The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: persons more or less familiar with his past, and to whom the
visible conformities of his life seemed a final disproof of its
one fierce secret deviation. The general tendency was to take
for the whole of life the slit seen between the blinders of
habit: and in his walk down that narrow vista Granice cut a
correct enough figure. To a vision free to follow his whole
orbit his story would be more intelligible: it would be easier to
convince a chance idler in the street than the trained
intelligence hampered by a sense of his antecedents. This idea
shot up in him with the tropic luxuriance of each new seed of
thought, and he began to walk the streets, and to frequent out-
|