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Chapter the Ninth
The Potwell Inn
I
But when a man has once broken through the paper walls of everyday
circumstance, those unsubstantial walls that hold so many of us
securely prisoned from the cradle to the grave, he has made a
discovery. If the world does not please you you can change it.
Determine to alter it at any price, and you can change it altogether.
You may change it to something sinister and angry, to something
appalling, but it may be you will change it to something brighter,
something more agreeable, and at the worst something much more
interesting. There is only one sort of man who is absolutely to blame
for his own misery, and that is the man who finds life dull and
dreary. There are no circumstances in the world that determined action
cannot alter, unless perhaps they are the walls of a prison cell, and
even those will dissolve and change, I am told, into the infirmary
compartment at any rate, for the man who can fast with resolution. I
give these things as facts and information, and with no moral
intimations. And Mr. Polly lying awake at nights, with a renewed
indigestion, with Miriam sleeping sonorously beside him and a general
air of inevitableness about his situation, saw through it, understood
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