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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Edition of The Ambassadors by Henry James: It was history, to begin with, that Jeanne's mother had been
three-and-twenty years before, at Geneva, schoolmate and good
girlfriend to Maria Gostrey, who had moreover enjoyed since then,
though interruptedly and above all with a long recent drop,
other glimpses of her. Twenty-three years put them both on,
no doubt; and Madame de Vionnet--though she had married straight
after school--couldn't be today an hour less than thirty-eight.
This made her ten years older than Chad--though ten years, also, if
Strether liked, older than she looked; the least, at any rate, that
a prospective mother-in-law could be expected to do with. She would
be of all mothers-in-law the most charming; unless indeed, through
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