And it was strange, very strange, even to himself, to find how, by
quick though almost imperceptible degrees, he lost his delicacy and
self-respect, and gradually came to do that as a matter of course,
without the least compunction, which but a few short days before had
galled him to the quick. The first time he visited the pawnbroker's,
he felt on his way there as if every person whom he passed suspected
whither he was going; and on his way back again, as if the whole human
tide he stemmed, knew well where he had come from. When did he care to
think of their discernment now! In his first wanderings up and down the
weary streets, he counterfeited the walk of one who had an object in
his view; but soon there came upon him the sauntering, slipshod gait of
listless idleness, and the lounging at street-corners, and plucking and
biting of stray bits of straw, and strolling up and down the same place,
and looking into the same shop-windows, with a miserable indifference,
fifty times a day. At first, he came out from his lodging with an uneasy
sense of being observed--even by those chance passers-by, on whom he had
never looked before, and hundreds to one would never see again--issuing
in the morning from a public-house; but now, in his comings-out and
goings-in he did not mind to lounge about the door, or to stand sunning
himself in careless thought beside the wooden stem, studded from head to
heel with pegs, on which the beer-pots dangled like so many boughs upon
a pewter-tree.
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