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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Ball at Sceaux by Honore de Balzac: for pleasantry. But she had not time to give herself up to malicious
criticism, or opportunity for hearing many of the startling speeches
which caricaturists so gladly pick up. The haughty young lady suddenly
found a flower in this wide field--the metaphor is reasonable--whose
splendor and coloring worked on her imagination with all the
fascination of novelty. It often happens that we look at a dress, a
hanging, a blank sheet of paper, with so little heed that we do not at
first detect a stain or a bright spot which afterwards strikes the eye
as though it had come there at the very instant when we see it; and by
a sort of moral phenomenon somewhat resembling this, Mademoiselle de
Fontaine discovered in a young man the external perfection of which
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