It took me such a long time to write an answer at all to my satisfaction, that I don’t know what the ticket-porter can have thought, unless he thought I was learning to write. I must have written half-a-dozen answers at least. I began one, “How can I ever hope, my dear Agnes, to efface from your remembrance the disgusting impression”—there I didn’t like it, and then I tore it up. I began another, “Shakespeare has observed, my dear Agnes, how strange it is that a man should put an enemy into his mouth”—that reminded me of Markham, and it got no farther. I even tried poetry. I began one note, in a six-syllable line, “Oh, do not remember”—but that associated itself with the fifth of November, and became an absurdity. After many attempts, I wrote, “My dear Agnes. Your letter is like you, and what could I say of it that would be higher praise than that? I will come at four o’clock. Affectionately and sorrowfully, T. C. ” With this missive (which I was in twenty minds at once about recalling, as soon as it was out of my hands), the ticket-porter at last departed.
If the day were half as tremendous to any other professional gentleman in Doctors’ Commons as it was to me, I sincerely believe he made some expiation for his share in that rotten old ecclesiastical cheese. Although I left the office at half past three, and was prowling about the place of appointment within a few minutes afterwards, the appointed time was exceeded by a full quarter of an hour, according to the clock of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, before I could muster up sufficient desperation to pull the private bell-handle let into the left-hand doorpost of Mr. Waterbrook’s house.
The professional business of Mr. Waterbrook’s establishment was done on the ground floor, and the genteel business (of which there was a good deal) in the upper part of the building. I was shown into a pretty but rather close drawing room, and there sat Agnes, netting a purse.
She looked so quiet and good, and reminded me so strongly of my airy fresh school days at Canterbury, and the sodden, smoky, stupid