"By working after hours at carpentering up there"—he made a gesture towards Vadrome Mountain. "But I can't go on doing that all the time, or I'll be like you too soon."
"Be like me!" The voice of the tailor rose shrilly.
"Be like me! What's the matter with me?"
"Only that you're in a bad way before your time, and that you mayn't get out of this hole without stepping into another. You work too hard, Monsieur Trudel."
"What do you want—wages?"
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?"