| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Village Rector by Honore de Balzac: as that of a drunkard emeritus, and covered with suppurating pimples,
either bleeding or about to burst. Without being caused by eczema or
scrofula, these signs of a blood overheated by continual toil,
anxiety, and the lust of business, by wakeful nights, poor food, and a
sober life, seemed to partake of both these diseases. In spite of the
advice of his partners, his clerks, and his physician, the banker
would never compel himself to take the healthful precautions which
might have prevented, or would at least modify, this malady, which was
slight at first, but had greatly increased from year to year. He
wanted to cure it, and would sometimes take baths or drink some
prescribed potion; but, hurried along on the current of his business,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: "Too, too dreadful--some of them."
She looked at him a minute, and there came to him as he met it, an
inconsequent sense that her eyes, when one got their full
clearness, were still as beautiful as they had been in youth, only
beautiful with a strange cold light--a light that somehow was a
part of the effect, if it wasn't rather a part of the cause, of the
pale hard sweetness of the season and the hour. "And yet," she
said at last, "there are horrors we've mentioned."
It deepened the strangeness to see her, as such a figure in such a
picture, talk of "horrors," but she was to do in a few minutes
something stranger yet--though even of this he was to take the full
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Mountains by Stewart Edward White: grew very tired of it. He removed his pipe deliberately,
and spat in the fire.
"Say, son," he drawled, "if you want to say
something big, why don't you say `elephant'?"
The young fellow subsided. We went on smoking
our pipes.
Down near the Chiracahua Range in southeastern
Arizona, there is a butte, and halfway up that butte
is a cave, and in front of that cave is a ramshackle
porch-roof or shed. This latter makes the cave into
a dwelling-house. It is inhabited by an old "alkali"
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