"What if it
should be she _now_?" But when he went to peer through the
door-curtain it was only an old fellow who had spent the better part
of the afternoon in the best chair, reading a book. Erlcort went back
to the fire and let him rattle, which he did rather a long time, and
then went away, Erlcort hoped, in dudgeon. He was one of a number of
customers who had acted on the half of his motto asking them to sit
down and rest them, after acting on the other half to look round all
they wanted. Most of them did not read, even; they seemed to know one
another, and they talked comfortably together. Erlcort recognized a
companionship of four whom he had noticed in the Park formerly; they
were clean-enough-looking elderly men, but occupied nearly all the
chairs and settles, so that lady customers did not like to bring books
and look over them in the few places left, and Erlcort foresaw the
time when he should have to ask the old fellows to look around more
and rest them less. In resuming his own place before the fire he felt
the fleeting ache of a desire to ask Margaret Green whether it would
not be a good plan to remove the motto from the chimneypiece. He would
not have liked to do it without asking her; it had been her notion to
put it there, and her other notion of the immoral mirrors had
certainly worked well. The thoughtful expression they had reflected on
the faces of lady customers had sold a good many books; not that
Erlcort wished to sell books that way, though he argued with himself
that his responsibility ought strictly to end with the provision of
books which he had critically approved before offering them for sale.

His conscience was not wholly at peace as to his stock, not only the
books which he had included, but also those he had excluded. Some of
these tacitly pleaded against his severity; in one case an author came
and personally protested. This was the case of a book by the
ex-best-seller, who held that his last book was so much better than
his first that it ought certainly to be found in any critical
bookstore. The proceeds of his best-seller had enabled him to buy an
electric runabout, and he purred up to Erlcort's door in it to argue
the matter with him. He sat down in a reproduction and proved, gaily,
that Erlcort was quite wrong about it. He had the book with him, and
read passages from it; then he read passages from some of the books on
sale and defied Erlcort to say that his passages were not just a