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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from A Start in Life by Honore de Balzac: misfortune to a ridiculous suit of clothes, and caring nothing for the
real interests of life, torments itself about frivolities, about
neckcloths, and the passionate desire to appear a man. Then the young
fellow swells himself out; his swagger is all the more portentous
because it is exercised on nothings. Yet if he envies a fool who is
elegantly dressed, he is also capable of enthusiasm over talent, and
of genuine admiration for genius. Such defects as these, when they
have no root in the heart, prove only the exuberance of sap,--the
richness of the youthful imagination. That a lad of nineteen, an only
child, kept severely at home by poverty, adored by a mother who put
upon herself all privations for his sake, should be moved to envy by a
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