They allowed him books
and pens and paper, and even cards, if he chose to play at Patience
with them or build castles. The paper and pens he could use because
he could write about himself. From day to day he composed a diary in
which he was never tired of expatiating on the terrible injustice of
his position. But he could not read. He found it to be impossible to
fix his attention on matters outside himself. He assured himself from
hour to hour that it was not death he feared,--not even death from
the hangman's hand. It was the condemnation of those who had known
him that was so terrible to him; the feeling that they with whom he
had aspired to work and live, the leading men and women of his day,
Ministers of the Government and their wives, statesmen and their
daughters, peers and members of the House in which he himself had
sat;--that these should think that, after all, he had been a base
adventurer unworthy of their society! That was the sorrow that broke
him down, and drew him to confess that his whole life had been a
failure.
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