| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Dream Life and Real Life by Olive Schreiner: and there among the broken kopjes. In the rocks there were hundreds of
homes for the conies, and from the crevices wild asparagus hung down. She
ran to the river, bathed in the clear cold water, and tossed it over her
head. She sang aloud. All the songs she knew were sad, so she could not
sing them now, she was glad, she was so free; but she sang the notes
without the words, as the cock-o-veets do. Singing and jumping all the
way, she went back, and took a sharp stone, and cut at the root of a
kippersol, and got out a large piece, as long as her arm, and sat to chew
it. Two conies came out on the rock above her head and peeped at her. She
held them out a piece, but they did not want it, and ran away.
It was very delicious to her. Kippersol is like raw quince, when it is
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Firm of Nucingen by Honore de Balzac: doctrine much preached, and very seldom practised."
"Oh, what rubbish!" cried Blondet. "The Marechal de Richelieu
understood something of gallantry, and he settled an allowance of a
thousand louis d'or on Mme. de la Popeliniere after that affair of the
hiding-place behind the hearth. Agnes Sorel, in all simplicity, took
her fortune to Charles VII., and the King accepted it. Jacques Coeur
kept the crown for France; he was allowed to do it, and woman-like,
France was ungrateful."
"Gentlemen," said Bixiou, "a love that does not imply an indissoluble
friendship, to my thinking, is momentary libertinage. What sort of
entire surrender is it that keeps something back? Between these two
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Vicar of Tours by Honore de Balzac: this document, strengthened by citations of precedents and supported
by certain clauses in the Code, was a masterpiece of legal argument,
and so evidently just in its condemnation of the old maid that thirty
or forty copies were made and maliciously distributed through the
town.
IV
A few days after this commencement of hostilities between Birotteau
and the old maid, the Baron de Listomere, who expected to be included
as captain of a corvette in a coming promotion lately announced by the
minister of the Navy, received a letter from one of his friends
warning him that there was some intention of putting him on the
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