"H. L. Gold - Man With English" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gold H. L)

more. I've got enough to do without making three meals a
day."
"But I can't drive back with that tire"
He did, though not with the tirehe took a cab. It cost
a dollar plus tip, lunch was a dollar and a half plus tip,
bicarb at Rite Drug Store a few doors away and in a great
hurry came to another fifteen centsonly it didn't work.
And then Miss Ellis came in for some material. Miss Ellis
could round out any miserable day. She was fifty, tall,
skinny and had thin, disapproving lips. She had a sliver
of cloth clipped very meagerly o& a hem that she intended
to use as a sample.
"The arms of the slipcover on my reading chair wore
through," she informed him. "I bought the material here,
if you remember."
Stone didn't have to look at the fragmentary swatch.
"That was about seven years ago"
"Six-and-a-half," she corrected. "I paid enough for it.
You'd expect anything that expensive to last."
"The style was discontinued. I have something here
that-"
"I do not want to make an entire slipcover, Mr. Stonp. All
I want is enough to make new panels for the arms. Two
yards should do very nicely."
Stone smothered a bilious hiccup. "Two yards, Miss
Ellis?"
"At the most."
"I sold the last of that material years ago." He pulled
a bolt off a shelf and partly unrolled it for her. "Why not
use a different pattern as a kind of contrast?"
"I want this same pattern," she said, her thin lips getting
even thinner and more obstinate.
"Then I'll have to order it and hope one of my wholesalers
still has some of it in stock."
"Not without looking for it first right here, you won't
order it for me. You can't know all these materials you
have on these shelves."
Stone felt all the familiar symptoms of furythe sudden
pulsing of the temples, the lurch and bump of his heart as
adrenalin came surging in like the tide at the Firth of Forth,
the quivering of his hands, the angry shout pulsing at his
vocal cords from below.
"Ill take a look. Miss Ellis," he said.
She was president of the Ladies Cultural Society and
dominated it so thoroughly that the members would go
clear to the next town for their dry goods, rather than
deal with him, if he offended this sour stick of stubbornness.
If Stone's life insurance salesman had been there, he
would have tried to keep Stone from climbing the ladder
that ran around the three walls of the store. He probably