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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Pupil by Henry James: blight seemed, in a tradition of self-respect, so undeserved and so
arbitrary. No doubt people had a right to take the line they
liked; but why should his people have liked the line of pushing and
toadying and lying and cheating? What had their forefathers - all
decent folk, so far as he knew - done to them, or what had he done
to them? Who had poisoned their blood with the fifth-rate social
ideal, the fixed idea of making smart acquaintances and getting
into the monde chic, especially when it was foredoomed to failure
and exposure? They showed so what they were after; that was what
made the people they wanted not want THEM. And never a wince for
dignity, never a throb of shame at looking each other in the face,
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