Harrowsmith shrugged and said, “I shall get a dealer in. Can you recommend one? You’re hand in glove with all those fellows. I hate the thing. It’s too heavy. It dwarfs the room.”
Kinsman with his finger was tracing the panels. He threw a look of desperation, of pleading even, at the oak, as if he thought that a thing which had been so long in the world and had witnessed the perplexities of so many generations was really sentient and could suggest. As he looked, his cheeks flushed, his lips smiled, and his whole attitude became suddenly débonnaire.
He returned to the fire, walking ludicrously sideways, as if he were afraid to take his eyes off the cabinet—the wise, resourceful cabinet. It had suggested. He suddenly remembered. He became confused, dizzy, elated with remembrance. He could buy it—if not with coin of the realm, with something equally marketable. Harrowsmith had said it was marketable. He would buy it. Why not? Within his own body he carried the means to buy—his own imperfect, freakish body!
“Do you remember,” he asked, in the hurried, jerky tones of a clock that is out of gear, “the offer you once made me?”
Harrowsmith looked perplexed, and then his face lighted.
“To buy your body—yes.”
“Does it still hold good?”
The doctor stared. Then he laughed and poked the fire until the hot light ran round the room, and, darting down the panels of the cabinet, made it wink and beckon more than before.
“You didn’t like the idea,” he said at last.
“Your Uncle Bob hadn’t left you the cabinet then,” Kinsman reminded him pointedly.