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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Another Study of Woman by Honore de Balzac: antagonism; she can crush nothing under foot, it is she who would be
crushed. Thus she is apt at Jesuitical /mezzo termine/, she is a
creature of equivocal compromises, of guarded proprieties, of
anonymous passions steered between two reef-bound shores. She is as
much afraid of her servants as an Englishwoman who lives in dread of a
trial in the divorce-court. This woman--so free at a ball, so
attractive out walking--is a slave at home; she is never independent
but in perfect privacy, or theoretically. She must preserve herself in
her position as a lady. This is her task.
"For in our day a woman repudiated by her husband, reduced to a meagre
allowance, with no carriage, no luxury, no opera-box, none of the
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