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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Juana by Honore de Balzac: being able to discover how her gold evaporated, she would find herself
back in the streets, poor, denuded of everything, preserving nothing
but her all-powerful beauty, yet living on without thought or care of
the past, the present, or the future. Cast, in her poverty, into the
hands of some poor gambling officer, she attached herself to him as a
dog to its master, sharing the discomforts of the military life, which
indeed she comforted, as content under the roof of a garret as beneath
the silken hangings of opulence. Italian and Spanish both, she
fulfilled very scrupulously the duties of religion, and more than once
she had said to love:--
"Return to-morrow; to-day I belong to God."
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