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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from A Second Home by Honore de Balzac: carry away with him a perfect image of the life led in Paris by the
working class of women, for the embroideress evidently lived by her
needle. Many, as they passed through the turnstile, found themselves
wondering how a girl could preserve her color, living in such a
cellar. A student of lively imagination, going that way to cross to
the Quartier-Latin, would compare this obscure and vegetative life to
that of the ivy that clung to these chill walls, to that of the
peasants born to labor, who are born, toil, and die unknown to the
world they have helped to feed. A house-owner, after studying the
house with the eye of a valuer, would have said, "What will become of
those two women if embroidery should go out of fashion?" Among the men
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