“You invited me.”
“I did—that’s true; and you came. I said to him, ‘I hear you’re a bit of a penman.’”
“I didn’t know what you meant.”
“You wouldn’t. I laid five bill-stamps in front of him.”
“There was nothing on them.”
“True again; there wasn’t. I showed him my brother’s signature at the bottom of a letter, and I asked him if he thought that he could make a nice clean copy of it in the corner of each stamp.”
“You never said what you were going to do with it.”
“Still correct—I didn’t. But you said, ‘How much are you going to give me?’”
“Well, you were a stranger to me; you didn’t expect I was going to do you a favour for nothing?”
“Hardly. I said I’d give you a hundred pounds, which I thought was pretty fair pay for a little copying. But you said, ‘I want five hundred.’”