'Stiff, eh?'
'I should smile. And sorta weak.'
'No wonder. Come on, now! And I want your promise that after breakfast you'll go straight to bed.'
'Hump, I can't.'
This, apparently, was the truth. He couldn't.
He stopped in at Jackson's Book Store (formerly B. F. Jones's) and bought paper and pencils: Then, in a thrill of fresh importance, he bought penholders, large desk blotters, a flannel pen-wiper with a bronze dog seated in the centre, a cut-glass inkstand, a ruler, half a dozen pads of a better paper, a partly abridged dictionary, Roget's Thesaurus, (for years he had casually wondered what a Thesaurus was), a round glass paperweight with a gay butterfly imprisoned within, four boxes of wire clips, assorted sizes, and, because he saw it, Crabb's Synonyms. Then he saw an old copy of The Thousand and One Nights and bought that.
It seemed to him that he ought to be equipped for his work. Before he went out he asked the prices of the better makes of typewriters.
And for the first time in two years, he uttered the magic but too often fatal words:—
'Just charge it, if you don't mind.'