employed hours hung heavily on my hands.
I kept away from home all day, partly to support a fiction that
I was sedulously seeking another situation, and partly to escape
the persistent question in my mother's eyes. "Why did you quarrel
with Mr. Rawdon? Why DID you? Why do you keep on going about with
a sullen face and risk offending IT more?" I spent most of the
morning in the newspaper-room of the public library, writing
impossible applications for impossible posts--I remember that among
other things of the sort I offered my services to a firm of private
detectives, a sinister breed of traders upon base jealousies now
happily vanished from the world, and wrote apropos of an advertisement
for "stevedores" that I did not know what the duties of a stevedore
might be, but that I was apt and willing to learn--and in the
afternoons and evenings I wandered through the strange lights and
shadows of my native valley and hated all created things. Until my
wanderings were checked by the discovery that I was wearing out my
boots.

The stagnant inconclusive malaria of that time!

I perceive that I was an evil-tempered, ill-disposed youth with a
great capacity for hatred, BUT--

There was an excuse for hate.

It was wrong of me to hate individuals, to be rude, harsh,
and vindictive to this person or that, but indeed it would have
been equally wrong to have taken the manifest offer life made me,
without resentment. I see now clearly and calmly, what I then felt
obscurely and with an unbalanced intensity, that my conditions were
intolerable. My work was tedious and laborious and it took up an
unreasonable proportion of my time, I was ill clothed, ill fed,
ill housed, ill educated and ill trained, my will was suppressed
and cramped to the pitch of torture, I had no reasonable pride in
myself and no reasonable chance of putting anything right. It was
a life hardly worth living. That a large proportion of the people
about me had no better a lot, that many had a worse, does not
affect these facts. It was a life in which contentment would have
been disgraceful. If some of them were contented or resigned, so
much the worse for every one. No doubt it was hasty and foolish
of me to throw up my situation, but everything was so obviously
aimless and foolish in our social organization that I do not feel
disposed to blame myself even for that, except in so far as it
pained my mother and caused her anxiety.

Think of the one comprehensive