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This isolated sentence casts return as a nearly impossible retreat from distance, apprenticeship, and foreign authority.

Because the page is just one line, it reads like a hinge in the manuscript. `a long long way back` holds both literal travel and the deeper difficulty of coming back from whatever the `foreign master's` world has demanded.

One isolated line - 'It was going to be a long long way back to a foreign master's' - left alone on the page as a refrain. The same phrasing surfaces again at page 38, so this lone sentence reads as the book's motto being set down and saved.