But I have come round on that too, and this is where I have got to and where I intend to stay.

I do not think it was the word he wanted.

I think he wanted somebody to sit down beside him, and he did not know how to ask for that, and he had spent twenty-eight years in a building where the only way anybody ever got anything was by filling in the correct form.

So he found a form.

And I filled it in, at a counter, in eleven minutes, in the one language both of us could speak.

And then for twenty-one days I stood up in his room nineteen times and did not sit down.

I am sitting down now.

It took three years, a collections agency, four hundred pages of county ledgers and a man named Arthur who did not want the coffee.

But I am sitting down, and it is my cup, and there is sweet cream in it, and I am in no hurry at all.