin; "he neither sees nor hears us any
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from House of Mirth by Edith Wharton: since. She sent for Miss Jane, and made a dreadful scene; and
Jack Stepney and Herbert Melson, who were there too, told Miss
Jane that Freddy was threatening to marry some dreadful woman to
whom Ned had introduced him, and that they could do nothing with
him because now he's of age he has his own money. You can fancy
how poor Miss Jane felt--she came to me at once, and seemed to
think that if I could get her something to do she could earn
enough to pay Ned's debts and send him away--I'm afraid she has
no idea how long it would take her to pay for one of his evenings
at bridge. And he was horribly in debt when he came back from the
cruise--I can't see why he should have spent so much more money
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