When I think how easily I was the dupe of that not too subtle artifice, which was only half malicious, I could smile, if I did not know how it ended.
'How much was that?' he asked contemptuously, 'twopence-halfpenny? Well, if you choose to give a shilling for it, I'm not going to pay, that's all. So just give me back my shilling!'
Now, as my weekly allowance consisted of threepence, which was confiscated for some time in advance (as I think he knew), to provide fines for my mysteriously-stained dictionaries, this was out of the question, as I represented.
'Then go back to the shop and change it,' said he; 'I won't have that thing!'
'Tell me what you would like instead, and I will,' I stipulated, not unreasonably.
He laughed; his little scheme was working so admirably. 'That's not the bargain,' he said; 'you're bound to get me something I like. I'm not obliged to tell you what it is.'
But even I was driven to protest against such flagrant unfairness. 'I didn't know you meant that,' I said, 'or I'm sure I shouldn't have gone. I went to oblige you, Ormsby.'
'No, you didn't,' he said, 'you went because I told you. And you'll go again.'
'Not unless you tell me what I'm to get,' I said.
'I tell you what I believe,' he said; 'you never spent the whole shilling at all on that; you bought something for yourself with the rest, you young swindler! No wonder you won't go back to the shop.'