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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: he supposed it had ceased to be read; and this apparent subsidence
of the agitation about it brought the reassuring sense that he had
exaggerated its vitality. The conviction, if it did not ease his
conscience, at least offered him the relative relief of obscurity:
he felt like an offender taken down from the pillory and thrust
into the soothing darkness of a cell.
But one evening, when Alexa had left him to go to a dance, he
chanced to turn over the magazines on her table, and the copy of
the Horoscope, to which he settled down with his cigar, confronted
him, on its first page, with a portrait of Margaret Aubyn. It was
a reproduction of the photograph that had stood so long on his
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