“Dear me,” said Titania, “Is it so good as all that? Perhaps I’d better read it.”
“It is so good that if I knew any way of doing so I’d insist on Mr. Wilson reading it on his voyage to France. I wish I could get it onto his ship. My, what a book! It makes one positively ill with pity and terror. Sometimes I wake up at night and look out of the window and imagine I hear Hardy laughing. I get him a little mixed up with the Deity, I fear. But he’s a bit too hard for you to tackle.”
Titania was puzzled, and said nothing. But her busy mind made a note of its own: “Hardy, hard to read, makes one ill, try it.”
“What did you think of the books I put in your room?” said Roger. He had vowed to wait until she made some comment unsolicited, but he could not restrain himself.
“In my room?” she said. “Why, I’m sorry, I never noticed them!”
IV
The Disappearing Volume
“Well, my dear,” said Roger after supper that evening, “I think perhaps we had better introduce Miss Titania to our custom of reading aloud.”
“Perhaps it would bore her?” said Helen. “You know it isn’t everybody that likes being read to.”
“Oh, I should love it!” exclaimed Titania. “I don’t think anybody ever read to me, that is not since I was a child.”
“Suppose we leave you to look after the shop,” said Helen to Roger, in a teasing mood, “and I’ll take Titania out to the movies. I think Tarzan is still running.”
Whatever private impulses Miss Chapman may have felt, she saw by the bookseller’s downcast face that a visit to Tarzan would break his heart, and she was prompt to disclaim any taste for the screen classic.
“Dear me,” she said; “Tarzan—that’s all that nature stuff by John Burroughs; isn’t it? Oh, Mrs. Mifflin, I think it would be very tedious. Let’s have Mr. Mifflin read to us. I’ll get down my knitting bag.”
“You mustn’t mind being interrupted,” said Helen. “When anybody rings the bell Roger has to run out and tend the shop.”
“You must let me do it,” said Titania. “I want to earn my wages, you know.”
“All right,” said Mrs. Mifflin; “Roger, you settle Miss Chapman in the den and give her something to look at while we do the dishes.”
But Roger was all on fire to begin the reading. “Why don’t we postpone the dishes,” he said, “just to celebrate?”
“Let me help,” insisted Titania. “I should think washing up would be great fun.”
“No, no, not on your first evening,” said Helen. “Mr. Mifflin and I will finish them in a jiffy.”
So Roger poked up the coal fire in the den, disposed the chairs, and gave Titania a copy of Sartor Resartus to look at. He then vanished into the kitchen with his wife, whence Titania heard the cheerful clank of crockery in a dishpan and the splashing of hot water. “The best thing about washing up,” she heard Roger say, “is that it makes one’s hands so clean, a novel sensation for a secondhand bookseller.”
She gave Sartor Resartus what is graphically described as a “once over,” and then seeing the morning Times lying on the table, picked it up, as she had not read it. Her eye fell upon the column headed
Lost And Found
Fifty cents an agate line
and as she had recently lost a little pearl brooch, she ran hastily through it. She chuckled a little over
Lost—Hotel Imperial lavatory, set of teeth. Call or communicate Steel, 134 East 43 St. Reward, no questions asked.
Then she saw this:
Lost—Copy of Thomas Carlyle’s Oliver Cromwell, between Gissing Street, Brooklyn, and the Octagon Hotel. If found before midnight, Tuesday, Dec. 3, return to assistant chef, Octagon Hotel.
“Why” she exclaimed, “Gissing Street—that’s here! And what a funny kind of book for an assistant chef to read. No wonder their lunches have been so bad lately!”
When Roger and Helen rejoined her in the den a few minutes later she showed the bookseller the advertisement. He was very much excited.
“That’s a funny thing,” he said. “There’s something queer about that book. Did I tell you about it? Last Tuesday—I know it was then because it was the evening young Gilbert was here—a man with a beard came in asking for it, and it wasn’t on the shelf. Then the next night, Wednesday, I was up very late writing, and fell asleep at my desk. I must have left the front door ajar, because I was waked up by the draught, and when I went to close the door I saw the book sticking out a little beyond the others, in its usual place. And last night, when the Corn Cobs were here, I went out to look up a quotation in it, and it was gone again.”
“Perhaps the assistant chef stole it?” said Titania.
“But if so, why the deuce would he advertise having done so?” asked Roger.
“Well, if he did steal it,” said Helen, “I wish him joy of it. I tried to read it once, you talked so much about it, and I found it dreadfully dull.”
“If he did steal it,” cried the bookseller, “I’m perfectly delighted. It shows that my contention is right: people do really care for good books. If an assistant chef is so fond of good books that he has to steal them, the world is safe for democracy. Usually the only books anyone wants to steal are sheer piffle, like Making Life Worth While by Douglas Fairbanks or Mother Shipton’s Book of Oracles. I don’t mind a man stealing books if he steals good ones!”
“You see the remarkable principles that govern this business,” said Helen to Titania. They sat down by the fire and took up their knitting while the bookseller ran out to see if the volume had by any chance returned to his shelves.
“Is
