Titania Learns the Business

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"Good gracious, Roger!" she exclaimed, "I've heard your voice piping away for I don't know how long. What are you doing, giving the poor child a Chautauqua lecture? You must want to frighten her out of the book business."

Roger looked a little sheepish. "My dear," he said, "I was only laying down a few of the principles underlying the art of bookselling----"

"It was very interesting, honestly it was," said Titania brightly. Mrs. Mifflin, in a blue check apron and with plump arms floury to the elbow, gave her a wink--or as near a wink as a woman ever achieves (ask the man who owns one).

"Whenever Mr. Mifflin feels very low in his mind about the business," she said, "he falls back on those highly idealized sentiments. He knows that next to being a parson, he's got into the worst line there is, and he tries bravely to conceal it from himself."

"I think it's too bad to give me away before Miss Titania," said Roger, smiling, so Titania saw this was merely a family joke.

"Really truly," she protested, "I'm having a lovely time. I've been learning all about Professor Latimer who wrote The Handle of Europe, and all sorts of things. I've been afraid every minute that some customer would come in and interrupt us."

"No fear of that," said Helen. "They're scarce in the early morning." She went back to her kitchen.

"Well, Miss Titania," resumed Roger. "You see what I'm driving at. I want to give people an entirely new idea about bookshops. The grain of glory that I hope will cure both my fever and my lethargicness is my conception of the bookstore as a power-house, a radiating place for truth and beauty. I insist books are not absolutely dead things: they are as lively as those fabulous dragons' teeth, and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. How about Bernhardi? Some of my Corn Cob friends tell me books are just merchandise. Pshaw!"

"I haven't read much of Bernard Shaw" said Titania.

"Did you ever notice how books track you down and hunt you out? They follow you like the hound in Francis Thompson's poem. They know their quarry! Look at that book The Education of Henry Adams! Just watch the way it's hounding out thinking people this winter. And The Four Horsemen--you can see it racing in the veins of the reading people. It's one of the uncanniest things I know to watch a real book on its career--it follows you and follows you and drives you into a corner and MAKES you read it. There's a queer old book that's been chasing me for years: The Life and Opinions of John Buncle, Esq., it's called. I've tried to escape it, but every now and then it sticks up its head somewhere. It'll get me some day, and I'll be compelled to read it. Ten Thousand a Year trailed me the same way until I surrendered. Words can't describe the cunning of some books. You'll think you've shaken them off your trail, and then one day some innocent-looking customer will pop in and begin to talk, and you'll know he's an unconscious agent of book-destiny. There's an old sea-captain who drops in here now and then. He's simply the novels of Captain Marryat put into flesh. He has me under a kind of spell: I know I shall have to read Peter Simple before I die, just because the old fellow loves it so. That's why I call this place the Haunted Bookshop. Haunted by the ghosts of the books I haven't read. Poor uneasy spirits, they walk and walk around me. There's only one way to lay the ghost of a book, and that is to read it."