The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton: it, an amicable arrangement is necessary--to secure the
requisite evidence then a line from you, suggesting an
interview, seems to me more advisable."
"An interview? Is an interview necessary?" She was ashamed to
show her agitation to this cautiously smiling young man, who
must wonder at her childish lack of understanding; but the break
in her voice was uncontrollable.
"Oh, please write to him--I can't! And I can't see him! Oh,
can't you arrange it for me?" she pleaded.
She saw now that her idea of a divorce had been that it was
something one went out--or sent out--to buy in a shop:
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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: future and sleep in hamlets.
At last the path went between two houses, and turned the party out
into a wide muddy high-road, bordered, as far as the eye could
reach on either hand, by an unsightly village. The houses stood
well back, leaving a ribbon of waste land on either side of the
road, where there were stacks of firewood, carts, barrows, rubbish-
heaps, and a little doubtful grass. Away on the left, a gaunt
tower stood in the middle of the street. What it had been in past
ages, I know not: probably a hold in time of war; but now-a-days
it bore an illegible dial-plate in its upper parts, and near the
bottom an iron letter-box.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Straight Deal by Owen Wister: have made this continent is of greater service to mankind than the
wilderness of the Indian ever could possibly have been--once conceding,
as you have to concede, the inevitableness of civilization. Neither you,
nor I, nor any man, can remold the sorry scheme of things entire. But we
could have behaved better to the Indian. That was in our power. And we
gave him a raw deal instead, not once, but again and again. We did it
because we could do it without risk, because he was weaker and we could
always beat him in the end. And all the while we were doing it, there was
our Bill of Rights, our Declaration of Independence, founded on a new
thing in the world, proclaiming to mankind the fairest hope yet born,
that "All men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable
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