And so on, and so on; constant little pin-pricks, sordid humiliations, ugliness, meannesses, and dirt, that called forth in resistance all that was lowest and least commendable in one’s self.
One has attuned one’s nerves to the leading of a forlorn hope, and a gnat gets into one’s eye, or a little cinder grit, and there it sticks; and there is no question of leading any forlorn hope, after all, and never will be; all that was in the imagination only: it is always gnats and cinder grits, gnats and cinder grits.
By the evening I had ignominiously broken down, and was plunged in the depths of an exasperated pessimism too deep even for tears, and would have believed myself the meanest and most miserable of mankind, but that everybody else, without exception, was even meaner and miserabler th
