outside. One room, dark, with a bare floor, and with cracked plastered
walls upon which a few calendars and an ancient map were hanging. There
was a worn wooden settee and two wooden armchairs at the front, near the
stove, and at the rear an old-fashioned walnut desk.

At this desk in a shabby, leather-cushioned armchair, sat a little old
man with scant gray hair and a fringe of gray throat whiskers. He wore
steel-rimmed spectacles and over these he peered at his visitor.

"Good mornin'," said Thankful. It seemed to her high time that someone
said something, and the little man had not opened his lips. He did not
open them even now.

"Um," he grunted, and that was all.

"Are you Mr. Solomon Cobb?" she asked. She knew now that he was; he had
changed a great deal since she had last seen him, but his eyes had not
changed, and he still had the habit she remembered, that of pulling at
his whiskers in little, short tugs as if trying to pull them out. "Like
a man hauling wild carrots out of a turnip patch," she wrote Emily when
describing the interview.

He did not answer the question. Instead, after another long look, he
said:

"If you're sellin' books, I don't want none. Don't use 'em."

This was so entirely unexpected that Mrs. Barnes was, for the moment,
confused and taken aback.