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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Figure in the Carpet by Henry James: my having, in a postscript to my very first letter to her after the
receipt of the hideous news, asked Mrs. Corvick whether her husband
mightn't at least have finished the great article on Vereker. Her
answer was as prompt as my question: the article, which had been
barely begun, was a mere heartbreaking scrap. She explained that
our friend, abroad, had just settled down to it when interrupted by
her mother's death, and that then, on his return, he had been kept
from work by the engrossments into which that calamity was to
plunge them. The opening pages were all that existed; they were
striking, they were promising, but they didn't unveil the idol.
That great intellectual feat was obviously to have formed his
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