The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from O Pioneers! by Willa Cather: Marie stole slowly, flutteringly, along the
path, like a white night-moth out of the fields.
The years seemed to stretch before her like the
land; spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring;
always the same patient fields, the patient little
trees, the patient lives; always the same yearn-
ing, the same pulling at the chain--until the
instinct to live had torn itself and bled and
weakened for the last time, until the chain
secured a dead woman, who might cautiously
be released. Marie walked on, her face lifted
 O Pioneers! |