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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from At the Sign of the Cat & Racket by Honore de Balzac: with a gleam in it like a cat's, seemed to spite the world because she
was so ugly. Mademoiselle Virginie, brought up, like her younger
sister, under the domestic rule of her mother, had reached the age of
eight-and-twenty. Youth mitigated the graceless effect which her
likeness to her mother sometimes gave to her features, but maternal
austerity had endowed her with two great qualities which made up for
everything. She was patient and gentle. Mademoiselle Augustine, who
was but just eighteen, was not like either her father or her mother.
She was one of those daughters whose total absence of any physical
affinity with their parents makes one believe in the adage: "God gives
children." Augustine was little, or, to describe her more truly,
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