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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Duchesse de Langeais by Honore de Balzac: confessed a weakling in a monastery; he was born to act, to live
out a life of work; he is evading a man's destiny in his cell.
But what man's strength, blended with pathetic weakness, is
implied by a woman's choice of the convent life! A man may have
any number of motives for burying himself in a monastery; for him
it is the leap over the precipice. A woman has but one
motive--she is a woman still; she betrothes herself to a Heavenly
Bridegroom. Of the monk you may ask, "Why did you not fight
your battle?" But if a woman immures herself in the cloister,
is there not always a sublime battle fought first?
At length it seemed to the General that that still room, and the
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