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 door-post 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 wretch I had been the other night, that, nobody being by, I yielded to my self-reproach and shame, and--in short, made a fool of myself.

I cannot deny that I shed tears.

To this hour I am undecided whether it was upon the whole the wisest thing I could have done, or the most ridiculous.
'If it had been anyone but you, Agnes,' said I, turning away my head, 'I should not have minded it half so much.