"You do me infinite honour."
"Not at all. I say what I think, you may take your oath of that. But when I saw you come about that last boy, I said to myself—'Mr. Todd is carrying on some nice game, but what it is I don't know. Howsomdever he is a man with something more than would go into a small tea-spoon here-abouts.'"
Mr. Peter tapped his forehead with his finger as he spoke, to intimate that he alluded to the intellectual capacity of Todd.
"You are very obliging," said Todd.
"Not at all. Not at all. How much will you stand, now?"
"I suppose, if I say the same as Mr. Fogg, you will be satisfied, Mr. Peter. Times are very bad, you know."
Peter laughed again.
"No, no! Mr. Todd, times are not very bad, but I do think what you say is very fair, and that if you stand the same as Fogg, I ought not to say one word against it."
"How charming it is," said Todd, casting his eyes up to the ceiling, as though communing with himself or some higher intelligence supposed to be in that direction. "How charming it is to feel that you are at any time transacting business with one who is so very obliging and so very reasonable."
Somehow Peter winced a little before the look of Todd. The barber had come into his proposal a little too readily. It almost looked as though he saw his way too clearly out of it again. If he had declaimed loudly, and made a great fuss about the matter, Mr. Peter would have been better pleased, but as it was he felt, he scarcely knew why, wonderfully fidgetty.