Charley inclined his head. “If you think I’m worth them.”
The tailor viciously snipped a piece of cloth. “How can I pay you wages, if you stand there doing nothing?” “This is my day for doing nothing,” Charley answered pleasantly, for the tailor-man amused him, and the whimsical mental attitude of his past life was being brought to the surface by this odd figure, with big spectacles pushed up on a yellow forehead, and shrunken hands viciously clutching the shears.
“You don’t mean to say you’re not going to work to-day, and this suit of clothes promised for to-morrow night—for the Manor House too!”
With a piece of chalk Charley idly made heads on brown paper. “After all, why should clothes be the first thing in one’s mind—when they are some one else’s! It’s a beautiful day outside. I’ve never felt the sun so warm and the air so crisp and sweet—never in all my life.”
“Then where have you lived?” snapped out the tailor with a sneer. “You must be a Yankee—they have only what we leave over down there!”—he jerked his head southward. “We don’t stop to look at weather here. I suppose you did where you come from?”
Charley smiled in a distant sort of way. “Where I came from, when we weren’t paid for our work we always stopped to consider our health—and the weather. I don’t want a great deal. I put it to you honestly. Do you want me? If you do, will you give me enough to live on—enough to buy a suit of clothes a year, to pay for food and a room? If I work for you for nothing, I have to live on others for nothing, or kill myself as you’re doing.”
There was no answer at once, and Charley went on: “I came to you because I saw you wanted help badly. I saw that you were hard-pushed and sick—”
“I wasn’t sick,” interrupted the tailor with a snarl.
“Well, overworked, which is the same thing in the end. I did the best I could: I gave you my hands—awkward enough they were at first, I know, but—”
“It’s a lie. They weren’t awkward,” churlishly cut in the tailor.