He had few friends of his own age, yet he was not unpopular, except, perhaps, with an overbearing animal like Jim Wigson, who instinctively looked upon other people's brains as an offence to his own muscular pretensions.
But his Easter Eve struggle with Hannah closed, as it were, a childhood, which, though hard and loveless, had been full of compensations and ignorant of its own worst wants.

It woke in him the bitterness of the orphan dependant, who feels himself a burden and loathes his dependence.

That utter lack of the commonest natural affection, in which he and Louie had been brought up--for Reuben's timorous advances had done but little to redress the balance--had not troubled him much, till suddenly it was writ so monstrous large in Hannah's refusal to take pity on the fainting and agonised Louie.

Thenceforward every morsel of food he took at her hands seemed to go against him.

They were paupers, and Aunt Hannah hated them.