Questions 1-10 are based on the following
passage.
This passage is from Charlotte Brontë, The Professor , originally published in 1857.
No man likes to acknowledge that he has made a
mistake in the choiceof his profession, and every
man, worthy of the name, will row long against wind
and tide before he allows himself to cry out, “I am
5 baffled!” and submits to be floated passively back to
land. From the first week of my residence in X—I
felt my occupation irksome. The thing itself —the
work of copying and translating business-letters—
was a dry and tedious task enough, but had that been
10 all, I should long have borne with the nuisance; I am
not of an impatient nature, and influenced by the
double desire of getting my living and justifying to
myself and others the resolution I had taken to
become a tradesman ,I should have endured in
15 silence the rust and cramp of my best faculties; I
should not have whispered, even inwardly, that I
longed for liberty; I should have pent in every sigh by
which my heart might have ventured to intimate its
distress under the closeness, smoke, monotony, and
20 joyless tumult of Bigben Close, and its panting desire
for freer and fresher scenes; I should have set up the
image of Duty, the fetish of Perseverance, in my
small bedroom at Mrs.King’s lodgings, and they two
should have been my household gods, from which
25 my darling, my cherished-in-secret, Imagination, the
tender and the mighty, should never, either by
softness or strength, have severed me. But this was
not all; the antipathy which had sprung up between
myself and my employer striking deeper root and
30 spreading denser shade daily, excluded me from
every glimpse of the sunshine of life; and I began to
feel like a plant growing in humid darkness out of the
slimy walls of a well.
Antipathy is the only word which can express the
35 feeling Edward Crims worth had for me— a feeling, in
a great measure, involuntary, and which was liable to
be excited by every, the most trifling movement,
look, or word of mine. My southern accent annoyed
him; the degree of education evinced in my language
40 irritated him; my punctuality, industry, and
accuracy, fixed his dislike, and gave it the high
flavour and poignant relish of envy; he feared that I
too should one day make a successful tradesman.
Had I been in anything inferior to him, he would not
45 have hated me so thoroughly, but I knew all that he
knew, and, what was worse, he suspected that I kept
the padlock of silence on mental wealth in which he
was no sharer. If he could have once placed me in a
ridiculous or mortifying position, he would have
50 forgiven me much, but I was guarded by three
faculties—Caution, Tact, Observation; and prowling
and prying as was Edward’s malignity, it could never
baffle the lynx-eyes of these, my natural sentinels.
Day by day did his malice watch my tact, hoping it
55 would sleep ,and prepared to steal snake-like on its
slumber; but tact, if it be genuine, never sleeps.
I had received my first quarter’s wages, and was
returning to my lodgings, possessed heart and soul
with the pleasant feeling that the master who had
60 paid me grudged every penny of that hard‑earned
pittance—(I had long ceased to regard
Mr.Crimsworth as my brother—he was a hard,
grinding master; he wished to be an inexorable
tyrant: that was all).Thoughts, not varied but strong,
65 occupied my mind; two voices spoke within me;
again and again they uttered the same monotonous
phrases. One said :“ William, your life is intolerable. ”
The other: “ What can you do to alter it?” I walked
fast, for it was a cold, frosty night in January; as I
70 approached my lodgings, I turned from a general
view of my affairs to the particular speculation as to
whether my fire would be out; looking towards the
window of my sitting-room, I saw no cheering red
gleam.