| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from In the Cage by Henry James: "Yes, I know," she replied; uttering the words with a sense of the
situation far deeper than any pretence of not fitting his allusion.
She immediately felt him surprised and even a little puzzled at her
frank assent; but for herself the trouble she had taken could only,
in these fleeting minutes--they would probably never come back--be
all there like a little hoard of gold in her lap. Certainly he
might look at it, handle it, take up the pieces. Yet if he
understood anything he must understand all. "I consider you've
already immensely thanked me." The horror was back upon her of
having seemed to hang about for some reward. "It's awfully odd you
should have been there just the one time--!"
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Start in Life by Honore de Balzac: a sort of iron box--for he is always in hopes of getting cured."
"If he is such a friend of the King as they say he is, why doesn't he
get his Majesty to touch him?" asked Georges.
"The count has lately promised thirty thousand francs to a celebrated
Scotch doctor who is coming over to treat him," continued Oscar.
"Then his wife can't be blamed if she finds better--" said Schinner,
but he did not finish his sentence.
"I should say so!" resumed Oscar. "The poor man is so shrivelled and
old you would take him for eighty! He's as dry as parchment, and,
unluckily for him, he feels his position."
"Most men would," said Pere Leger.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Death of the Lion by Henry James: less of a battlefield than the haunted study. He once told me that
he had had no personal life to speak of since his fortieth year,
but had had more than was good for him before. London closed the
parenthesis and exhibited him in relations; one of the most
inevitable of these being that in which he found himself to Mrs.
Weeks Wimbush, wife of the boundless brewer and proprietress of the
universal menagerie. In this establishment, as everybody knows, on
occasions when the crush is great, the animals rub shoulders freely
with the spectators and the lions sit down for whole evenings with
the lambs.
It had been ominously clear to me from the first that in Neil
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