Other people did not have high resolves. Some people had very bad
tempers, and rubbed one very much the wrong way.
What a hideous place was Pentonville to slave away one's life in! ...
What a grind it was to be forever making designs for little new shops in
Rosoman Street, and not making them well, it seemed! ...
Why should a squinting, pock-marked, bowlegged, hunch-backed little
Judkins (a sight to make a recruiting-sergeant shudder) forever taunt
one with having enlisted as a private soldier? ...
And then why should one be sneeringly told to "hit a fellow one's own
size," merely because, provoked beyond endurance, one just grabbed him
by the slack of his trousers and gently shook him out of them onto the
floor, terrified but quite unhurt? ...
And so on, and so on; constant little pin-pricks, sordid humiliations,
ugliness, meannesses, and dirt, that called forth in resistance all that
was lowest and least commendable in one's self.
One has attuned one's nerves to the leading of a forlorn hope, and a
gnat gets into one's eye, or a little cinder grit, and there it sticks;
and there is no question of leading any forlorn hope, after all, and
never will be; all _that_ was in the imagination only: it is always
gnats and cinder grits, gnats and cinder grits.
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