And more than all, 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, when I had feared to ask him to do the
slightest incidental thing for me, even though I might know, from his
long-continued motionlessness, that behind his screen he must be
standing in one of those dead-wall reveries of his.
Revolving all these things, and coupling them with the recently
discovered fact that he made my office his constant abiding place and
home, and not forgetful of his morbid moodiness; revolving all these
things, a prudential feeling began to steal over me. My first emotions
had been those of pure melancholy and sincerest pity; but just in
proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew to my
imagination, did that same melancholy merge into fear, that pity into
repulsion. So true it is, and so terrible too, that up to a certain
point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections; but,
in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not.
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