| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from La Grenadiere by Honore de Balzac: down from the terrace upon the ever-changing river nearly two hundred
feet below; and in the evening the breeze brings a fresh scent of the
sea, with the fragrance of far-off flowers gathered upon its way. Some
cloud wandering in space, changing its color and form at every moment
as it crosses the pure blue of the sky, can alter every detail in the
widespread wonderful landscape in a thousand ways, from every point of
view. The eye embraces first of all the south bank of the Loire,
stretching away as far as Amboise, then Tours with its suburbs and
buildings, and the Plessis rising out of the fertile plain; further
away, between Vouvray and Saint-Symphorien, you see a sort of crescent
of gray cliff full of sunny vineyards; the only limits to your view
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Commission in Lunacy by Honore de Balzac: "Well, madame, granting that you spend only sixty thousand francs a
year, to any one who sees your stables, your house, your train of
servants, and a style of housekeeping which strikes me as far more
luxurious than that of the Jeanrenauds, that sum would seem well laid
out."
The Marquise bowed an agreement.
"But," continued the judge, "if you have no more than twenty-six
thousand francs a year, you may have a hundred thousand francs of
debt. The Court would therefore have a right to imagine that the
motives which prompt you to ask that your husband may be deprived of
the control of his property are complicated by self-interest and the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: tells it, inevitably and irresistibly displaces all the vulgar, mean,
purblind, spiteful versions. There is a precise realism and an
unsmiling, measured, determined sincerity which gives a strange
dignity to the work of one whose fixed practice and ungovernable
impulse it is to kick conventional dignity whenever he sees it.
Harris "durch Mitleid wissend"
Frank Harris is everything except a humorist, not, apparently, from
stupidity, but because scorn overcomes humor in him. Nobody ever
dreamt of reproaching Milton's Lucifer for not seeing the comic side
of his fall; and nobody who has read Mr Harris's stories desires to
have them lightened by chapters from the hand of Artemus Ward. Yet he
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