nobody but you
to look to, you think you are to make me do, or not do, everything you
please, and are to put any affront upon me. You are as bad as they were,
every bit. But I will not be quite tamed, and made submissive. I will
say again that I went to look at the house, because I had often thought
that I should like to see it once more. I will ask again how they are,
because I once liked them and at times thought they were kind to me.'

Hereupon Clennam said that he was sure they would still receive her
kindly, if she should ever desire to return.

'Never!' said the girl passionately. 'I shall never do that. Nobody
knows that better than Miss Wade, though she taunts me because she has
made me her dependent. And I know I am so; and I know she is overjoyed
when she can bring it to my mind.'

'A good pretence!' said Miss Wade, with no less anger, haughtiness, and
bitterness; 'but too threadbare to cover what I plainly see in this. My
poverty will not bear competition with their money. Better go back at
once, better go back at once, and have done with it!'

Arthur Clennam looked at them, standing a little distance asunder in the
dull confined room, each proudly cherishing her own anger; each, with
a fixed determination, torturing her own breast, and torturing the
other's. He said a word or two of leave-taking; but Miss Wade barely
inclined her head, and Harriet, with the assumed humiliation of an
abject dependent and serf (but not without defiance for all that), made
as if she were too low to notice or to be noticed.

He came down the dark winding stairs into the yard with an increased
sense upon him of the gloom of the wall that was dead, and of the shrubs
that were dead, and of the fountain that was dry, and of the statue that
was gone. Pondering much on what he had seen and heard in that house,
as well as on the failure of all his efforts to trace the suspicious
character who was lost, he returned to London and to England by the
packet that had taken him over. On the way he unfolded the sheets of
paper, and read in them what is reproduced in the next chapter.

CHAPTER 21. The History of a Self-Tormentor

I have the misfortune of not being a fool. From a very early age I have
detected what those about me thought they hid from me. If I could have
been habitually imposed upon, instead of habitually discerning the
truth, I might have lived as smoothly as most fools do.

My childhood was passed with a grandm