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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Alkahest by Honore de Balzac: yielded herself to happiness. She asked herself if Claes were not
seeking a domestic slave,--one who would necessarily keep the house?
whether he had himself no secret imperfection which obliged him to be
satisfied with a poor, deformed girl? Such perpetual misgivings gave a
priceless value to the few short hours during which she trusted the
sincerity and the permanence of a love which was to avenge her on the
world. Sometimes she provoked hazardous discussions, and probed the
inner consciousness of her lover by exaggerating her defects. At such
times she often wrung from Balthazar truths that were far from
flattering; but she loved the embarrassment into which he fell when
she had led him to say that what he loved in a woman was a noble soul
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