An Unspecified Amount
Someone must have been telling lies about John A. It happened this way: all day long he would sit on the front porch, watching people and cars go by, tugging on his briar pipe. Except for his meals, which he took at the kitchen table, he would remain on the porch from dawn until it got quite dark, summer and winter, except for periods of extreme cold. Even then he could survey the street through a species of panopticon he had rigged up, which he liked to say was better than television, since it was free and never required adjustment. He said this mostly to himself since he rarely spoke to others, having little occasion to do so. He was not one of those people who sit and wave at cars and passersby with a cheery greeting. The one exception to his code of silence was Rachel, his cleaning woman who came twice a week, and even then his speech concerned mainly practical household matters.
One day a Fuller Brush man happened by, and, undiscouraged by John’s laconic replies to his attempts at small talk, seated himself in the wicker chair where John would sit to read the newspaper, and was the only piece of porch furniture except for a glider where he would recline and occasionally take a nap, though this rarely happened since it prevented him from observing the activity in the street. Finding that his observations concerning traffic and the weather were not rebuffed, though scarcely encouraged, the man proceeded to expand on other topics such as the decline of the neighborhood.
très modéré
This irritated and frustrated John, who had been expecting a sales pitch for the brushes, and had already begun preparing a reply to the effect that he was amply provided with cleaning utensils and employed a person whose duties included ascertaining that nothing was lacking in that department. He had begun casting about for other ways of ridding himself of this pest, when the latter suddenly startled him by drawing his attention to a large package which the postman had evidently left next to the front door, whose mail slot would have been too narrow to accommodate it.
“What do you suppose is in there?” the stranger asked, a bit impertinently it seemed to John.
“Oh, it’s probably some boots I ordered from L.L. Bean,” John answered shiftily, aware as he did so that the package obviously contained nothing of the sort and that he had just unwittingly opened new avenues in a conversation that was fast becoming vexatious.
The salesman however let the matter rest there. Or was he considering the most effective way to irk John even further?