| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Illustrious Gaudissart by Honore de Balzac: his wife and his garden, marry his daughter, play whist in the
evenings, keep the run of all the gossip in the neighborhood, meddle
with the elections, squabble with the large proprietors, and order
good dinners; or else trot along the embankment to find out what was
going on in Tours, torment the cure, and finally, by way of dramatic
entertainment, assist at the sale of lands in the neighborhood of his
vineyards. In short, he led the true Tourangian life,--the life of a
little country-townsman. He was, moreover, an important member of the
bourgeoisie,--a leader among the small proprietors, all of them
envious, jealous, delighted to catch up and retail gossip and
calumnies against the aristocracy; dragging things down to their own
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Malbone: An Oldport Romance by Thomas Wentworth Higginson: Washington once slept here."
"Oh!" said Philip. "It is one of that class of houses?"
"Yes," said she. "There is not a village in America that has
not half a dozen of them, not counting those where he only
breakfasted. Did ever man sleep like that man? What else could
he ever have done? Who governed, I wonder, while he was asleep?
How he must have travelled! The swiftest horse could scarcely
have carried him from one of these houses to another."
"I never was attached to the memory of Washington," meditated
Philip; "but I always thought it was the pear-tree. It must
have been that he was such a very unsettled person."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Duchess of Padua by Oscar Wilde: And slew him not: this is the noblest vengeance
Which I can take.
MORANZONE
You will not slay him?
GUIDO
No.
MORANZONE
Ignoble son of a noble father,
Who sufferest this man who sold that father
To live an hour.
GUIDO
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