so chapped and coarsened, so evilly entreated. . . . At any rate,
there is this I can say for myself, that my bitterness against the
world and fortune was for her sake as well as for my own.

Yet that night I pushed by her harshly. I answered her curtly,
left her concerned and perplexed in the passage, and slammed my
door upon her.

And for a long time I lay raging at the hardship and evil of life,
at the contempt of Rawdon, and the loveless coolness of Nettie's
letter, at my weakness and insignificance, at the things I found
intolerable, and the things I could not mend. Over and over went
my poor little brain, tired out and unable to stop on my treadmill
of troubles. Nettie. Rawdon. My mother. Gabbitas. Nettie. . .

Suddenly I came upon emotional exhaustion. Some clock was striking
midnight. After all, I was young; I had these quick transitions.
I remember quite distinctly, I stood up abruptly, undressed very
quickly in the dark, and had hardly touched my pillow again before
I was asleep.

But how my mother slept that night I do not know.

Oddly enough, I do not blame myself for behaving like this to my
mother, though my conscience blames me acutely for my arrogance to
Parload. I regret my behavior to my mother before the days of the
Change, it is a scar among my memories that will always be a little
painful to the end of my days, but I do not see how something of
the sort was to be escaped under those former conditions. In that
time of muddle and obscurity people were overtaken by needs and