| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Coxon Fund by Henry James: "I'm sure YOU needn't!" and Mrs. Mulville tossed her head.
"He isn't good enough!" I went on; to which she opposed a sound
almost as contentious as my own had been. This made me, with
genuine immediate horror, exclaim: "You haven't influenced her, I
hope!" and my emphasis brought back the blood with a rush to poor
Adelaide's face. She declared while she blushed--for I had
frightened her again--that she had never influenced anybody and
that the girl had only seen and heard and judged for herself. HE
had influenced her, if I would, as he did every one who had a soul:
that word, as we knew, even expressed feebly the power of the
things he said to haunt the mind. How could she, Adelaide, help it
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Roads of Destiny by O. Henry: "Fifty miles down the Mississippi our steamer broke her rudder. We
sent for a tug to tow us back and lost three days. When we struck the
blue waters of the Gulf, all the storm clouds of the Atlantic seemed
to have concentrated above us. We thought surely to sweeten those
leaping waves with our sugar, and to stack our arms and lumber on the
floor of the Mexican Gulf.
"Kearny did not seek to cast off one iota of the burden of our danger
from the shoulders of his fatal horoscope. He weathered every storm on
deck, smoking a black pipe, to keep which alight rain and sea-water
seemed but as oil. And he shook his fist at the black clouds behind
which his baleful star winked its unseen eye. When the skies cleared
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Summer by Edith Wharton: made him forget what he was going to say; she recalled
the change in his face, and jumping up she ran over the
bare boards to her washstand, found the matches, lit a
candle, and lifted it to the square of looking-glass on
the white-washed wall. Her small face, usually so
darkly pale, glowed like a rose in the faint orb of
light, and under her rumpled hair her eyes seemed
deeper and larger than by day. Perhaps after all it
was a mistake to wish they were blue. A clumsy band
and button fastened her unbleached night-gown about the
throat. She undid it, freed her thin shoulders, and saw
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