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He moves among ordinary men and women, but as a mere presence, an unmoved spectator of their actions, quite dispassionate and impersonal." "Yes; he is astonishingly self-contained; in fact, he seems, as you say, to go to and fro among men, enveloped in a sort of infernal atmosphere of his own, like Marley's ghost.
Marley's Ghost bothered him exceedingly. Every time he resolved within himself, after mature inquiry, that it was all a dream, his mind flew back again like a strong spring released, to its first position, and presented the same problem to be worked all through, "Was it a dream or not?"
And finally, as she left to go back to her berth, she exclaimed with fervor that she only wished that Miss Pritchard were her cousin, and the Reverend John Middleton Elsie Marley's uncle and guardian. As those were Elsie Moss's last spoken words that night, so that thought was uppermost in her mind as she fell asleep shortly after her cropped head touched the pillow.
He did pause, with a moment's irresolution, before he shut the door; and he did look cautiously behind it first, as if he half-expected to be terrified with the sight of Marley's pigtail sticking out into the hall. But there was nothing on the back of the door, except the screws and nuts that held the knocker on; so he said "Pooh, pooh!" and closed it with a bang.
Then it was that the words of my father, 'You will find your wings some day and fly away, would come back to me, and set up such a restlessness as all the wise words of Zachary Palmer could not allay. One evening in the month of May 1685, about the end of the first week of the month, my friend Reuben Lockarby and I borrowed Ned Marley's pleasure boat, and went a-fishing out of Langston Bay.
His colour changed, though, when, without a pause, it came on through the heavy door, and passed into the room before his eyes. Upon its coming in, the dying flame leaped up, as though it cried, "I know him! Marley's Ghost!" and fell again. The same face: the very same.
That very evening at dinner some one asked her where she got her dimples whether they were inherited? "Or, perhaps, Miss Marley's a freak like the white peacock at the gardens?" broke in a callow youth whom Elsie disliked. "From my mother," she said quickly, and Miss Pritchard, sensitive to the least sound of hurt in Elsie's voice, introduced another subject. Nevertheless, she wondered.
Something vaguely uncomfortable just stirred the surface of Elsie Marley's consciousness, though it wasn't sufficiently acute to be called a pang. The earthquake had happened seven or eight years ago and this girl's grief seemed fresh to-day. Her own mother had been dead less than three years. She did not acknowledge that her mother was only a memory. She hardly realized it, indeed.
He didn't want the Cresta bun, and he thought that he resented Miss Marley's invitation; but, on the other hand, he was intensely glad she was going off and leaving him alone. He felt uncommonly queer. Perhaps he could think of some excuse to avoid the tea when she came back. All the muscles of his chest seemed to have gone wrong; it hurt him to breathe.
And Scrooge said often afterwards, that of all the blithe sounds he had ever heard, those were the blithest in his ears. He had not gone far, when coming on towards him he beheld the portly gentleman, who had walked into his counting-house the day before and said, "Scrooge and Marley's, I believe?"
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