SAT Reading Practice Test 2

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 choice of 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 5baffled!” and submits to be floated passively back to land. From the first week of my residence in X— lt 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 10all, 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 it 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, thetender 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 Crimsworth 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 have50 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 towhether my fire would be out; looking towards the window of my sitting-room, I saw no cheering red gleam.