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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Two Poets by Honore de Balzac: her dear Camille liked a quiet country farmhouse existence of all
things. Mother and daughter had the pinched sub-acid dignity
characteristic of those who have learned by experience the exact value
of expressions of sympathy; they belonged to a class which the world
delights to pity; they had been the objects of the benevolent interest
of egoism; they had sounded the empty void beneath the consoling
formulas with which the world ministers to the necessities of the
unfortunate.
M. de Severac was fifty-nine years old, and a childless widower.
Mother and daughter listened, therefore, with devout admiration to all
that he told them about his silkworm nurseries.
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