"It was until it came on to rain, and I had to put things under cover, and then I had my idea, and I thought I'd run right home and tend to it."
The door opened and Winny came in, tugging her big umbrella. Instinct, it could not have been education, prompted Tode to take the dripping thing from her and put it away.
"What on earth is that?" Winny said, pausing in the act of taking off her things to examine the pasteboard.
"That's my sign—leastways it will be when your wits and my wits are put together to make it. I got some colored chalk round the corner at the painters, and he showed me how to use 'em."
"Tode, you said you would remember not to use ''em' and 'leastways' any more."
"So I will one of these days. I keep remembering all the time. Say, won't that make a elegant sign? I never thought of a sign in my life till Pliny Hastings he came along to-day. Did you ever see Pliny Hastings?"
"No. Tode, I do wish you would begin to study grammar this very evening. You're enough to kill any body the way you talk."
"Oh bother the grammar, I'm telling you about Pliny Hastings. He came along, and says he, 'Halloo, Tode, here you are as large as life in business for yourself. You ought to have a sign,' says he. 'What's your establishment called?' And you may think I felt cheap as long as I lived at the Euclid house, to have no kind of a name for my place. I thought then I'd have a name and a sign before this time to-morrow. So when I went for my dinner I bought this pasteboard, and I been studying the thing out all this afternoon between the spells of arithmetic, and I've got it all fixed now, and I've got another idea come of that I never see how one thing starts another. There's going to come a piece of pasteboard off this end, 'cause you see it's too long, and I'm going to have a circle out of that."
"A circle. What for?"
"Oh you'll see when we get to it. But now don't you want to know what my sign is?"