to my consternation a key was turned from within; and thrusting his lean
visage at me, and holding the door ajar, the apparition of Bartleby
appeared, in his shirt sleeves, and otherwise in a strangely tattered
deshabille, saying quietly that he was sorry, but he was deeply engaged
just then, and--preferred not admitting me at present. In a brief word
or two, he moreover added, that perhaps I had better walk round the
block two or three times, and by that time he would probably have
concluded his affairs.

Now, the utterly unsurmised appearance of Bartleby, tenanting my
law-chambers of a Sunday morning, with his cadaverously gentlemanly
_nonchalance_, yet withal firm and self-possessed, had such a strange
effect upon me, that incontinently I slunk away from my own door, and
did as desired. But not without sundry twinges of impotent rebellion
against the mild effrontery of this unaccountable scrivener. Indeed, it
was his wonderful mildness chiefly, which not only disarmed me, but
unmanned me as it were. For I consider that one, for the time, is a sort
of unmanned when he tranquilly permits his hired clerk to dictate to
him, and order him away from his own premises. Furthermore, I was full
of uneasiness as to what Bartleby could possibly be doing in my office
in his shirt sleeves, and in an otherwise dismantled condition of a
Sunday morning. Was anything amiss going on? Nay, that was out of the
question. It was not to be thought of for a moment that Bartleby was an
immoral person. But what could he be doing there?--copying? Nay again,
whatever might be his eccentricities, Bartleby was an eminently decorous
person. He would be the last man to sit down to his desk in any state
approaching to nudity. Besides, it was Sunday; and there was something
about Bartleby that forbade the supposition that he would by any secular
occupation violate the proprieties of the day.