“Come,” I said, “you might finish what you were going to say.”

“I don’t know,” he muttered, “that I was going to say anything—­Oh yes—­that thing you sent me.  Why the silly blighter should suppose it’s necessary to stick in a storm at sea when it’s quite obvious he hasn’t seen one—­he talks about a brig when he means a bark, and from the way he navigates her you’d say the wind blew all ways at once in the Atlantic.”

I said it might for all I knew; and I asked him if he’d ever seen a storm at sea himself.

It seemed he had.  He’d been ordered a sea-voyage for his health after his spell of printing; and his uncle, who was a sea-captain, took him with him to Hong-Kong in his ship.  And he had been all through a cyclone in the Pacific.

I got him—­with some difficulty, for he had become extremely shy—­I got him to tell us about it.

He did.  And by the time he had finished with us we had all been through a cyclone in the Pacific.

It was too much.  The little beast could talk almost as well as he wrote.  A fellow who can write like Tasker Jevons has no business to talk at all.

Viola left soon after six.  He had outstayed her.  I went downstairs with her.  When I came back to him he was still staring at the doorway she had passed through.

“Who’s that girl?” he said.

I said she was my typist.

He meditated, and brought out as the result:  “Do you mind telling me how much she charges you?”

I told him.  He looked dejected.

“I can’t afford her,” he said presently.  “No.  I can’t possibly afford her.  Not yet.”  He paused.  “Do you mind giving me her address?”

“I thought you said you couldn’t afford her?”

“I can’t.  Not yet.  But I will afford her.  I will.  I give myself another—­” He stopped.  His mouth fell ajar, and I saw his lips moving as he went through some inaudible calculation—­“another six months.”

He hid his face in his hands and ran his fingers through his hair.  Then, as if he conceived himself to be unobserved behind this shelter, he let himself go; and I became the witness of an agony, a passion, a self-abandoned nakedness, to the utter shedding of all reticences and decencies, with nothing but those thin hands and that hair between me and it.

“I’ll work,” he said.  “I’ll work like a hundred bloody niggers.  Like ten hundred thousand million sweated tailors in a stinking cellar.  I’ll pinch.  I’ll skimp and save.  I’ll deny myself butter.  I’ll wear celluloid collars and sell my dress-suit.  My God!  I’d sell the coat off my back and the shoes off my feet; I’d sell my own mother’s body off her death-bed, and go without my dinner for nine months to see her again for five minutes.  Just to see her for five minutes.  Five (unprintable) little minutes that another man wouldn’t know what to do with, wouldn’t use for tying up a bootlace in.”

Pause.