| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Country Doctor by Honore de Balzac: pension due to him after twenty-two years of service, and I do not
know how many campaigns. He did not obtain his pension or his
traveling expenses; he did not even receive his arrears of pay. He
spent a year in making fruitless solicitations, holding out his hands
in vain to those whom he had saved; and at the end of it he came back
here, sorely disheartened but resigned to his fate. This hero unknown
to fame does draining work on the land, for which he is paid ten sous
the fathom. He is accustomed to working in a marshy soil, and so, as
he says, he gets jobs which no one else cares to take. He can make
about three francs a day by clearing out ponds, or draining meadows
that lie under water. His deafness makes him seem surly, and he is not
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis: hand, once, and she depressingly didn't notice it. She caroled, "You're a good
little mother's-helper, Georgie. Now trot in with the tray and leave it on
the side-table."
He wished that Eddie Swanson would give them cocktails; that Louetta would
have one. He wanted--Oh, he wanted to be one of these Bohemians you read
about. Studio parties. Wild lovely girls who were independent. Not
necessarily bad. Certainly not! But not tame, like Floral Heights. How he'd
ever stood it all these years--
Eddie did not give them cocktails. True, they supped with mirth, and with
several repetitions by Orville Jones of "Any time Louetta wants to come sit on
my lap I'll tell this sandwich to beat it!" but they were respectable, as
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: come over her. In one sense it was a happy one, since she had
grown, if not handsomer, at least more vivid and expressive; her
beauty had become more communicable: it was as though she had
learned the conscious exercise of intuitive attributes and now
used her effects with the discrimination of an artist skilled in
values. To a dispassionate critic (as Glennard now rated himself)
the art may at times have been a little too obvious. Her attempts
at lightness lacked spontaneity, and she sometimes rasped him by
laughing like Julia Armiger; but he had enough imagination to
perceive that, in respect of the wife's social arts, a husband
necessarily sees the wrong side of the tapestry.
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