The brooding, the moodiness; all the childish qualities, were my own importations.

I was a little ashamed to tell him, that--that I was going to live, in fact.

Some of the glory of it had gone, as if one of two candles I had been reading by had flickered out.
But I told him, after a fashion, that I had got a job at last.
"Oh, I congratulate you," he said.
"You see," I began to combat the objections he had not had time to utter, "even for my work it will be a good thing--I wasn't seeing enough of life to be able to...." "Oh, of course not," he answered--"it'll be a good thing.

You must have been having a pretty bad time." It struck me as abominably unfair.

I hadn't taken up with the _Hour_ because I was tired of having a bad time, but for other reasons: because I had felt my soul being crushed within me.
"You're mistaken," I said.