Читать книгу Jewel sowers. A novel онлайн

79 страница из 81

“But don’t you tell them that you expect return?”

“No; I like them to think there’s one generous person in the world.”

“But that is scarcely fair. You ought to tell them what you want.”

“The argument would be beyond them. Besides, it would come then too much like making bargains. I am no shopman. Those who seek me find me. Others stay away.”

“But this is nothing short of madness. How can you make people pay without a signature or anything?”

“I never jest but when it suits my purpose. And for madness, I grant upon the surface it may appear as such. But each bill works backward—item by item, year by year. Mathematicians and philosophers looking through them would find a subject more than fascinating.”

“But if when you show your bill the people refuse to pay, and say they never got the goods?”

“Why, then, one little snip and the fabric ravels out again, loop by loop, as it was knitted up. Back it goes to the fundamental working, as rigid as machinery, as true as time, and ends in nothingness.”