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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: but one; one who in the last years had requited her wonderful
pages, her tragic outpourings of love, humility, and pardon, with
the scant phrases by which a man evades the vulgarest of
sentimental importunities. He had been a brute in spite of
himself, and sometimes, now that the remembrance of her face had
faded, and only her voice and words remained with him, he chafed
at his own inadequacy, his stupid inability to rise to the height
of her passion. His egoism was not of a kind to mirror its
complacency in the adventure. To have been loved by the most
brilliant woman of her day, and to have been incapable of loving
her, seemed to him, in looking back, the most derisive evidence of
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