from Stories of Ourselves Remember to support your ideas with details from the writing. Read this extract from My Greatest Ambition (by Morris Lurie), and then answer the question that follows it: 'I have an appointment to see the editor of Boy Magazine, I said. 'Oh,' she said. 'At ten o’clock,' I said. 'I think I’m early.' It was half past nine. 'Just one minute,' she said, and picked up a telephone. While she was talking I looked around the foyer, in which there was nothing to look at, but I don’t like eavesdropping on people talking on the phone. Then she put down the phone and said to me, 'Won’t be long. Would you like to take a seat?' For some reason that caught me unawares and I flashed her a blinding smile and kept standing there, wondering what was going to happen next, and then I realised what she had said and I smiled again and turned around and bumped into a chair and sat down and crossed my legs and looked around and then remembered the shortness of my trousers and quickly uncrossed my legs and sat perfectly straight and still, except for looking at my watch ten times in the next thirty seconds. I don’t know how long I sat there. It was either five minutes or an hour, it’s hard to say. The lady at the desk didn’t seem to have anything to do, and I didn’t like looking at her, but from time to time our eyes met, and I would smile - or was that smile stretched across my face from the second I came in? I used to do things like that when I was thirteen. Finally a door opened and another lady appeared. She seemed, for some reason, quite surprised when she saw me sitting there, as though I had three eyes or was wearing a red suit, but I must say this for her, she had poise, she pulled herself together very quickly, hardly dropped a stitch, as it were, and holding open the door through which she had come, she said, 'Won’t you come this way?' and I did. I was shown into an office that was filled with men in grey suits. Actually, there were only three of them, but they all stood up when I came in, and the effect was overpowering. I think I might even have taken a half-step back. But my blinding smile stayed firm. The only name I remember is Randell and maybe I have that wrong. There was a lot of handshaking and smiling and saying of names. And when all that was done, no one seemed to know what to do. We just stood there, all uncomfortably smiling. Finally, the man whose name might have been Randell said, 'Oh, please, please, sit down,' and everyone did. 'Well,' Mr Randell said. 'You’re a young man to be drawing comics, I must say.' 'I’ve been interested in comics all my life.' I said. 'Well, we like your comic very much,' he said. 'And we’d like to make you an offer for it. Ah, fifteen pounds?' 'I accept,' I said. I don’t think Mr Randell was used to receiving quick decisions, for he then said something that seemed to me enormously ridiculous. 'That’s, ah, two pounds ten a page,' he said, and looked at me with his eyes wide open and one eyebrow higher than the other. 'Yes, that’s right,' I said. ‘Six two-and-a-halfs are fifteen. Exactly.' That made his eyes open even wider, and suddenly he shut them altogether and looked down at the floor. One of the other men coughed. No one seemed to know what to do. I leaned back in my chair and crossed my legs and just generally smiled at everyone. I knew what was coming. A job. And I knew what I was going to say then, too. And then Mr Randell collected himself, as though he had just thought of something very important (what an actor, I thought) and he said, 'Oh, there is one other thing, though. Jim, do we have Mr Lurie’s comic here?' 'Right here,' said Jim, and whipped it out from under a pile of things on a desk. 'Some of the, ah, spelling, Mr Randell said. 'Oh?' I said. 'Well, yes, there are, ah, certain things,' he said, turning over the pages of my comic, 'not, ah, big mistakes, but, here, see? You’ve spelt it as "jungel" which is not, ah, common usage.' 'You’re absolutely right,' I said, flashing out my fountain pen all ready to make the correction. 'Oh, no no no,' Mr Randell said. 'Don’t you worry about it. We’ll, ah, make the corrections. If you approve, that is.' 'Of course,' I said. 'We’ll, ah, post you our cheque for, ah, fifteen pounds,' he said. 'In the mail,' he added, rather lamely, it seemed to me. 'Oh, there’s no great hurry about that,' I said. 'Any old time at all will do.' 'Yes,' he said. Then we fell into another of these silences with which this appointment seemed to be plagued. Mr Randell scratched his neck. A truck just outside the window started with a roar and then began to whine and grind. It’s reversing, I thought. My face felt stiff from smiling, but somehow I couldn’t let it go. How does Lurie make the narrator such a likeable character here?