The fetch makes its last and best offer, and it makes it well, because it has had seven months to work out what you want to hear.

It offers to be both of them, always, forever, with no cold hands and no bad temper and no contract and no opinion of its own.

PorterYou are offering me a house with nobody in it. I have been in that house since March and it is very comfortable and it is not a life.

It stops talking. That is the only way you can tell it has been refused, and it stands in the doorway and waits, which is what it is for.