Sketches of Young Gentlemen, Charles Dickens [books on motivation .txt] 📗

d after exchanging his rough coat forsome more suitable attire (in which however he loses nothing of theout-and-outer), gets into the coach and grumbles all the way at hisown good nature: his bitter reflections aggravated by therecollection, that Tom Smith has taken the chair at a littleimpromptu dinner at a fighting man's, and that a set-to was to takeplace on a dining-table, between the fighting man and his brother-in-law, which is probably 'coming off' at that very instant.

As the out-and-out young gentleman is by no means at his ease inladies' society, he shrinks into a corner of the drawing-room whenthey reach the friend's, and unless one of his sisters is kindenough to talk to him, remains there without being much troubled bythe attentions of other people, until he espies, lingering outsidethe door, another gentleman, whom he at once knows, by his air andmanner (for there is a kind of free-masonry in the craft), to be abrother out-and-outer, and towards whom he accordingly makes hiswa