, helping me to undress, and where I was by turns telling him that
Agnes was my sister, and adjuring him to bring the corkscrew, that I
might open another bottle of wine.

How somebody, lying in my bed, lay saying and doing all this over again,
at cross purposes, in a feverish dream all night--the bed a rocking sea
that was never still! How, as that somebody slowly settled down into
myself, did I begin to parch, and feel as if my outer covering of skin
were a hard board; my tongue the bottom of an empty kettle, furred with
long service, and burning up over a slow fire; the palms of my hands,
hot plates of metal which no ice could cool!

But the agony of mind, the remorse, and shame I felt when I became
conscious next day! My horror of having committed a thousand offences I
had forgotten, and which nothing could ever expiate--my recollection
of that indelible look which Agnes had given me--the torturing
impossibility of communicating with her, not knowing, Beast that I was,
how she came to be in London, or where she stayed--my disgust of
the very sight of the room where the revel had been held--my racking
head--the smell of smoke, the sight of glasses, the impossibility of
going out, or even getting up! Oh, what a day it was!

Oh, what an evening, when I sat down by my fire to a basin of mutton
broth, dimpled all over with fat, and thought I was going the way of my
predecessor, and should succeed to his dismal story as well as to his
chambers, and had half a mind to rush express to Dover and reveal
all! What an evening, when Mrs. Crupp, coming in to take away the
broth-basin, produced one kidney on a cheese-plate as the entire remains
of yesterday's feast, and I was really inclined to fall upon her nankeen
breast and say, in heartfelt penitence, 'Oh, Mrs. Crupp, Mrs. Crupp,
never mind the broken meats! I am very miserable!'--only that I doubted,
even at that pass, if Mrs. Crupp were quite the sort of woman to confide
in!

CHAPTER 25. GOOD AND BAD ANGELS

I was going out at my door on the morning after that deplorable day of
headache, sickness, and repentance, with an odd confusion in my mind
relative to the date of my dinner-party, as if a body of Titans had
taken an enormous lever and pushed the day before yesterday some months
back, when I saw a ticket-porter coming upstairs, with a letter in his
hand. He was taking his time about his errand, then; but when he saw me
on the top of the staircase, looking at him