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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Christ in Flanders by Honore de Balzac: thanked her by a gesture full of gracious dignity, and took his place
between the young mother and the old soldier. Immediately behind him
sat a peasant and his son, a boy ten years of age. A beggar woman,
old, wrinkled, and clad in rags, was crouching, with her almost empty
wallet, on a great coil of rope that lay in the prow. One of the
rowers, an old sailor, who had known her in the days of her beauty and
prosperity, had let her come in "for the love of God," in the
beautiful phrase that the common people use.
"Thank you kindly, Thomas," the old woman had said. "I will say two
/Paters/ and two /Aves/ for you in my prayers to-night."
The skipper blew his horn for the last time, looked along the silent
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