The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Aspern Papers by Henry James: What had I come back to Venice for but to see them, to take them?
My delight in learning they were still in existence was such that
if the poor woman had gone down on her knees to beseech me never to
mention them again I would have treated the proceeding as a bad joke.
"I have got them but I can't show them," she added.
"Not even to me? Ah, Miss Tita!" I groaned, with a voice of infinite
remonstrance and reproach.
She colored, and the tears came back to her eyes;
I saw that it cost her a kind of anguish to take such a stand
but that a dreadful sense of duty had descended upon her.
It made me quite sick to find myself confronted with that
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