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Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
page 88 of 698 (12%)
But, when she was gone, I looked about me for a place to hide my
face in, and got behind one of the gates in the brewery-lane, and
leaned my sleeve against the wall there, and leaned my forehead on
it and cried. As I cried, I kicked the wall, and took a hard twist
at my hair; so bitter were my feelings, and so sharp was the smart
without a name, that needed counteraction.

My sister's bringing up had made me sensitive. In the little world
in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up,
there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as
injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be
exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its
rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a
big-boned Irish hunter. Within myself, I had sustained, from my
babyhood, a perpetual conflict with injustice. I had known, from
the time when I could speak, that my sister, in her capricious and
violent coercion, was unjust to me. I had cherished a profound
conviction that her bringing me up by hand, gave her no right to
bring me up by jerks. Through all my punishments, disgraces, fasts
and vigils, and other penitential performances, I had nursed this
assurance; and to my communing so much with it, in a solitary and
unprotected way, I in great part refer the fact that I was morally
timid and very sensitive.

I got rid of my injured feelings for the time, by kicking them into
the brewery wall, and twisting them out of my hair, and then I
smoothed my face with my sleeve, and came from behind the gate. The
bread and meat were acceptable, and the beer was warming and
tingling, and I was soon in spirits to look about me.

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