perhaps I may ask you, whether you have yet come to a
decision where to go next?«
    »Indeed, no. I am such a waif and stray everywhere, that I am liable to be
drifted where any current may set.«
    »It's extraordinary to me - if you'll excuse my freedom in saying so - that
you don't go straight to London,« said Mr. Meagles, in the tone of a
confidential adviser.
    »Perhaps I shall.«
    »Ay! But I mean with a will.«
    »I have no will. That is to say,« he coloured a little, »next to none that I
can put in action now. Trained by main force; broken, not bent; heavily ironed
with an object on which I was never consulted and which was never mine; shipped
away to the other end of the world before I was of age, and exiled there until
my father's death there, a year ago; always grinding in a mill I always hated;
what is to be expected from me in middle life? Will, purpose, hope? All those
lights were extinguished before I could sound the words.«
    »Light 'em up again!« said Mr. Meagles.
    »Ah! Easily said. I am the son, Mr. Meagles, of a hard father and mother. I
am the only child of parents who weighed, measured, and priced everything; for
whom what could not be weighed, measured, and priced, had no existence. Strict
people as the phrase is, professors of a stern religion, their very religion was
a gloomy sacrifice of tastes and sympathies that were never their own, offered
up as a part of a bargain for the security of their possessions. Austere faces,
inexorable discipline, penance in this world and terror in the next - nothing
graceful or gentle anywhere, and the void in my cowed heart everywhere - this
was my childhood, if I may so misuse the word as to apply it to such a beginning
of life.«
    »Really though?« said Mr. Meagles, made very uncomfortable by the picture
offered to his imagination. »That was a tough commencement. But come! You must
now study, and profit by all that lies beyond it, like a practical man.«
    »If the people who are usually called practical, were practical in your
direction -«
    »Why, so they are!« said Mr. Meagles.
    »Are they indeed?«
    »Well, I suppose so,« returned Mr. Meagles