out of the question.

What, in the name of common-sense, had I to do with any better
society than I had always lived in? It had satisfied me well enough.
My pleasant bachelor-parlor, sunny and shadowy, curtained and
carpeted, with the bedchamber adjoining; my centre-table, strewn with
books and periodicals; my writing-desk with a half-finished poem, in
a stanza of my own contrivance; my morning lounge at the reading-room
or picture gallery; my

noontide walk along the cheery pavement, with the suggestive
succession of human faces, and the brisk throb of human life in which
I shared; my dinner at the Albion, where I had a hundred dishes at
command, and could banquet as delicately as the wizard Michael Scott
when the Devil fed him from the king of France's kitchen; my evening
at the billiard club, the concert, the theatre, or at somebody's
party, if I pleased,--what could be better than all this? Was it
better to hoe, to mow, to toil and moil amidst the accumulations of a
barnyard; to be the chambermaid of two yoke of oxen and a dozen cows;
to eat salt beef, and earn it with the sweat of my brow, and thereby
take the tough morsel out of some wretch's mouth, into whose vocation
I had thrust myself? Above all, was it better to have a fever and
die blaspheming, as I was like to do?

In this wretched plight, with a furnace in my heart and another in my
head, by the heat of which I was kept constantly at the boiling point,
yet shivering at the bare idea of extruding so much as a finger into
the icy atmosphere of the room, I kept my bed until breakfast-time,
when Hollingsworth knocked at the door, and entered.