The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: more useful to him than ever yet, and partly by reason of an
appearance of uncertainty in her health, co-incident and equally
new. It was characteristic of the inner detachment he had hitherto
so successfully cultivated and to which our whole account of him is
a reference, it was characteristic that his complications, such as
they were, had never yet seemed so as at this crisis to thicken
about him, even to the point of making him ask himself if he were,
by any chance, of a truth, within sight or sound, within touch or
reach, within the immediate jurisdiction, of the thing that waited.
When the day came, as come it had to, that his friend confessed to
him her fear of a deep disorder in her blood, he felt somehow the
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