"No?"
"Nicholas, that is not a reason, and I want to say it once, and then I shall not raise it again for the rest of these nine weeks: if you do not write to him, I shall sit on that floor anyway, and I shall do it not knowing. You are not choosing between my being frightened and my not being frightened; you are choosing between my being frightened with a number and my being frightened without one. And you have had one of those for eight years, and I have had the other for six months, and I am the only person in this house who has had both."
"And which is worse?"
"I do not know," said Hannah Sedge. "And that is the honest answer, and it is the only one I have got at four in the morning, and I shall not pretend to a certainty about it to get you to do a thing I want."
He did not answer that, but he wrote the letter about a fortnight later, and he told her afterward that it had been the sentence about being frightened without a number that had done it, and that he had thought about it for nine days.
Hannah had built Ambrose Pell a great deal in nine weeks, and she was wrong about almost every part of it. She had expected a pompous man. What came out of that carriage was a very old physician with bad hands, who had plainly been a big man once, who was courteous to the servants, and who said on being shown into the library:
"Your Grace, I have had your letter, and I have read it four times, and I should like to say something before we begin."
"Say it."
"I have practiced in this county one-and-forty years, and I have written a great many letters and given a great many opinions," said Ambrose Pell, "and I have never in the whole of that time received a letter from a patient telling me what I said to him and when, and asking me to look again. And I want you to know that my first feeling on reading it was offense, and that it lasted about a quarter of an hour, and that I have spent the fortnight since being extremely ashamed of that quarter of an hour."