“Cruel? Do you mean to the hunchback?”
“I mean—Of course the man himself was quite indifferent; no doubt, it is to him just a way of getting a living, like the circus-rider’s way or the columbine’s. But the thing makes one feel unhappy. It is humiliating; it is the degradation of a human being.”
“He probably is not any more degraded than he was to start with. Most of us are degraded in one way or another.”