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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Juana by Honore de Balzac: their tomb; melancholies, misunderstood even by those who cause them;
sighs unheeded, devotions unrewarded,--on earth at least,--splendid
silences misconstrued; vengeances withheld, disdained; generosities
perpetually bestowed and wasted; pleasures longed for and denied;
angelic charities secretly accomplished,--in short, all the religions
of womanhood and its inextinguishable love.
Juana knew that life; fate spared her nought. She was wholly a wife,
but a sorrowful and suffering wife; a wife incessantly wounded, yet
forgiving always; a wife pure as a flawless diamond,--she who had the
beauty and the glow of the diamond, and in that beauty, that glow, a
vengeance in her hand; for she was certainly not a woman to fear the
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