Wolfe came in and said good morning. The mail didn’t take long. He signed a couple of checks I had made out for bills he had gone over the day before, and asked me with a sigh what the bank balance was, and gave me a few short letters. I tapped them off and went out with them to the mailbox. When I got back Wolfe was starting on a second bottle of beer, leaning back in his chair, and I thought I saw a look in his half-closed eyes. At least, I thought, he’s not back on the pretty snowflakes again. I sat at my desk and let the typewriter down.
Wolfe said, “Archie. One would know everything in the world there is to know, if one waited long enough. The one fault in the passivity of Buddha as a technique for the acquisition of knowledge and wisdom is the miserably brief span of human life. He sat through the first stanza of the first canto of the preamble, and then left for an appointment with... let us say, with a certain chemist.”
“Yes, sir. You mean, we just go on sitting here and we learn a lot.”
“Not a lot. But more, a little more each century.”
“You maybe. Not me. If I sit here about two more days I’ll be so damn goofy I won’t know anything.”
Wolfe’s eyes flickered faintly. “I would not care to seem mystic, but might not that, in your case, mean an increase?”
“Sure.” I grunted. “If you had hot once instructed me never again to tell you to go to hell, I would tell you to go to hell.”
“Good.” Wolfe gulped beer and wiped his lips. “You are offended. So, probably, awake. My opening remark was in the nature of a comment on a recent fact. You will remember that last month you were away for ten days on a mission that proved to be highly unremunerative, and that during your absence two young men were here to perform your duties.”
I nodded. I grinned. One of the men had been from the Metropolitan Agency as Wolfe’s bodyguard, and the other had been a stenographer from Miller’s. “Sure. Two could handle it on a sprint.”
“Just so. On one of those days a man came here and asked me to intercept his destiny. He didn’t put it that way, but that was the substance of it. It proved not feasible to accept his commission...”