| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Dynamiter by Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson: for nothing farther at my hands.'
The landlady met me at the door. 'Here, madam,' said she,
with a curtsey insolently low, 'here is my bill. Would it
inconvenience you to settle it at once?'
'You shall be paid, madam,' said I, 'in the morning, in the
proper course.' And I took the paper with a very high air,
but inwardly quaking.
I had no sooner looked at it than I perceived myself to be
lost. I had been short of money and had allowed my debt to
mount; and it had now reached the sum, which I shall never
forget, of twelve pounds thirteen and fourpence halfpenny.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield: an instant. Why don't I leave the office? Why don't I seriously consider,
this moment, for instance, what it is that prevents me leaving? It's not
as though I'm tremendously tied. I've two boys to provide for, but, after
all, they're boys. I could cut off to sea, or get a job up-country, or--"
Suddenly he smiled at Linda and said in a changed voice, as if he were
confiding a secret, "Weak...weak. No stamina. No anchor. No guiding
principle, let us call it." But then the dark velvety voice rolled out:"
"Would ye hear the story
How it unfolds itself..."
and they were silent.
The sun had set. In the western sky there were great masses of crushed-up
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Bunner Sisters by Edith Wharton: the table, and was tying up, with her usual fumbling deliberation,
a knobby object wrapped in paper. Now and then, as she struggled
with the string, which was too short, she fancied she heard the
click of the shop-door, and paused to listen for her sister; then,
as no one came, she straightened her spectacles and entered into
renewed conflict with the parcel. In honour of some event of
obvious importance, she had put on her double-dyed and triple-
turned black silk. Age, while bestowing on this garment a
patine worthy of a Renaissance bronze, had deprived it of
whatever curves the wearer's pre-Raphaelite figure had once been
able to impress on it; but this stiffness of outline gave it an air
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