with a little more blindness, would have amounted to positive
prejudice. To him humanity, so far as he had thought of it at all,
was rather divided into distinct classes than blended from extreme
to extreme. Hence by a sequence of ideas which might be traced if
it were worth while, he either detested or respected opinion, and
instinctively sought to escape a cold shade that mere sensitiveness
would have endured. He could have submitted to separation,
sickness, exile, drudgery, hunger and thirst, with stoical
indifference, but superciliousness was too incisive.

After living on for nine months in attempts to make an income as his
father's successor in the profession--attempts which were utterly
fruitless by reason of his inexperience--Graye came to a simple and
sweeping resolution. They would privately leave that part of
England, drop from the sight of acquaintances, gossips, harsh
critics, and bitter creditors of whose misfortune he was not the
cause, and escape the position which galled him by the only road
their great poverty left open to them--that of his obtaining some
employment in a distant place by following his profession as a
humble under-draughtsman.

He thought over his capabilities with the sensations of a soldier
grinding his sword at the opening of a campaign. What with lack of
employment, owing to the decrease of his late father's practice, and
the absence of direct and uncompromising pressure towards monetary
results from a pupil's labour (which seems to be always the case
when a professional man's pupil is also his son), Owen's progress in
the art and science of architecture had been very insignificant
indeed. Though anything but an idle young man, he had hardly
reached the age at which industrious men who lack an external whip