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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Altar of the Dead by Henry James: depend upon her to be the eventual guardian of his shrine; and it
was in the name of what had so passed between them that he appealed
to her not to forsake him in his age. She listened at present with
shining coldness and all her habitual forbearance to insist on her
terms; her deprecation was even still tenderer, for it expressed
the compassion of her own sense that he was abandoned. Her terms,
however, remained the same, and scarcely the less audible for not
being uttered; though he was sure that secretly even more than he
she felt bereft of the satisfaction his solemn trust was to have
provided her. They both missed the rich future, but she missed it
most, because after all it was to have been entirely hers; and it
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