"It is too late to come to it in this paper. You have now talked three thousand words, and that is the limit. You must be silent for at least another month."
"But if I have something important to say at this juncture? If I may not care to recur to the subject a month hence? If I may have returned to Europe by that time?"
"Then you can the better verify your statistics. But the rule in this place is inflexible. Three thousand words, neither more nor less. The wisdom of Solomon would be blue-pencilled if it ran to more."
XI
WAYS AND MEANS OF LIVING IN NEW YORK
The Howadji, or the Hajii, us people called his sort in the days of Home as Found, was prompt to the hour when his month's absence was up, and he began without a moment's delay: "But of course the lion in the way of my thesis that New York is comparatively cheap is the rent, the rent of flats or houses in the parts of the town where people of gentle tastes and feelings are willing to live. Provisions are cheap; furnishings of all kinds are cheap; service, especially when you mainly or wholly dispense with it, is cheap, for one maid here will do the work of two abroad, and if the mistress of the house does her own work she can make the modern appliances her handmaids at no cost whatever. It is ridiculous, in fact, leaving all those beautiful and ingenious helps in housework to the hirelings who work only twice as hard with them for more wages than the hirelings of countries where they don't exist."
"Don't be so breathless," we interposed. "You will only be allowed to talk three thousand words, whether you talk fast or slow, and you might as well take your ease."
"That is true," the Howadji reflected. "But I am full of my subject, and I have the feeling that I am getting more out, even if I can't get more in, by talking fast. The rent question itself," he hurried on, "has been satisfactorily solved of late in the new invention of co-operative housing which you may have heard of."
We owned that we had, with the light indifference of one whom matters of more money or less did not concern, and our friend went on.