The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: of type. The little broken phrases fled across the page like
wounded animals in the open. . . . It was a horrible sight. . . .
A battue of helpless things driven savagely out of shelter. He
had not known it would be like this. . . .
He understood now that, at the moment of selling the letters, he
had viewed the transaction solely as it affected himself: as an
unfortunate blemish on an otherwise presentable record. He had
scarcely considered the act in relation to Margaret Aubyn; for
death, if it hallows, also makes innocuous. Glennard's God was a
god of the living, of the immediate, the actual, the tangible; all
his days he had lived in the presence of that god, heedless of the
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