Gabler_ and _John Gabriel Borkman_, because
they destroyed by contrast the illusions with which they maintained
their activities.

The Scots bookseller was a great friend of Rodd's, and a loyal admirer,
though he did not in the least understand what the strange man was
about. Rodd used to talk of the virtue of an ordered world, while the
bookseller lived in dreams of Anarchy, men and women left alone so that
the good in them could come to the top and create a millennium of
kindliness. Rodd's researches into the human heart had revealed to him
only too clearly the terror that burns at the sources of human life,
but because the bookseller's dreams were dear to him, because they kept
him happy and benevolent, Rodd could never bring himself to push
argument far enough to disturb them.

One day in this fair summer of our tale, Rodd turned into the bookshop
to consume the lunch he had bought at the German Delicatessen-Magasin
up the road. He found the bookseller bubbling over with happiness,
dusting his books, re-arranging them, emptying large parcels of new
books, and not such very subversive books either except in so far as
all literature is subversive.

'Hallo!' said Rodd. 'I thought this was the slack season?'

'I'm rich,' retorted the bookseller. 'The dahned publishers are
crawling to me. They've had their filthy lucre, and they know I can
shift the stuff, and they're on their knees to me, begging me to take
their muck by the hundred--at my own price.'

(This was a pardonable exaggeration, but it was long since the
bookseller had had so much new stock.)

'If I ever want a change,' said Rodd, 'I'll get you to take me on as
your assistant.'

The bookseller's jaw dropped and he stared at Rodd.

'You might do worse,' he said. 'That's the second offer I've had this
year.'

'Oh! who made the first?'

'Ah!' The bookseller put his finger to his nose and chuckled. 'Ah!
Some one who's in love with me.'

'There are too many books,' said Rodd. 'Too much shoddy.'

He turned away to the shelves where the plays were kept--Shaw, Barker,
Galsworthy, Ibsen, Schnitzler, Hauptmann, Tschekov, Andreev, Claudel,
Strindberg, Wedekind, all the authors of the Sturm and Drang period,
when all over Europe the attempt was made to thrust literature upon the
theatre, in the endeavour, as Rodd thought, to break the tyranny of the
printed word. That was a favourite idea of his, that the tyranny of
print from which the world ha