He just nodded, and began to pour out some of the lotion in which he always bathes his poor eyes the last thing at night.
"And as for that, William," I went on, "all your stories seem to interest people.

What a number you have picked up, first and last, from different sitters, in the fifteen years of your practice as a portrait-painter! Have you any idea how many stories you really do know ?" No: he could not undertake to say how many just then.

He gave this answer in a very indifferent tone, dabbing away all the time at his eyes with the sponge and lotion.

He did it so awkwardly and roughly, as it seemed to me, that I took the sponge from him and applied the lotion tenderly myself.
"Do you think," said I, "if you turned over one of your stories carefully in your mind beforehand--say the one you told to-night, for example--that you could repeat it all to me so perfectly and deliberately that I should be able to take it down in writing from your lips ?" Yes: of course he could.

But why ask that question?
"Because I should like to have all the stories that you have been in the habit of relating to our friends set down fairly in writing, by way of preserving them from ever being forgotten." Would I bathe his left eye now, because that felt the hottest to-night?
I began to forbode that his growing indifference to what I was saying would soon end in his fairly going to sleep before I had developed my new idea, unless I took some means forthwith of stimulating his curiosity, or, in other words, of waking him into a proper state of astonishment and attention.