Bartleby, the Scrivener: a Story of Wall Street

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Thinking it would prove of benefit to the scrivener, I acquiesced;

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At such times, too, his face flamed with augmented blazonry, as if cannel coal had been heaped on anthracite.

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Nay again, whatever might be his eccentricities, Bartleby was an eminently decorous person.

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...I strangely felt something superstitious knocking at my heart, and forbidding me to carry out my purpose, and denouncing me for a villain if I dared to breathe one bitter word against this forlornest of mankind.

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I endeavored also immediately to occupy myself, and at the same time to comfort my despondency.

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Instantly it occurred to me, that his unexampled diligence in copying by his dim window for the first few weeks of his stay with me might have temporarily impaired his vision.

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...the mild effrontery of this unaccountable scrivener.

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I remembered a certain unconscious air of pallid—how shall I call it?—of pallid haughtiness, say, or rather an austere reserve about him, which had positively awed me into my tame compliance with his eccentricities,

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His steadiness, his freedom from all dissipation, his incessant industry (except when he chose to throw himself into a standing revery behind his screen), his great, stillness, his unalterableness of demeanor under all circumstances, made him a valuable acquisition.

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"Do you not see the reason for yourself," he indifferently replied.

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What I saw that morning persuaded me that the scrivener was the victim of an innate and incurable disorder.

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It is a very dull, wearisome, and lethargic affair.

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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.

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...for these reasons, I was willing to overlook his eccentricities, though indeed, occasionally, I remonstrated with him.

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My procedure seemed as sagacious as ever.

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I can readily imagine that to some sanguine temperaments it would be altogether intolerable.

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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.

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I plainly perceive that for Nippers, brandy and water were altogether superfluous.

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...a certain impatience of the duties of a mere copyist, an unwarrantable usurpation of strictly professional affairs, such as the original drawing up of legal documents.