I stood there on the sidewalk, looking down the street, and I felt hatred for the town—not for the people in it, but for the town itself, for the impersonal geographic concept of one particular place. The town lay dusty and arrogant and smug beyond all telling and it sneered at me and I knew that I had been mistaken in not leaving it when I’d had the chance. I had tried to live with it for very love of it, but I’d been blind to try. I had known what all my friends had known, the ones who’d gone away, but I had closed my mind to that sure and certain knowledge: there was nothing left in
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