Parload. . . ."

None the less that quarrel made me extremely unhappy. Parload was
my only gossip, and it cost me much to keep away from him and think
evil of him with no one to listen to me, evening after evening.

That was a very miserable time for me, even before my last visit
to Checkshill. My long unemployed hours hung heavily on my hands.
I kept away from home all day, partly to support a fiction that
I was sedulously seeking another situation, and partly to escape
the persistent question in my mother's eyes. "Why did you quarrel
with Mr. Rawdon? Why DID you? Why do you keep on going about with
a sullen face and risk offending IT more?" I spent most of the
morning in the newspaper-room of the public library, writing
impossible applications for impossible posts--I remember that among
other things of the sort I offered my services to a firm of private
detectives, a sinister breed of traders upon base jealousies now
happily vanished from the world, and wrote apropos of an advertisement
for "stevedores" that I did not know what the duties of a stevedore
might be, but that I was apt and willing to learn--and in the
afternoons and evenings I wandered through the strange lights and
shadows of my native valley and hated all created things. Until my
wanderings were checked by the discovery that I was wearing out my
boots.

The stagnant inconclusive malaria of that time!

I perceive that I was an evil-tempered, ill-disposed youth with a
great capacity for hatred, BUT--