Titania Arrives

More Books

To the consideration of what to put on Miss Titania's bookshelf Roger devoted the delighted hours of the morning. Several times Helen called him to come down and attend to the shop, but he was sitting on the floor, unaware of numbed shins, poring over the volumes he had carted upstairs for a final culling. "It will be a great privilege," he said to himself, "to have a young mind to experiment with. Now my wife, delightful creature though she is, was--well, distinctly mature when I had the good fortune to meet her; I have never been able properly to supervise her mental processes. But this Chapman girl will come to us wholly unlettered. Her father said she had been to a fashionable school: that surely is a guarantee that the delicate tendrils of her mind have never begun to sprout. I will test her (without her knowing it) by the books I put here for her. By noting which of them she responds to, I will know how to proceed. It might be worth while to shut up the shop one day a week in order to give her some brief talks on literature. Delightful! Let me see, a little series of talks on the development of the English novel, beginning with Tom Jones--hum, that would hardly do! Well, I have always longed to be a teacher, this looks like a chance to begin. We might invite some of the neighbours to send in their children once a week, and start a little school. Causeries du lundi, in fact! Who knows I may yet be the Sainte Beuve of Brooklyn."

Across his mind flashed a vision of newspaper clippings--"This remarkable student of letters, who hides his brilliant parts under the unassuming existence of a second-hand bookseller, is now recognized as the----"

"Roger!" called Mrs. Mifflin from downstairs: "Front! someone wants to know if you keep back numbers of Foamy Stories."

After he had thrown out the intruder, Roger returned to his meditation. "This selection," he mused, "is of course only tentative. It is to act as a preliminary test, to see what sort of thing interests her. First of all, her name naturally suggests Shakespeare and the Elizabethans. It's a remarkable name, Titania Chapman: there must be great virtue in prunes! Let's begin with a volume of Christopher Marlowe. Then Keats, I guess: every young person ought to shiver over St. Agnes' Eve on a bright cold winter evening. Over Bemerton's, certainly, because it's a bookshop story. Eugene Field's Tribune Primer to try out her sense of humour. And Archy, by all means, for the same reason. I'll go down and get the Archy scrapbook."

It should be explained that Roger was a keen admirer of Don Marquis, the humourist of the New York Evening Sun. Mr. Marquis once lived in Brooklyn, and the bookseller was never tired of saying that he was the most eminent author who had graced the borough since the days of Walt Whitman. Archy, the imaginary cockroach whom Mr. Marquis uses as a vehicle for so much excellent fun, was a constant delight to Roger, and he had kept a scrapbook of all Archy's clippings. This bulky tome he now brought out from the grotto by his desk where his particular treasures were kept. He ran his eye over it, and Mrs. Mifflin heard him utter shrill screams of laughter.