Jack plunged into the coach with his hat pulled over his nose and sat huddled low in the corner, peering furtively through the muddy glasses – a curiously deformed, conspicuous figure that excited comment whenever the horse moved at less than a trot. ‘An ill-looking parcel of bastards,’ he reflected, seeing a bailiff in every full-grown man. ‘But my God, what a life. Doing this every day, cooped up with a ledger – what a life.’ The cheerless faces went by, hurrying to their dismal work, an endless wet, anxious, cold, grey-yellow stream of people, jostling, pushing past one another like an ugly
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