y's history. After dinner I took the book from the shelf and as I
struck it against the table to let the dust fly up, I thought of what
Mrs. Harrington said. The Harringtons had spent an evening with me. As
they rose to go Mrs. Harrington ran the tip of her gloved finger across
half a dozen dingy volumes and sniffed. "Why don't you put glass doors
on your bookshelves?" she asked. It was a raw point with me and she knew
it. "The pretty kind, perhaps," I sneered, "with leaded panes and an
antique iron lock?" "Exactly," she replied. "The dust here is
abominable. You must be just steeped in all sorts of infection; and
perhaps if you kept your books under lock and key people wouldn't run
away with them." I was a fool to have tried irony upon Mrs. Harrington.
Her outlook upon life is literal and domestic. Books are to her
primarily part of a scheme of interior decoration. Harrington's views
come closer to my own, but Harrington is an indulgent husband.

The incident was now a week old, but something of the original fury came
back to me. It was exasperating that the world should be so afraid of
dust in the only place where dust has meaning and beauty. People who
will go abroad in motor cars and veneer themselves with the germ-laden
dust of the highway, find it impossible to endure the silent deposit of
the years on the covers of an old book. And the dust of the gutter that
is swept up by trailing skirts? And the dust of soggy theatre-chairs?
And the dust of old beliefs in which we live, my friend? And the dust
that statesmen and prophets are always throwing into our eyes? None of
these interfere with Mrs. Harrington's peace of mind. But when it comes
to the dust on the gilt tops of my red-buckrammed Moliere she fears
infection.

And yet Harrington is a man of exceptional intelligence. He would agree
with me that infection from book-dust is not an ignoble form of death. I
sit there and plot obituaries. "Mr. H. Wellington Jones," says the
_Evening Star_, "died yesterday afternoon from ptomaine poisoning, after
a very brief illness. Friday night he was with a merry group of diners
in one of our best-known and most brilliantly lighted Broadway
restaurants. He partook heartily of lobster salad, of which, his closest
friends declare, he was inordinately fond. Almost immediately he
complained of being ill and was taken home in a taxicab." If I were H.
Wellington Jones and it were my fate to die of poison I could frame a
nobler end f