cannot spare more than five minutes, but if that will do, he may come up."
He came. He greeted me as an old friend with whom he was eager and rejoiced to renew acquaintanceship. I did not ask him to sit down, but briefly informed him that we had decided to keep the sweeper he had "demonstrated" to us the week before, and would make out a check for it at once.
If I had looked for any sign of satisfaction from him at this announcement of capitulation, I was doomed to disappointment, for he accepted it as the natural result of our previous conferences, though he remarked benignly that I would never regret it.
"Just ring us up," he said cheerfully, "if anything goes wrong. The firm'll have a man over inside half an hour—no extra charge. But our machines don't get out of order easy. That's why folks take to them so lively. They're not complicated like some machines are, and they last. I'll venture to say that six or eight years from now you'll be using this very same machine (I devoutly hoped so) with good results. Of course they want care like everything else, you don't want to smash 'em round too much, but you can take my honest
