V
THE DRAIN
That vacation passed like the others, with this difference only, that in the great, newly-furnished house, Laurent was even more neglected and left to himself than usual. He came to envy the lot of the old pieces of furniture, cast off and doomed to slumber in the gloom and the dust of the attic. At least, when they had ceased to please, they were not humiliated by being placed in contact with their successors, while he, who had never pleased, nevertheless continued to figure as an incongruous and melancholy contrast to the assortment of rich furnishings and chilly plants. He felt himself more and more out of place in this costly and exclusive environment. Waiting for that day to come when he would be free to join others among his fellow men as ill-favored as himself, he used to long for night to come so that he might rejoin, in his narrow corner under the roof, the repudiated and banished objects that he loved.
And yet, as dismal and long as these vacations seemed to him, he was surprised to find that, hardly returned to school, he began to lament their end out of a real love of those tedious hours.
Of his sojourn with his guardians, he remembered most pleasantly the melancholy episodes, and it was the
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