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Dickens, Charles

"Hard Times"


Machinery slackened; throbbing feebly like a fainting pulse;
stopped. The bell again; the glare of light and heat dispelled;
the factories, looming heavy in the black wet night - their tall
chimneys rising up into the air like competing Towers of Babel.
He had spoken to Rachael only last night, it was true, and had
walked with her a little way; but he had his new misfortune on him,
in which no one else could give him a moment's relief, and, for the
sake of it, and because he knew himself to want that softening of
his anger which no voice but hers could effect, he felt he might so
far disregard what she had said as to wait for her again. He
waited, but she had eluded him. She was gone. On no other night
in the year could he so ill have spared her patient face.
O! Better to have no home in which to lay his head, than to have a
home and dread to go to it, through such a cause. He ate and
drank, for he was exhausted - but he little knew or cared what; and
he wandered about in the chill rain, thinking and thinking, and
brooding and brooding.


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