An elderly Wall Street lawyer hires a quiet new copyist who, asked to do the smallest task, answers only that he would prefer not to — and keeps preferring not to, until he has stopped working, stopped leaving, stopped everything, while the baffled narrator can neither move him nor bring himself to throw him out. Melville turns that soft, immovable refusal into one of the strangest and most haunting stories in American letters: a comedy of office manners that darkens by degrees into a parable of isolation no one in it can name. It is the tale that gave the language its patron saint of saying no.