m always has a favorite passage."

Wurm went to a shelf and took down a volume. He blew off the dust and
smoothed its sides. "Listen to this!" he said. "Picked up the volume
at Schulte's, on the twenty-five cent table. 'A love of the country is
taken,'" he read, "'I know not why, to indicate the presence of all
the cardinal virtues.... We assert a taste for sweet and innocent
pleasures and an indifference to the feverish excitements of
artificial society. I, too, like the country,...' (you'll like this,
Flint) 'but I confess--to be duly modest--that I love it best in
books. In real life I have remarked that it is frequently damp and
rheumatic, and most hated by those who know it best.... Though a
cockney in grain, I love to lean upon the farmyard gate; to hear Mrs.
Poyser give a bit of her mind to the squire; to be lulled into a
placid doze by the humming of Dorlecote Mill; to sit down in Dandie
Dinmont's parlour ... or to drop into the kitchen of a good old
country inn, and to smoke a pipe with Tom Jones or listen to the
simple-minded philosophy of Parson Adams.'"

"You hit on a good one then," said Flint. "And now as I was saying--"

Wurm interposed. "Just a moment, Flint! You think that that quotation
supports your side of the discussion. Not at all. It shows merely that
sometimes we get greater reality from books than we get from life.
Leslie Stephen liked the real country, also. In his holidays he
climbed the Swiss mountains--wrote a book about them--it's on that top
shelf. Don't you remember how he loved to roll stones off a cliff? And
as a pedestrian he was almost as famous as George Borrow--walked the
shirt off his back before his college trustees and all that sort of
thing. But he got an even sharper reality from books. He liked the
city, too, but in many a mood, there's no doubt about it, he preferred
to walk to Charing Cross with Doctor Johnson in a book, rather than to
jostle on the actual pavement outside his door."

"Speed up, Wurm!" This from Quill, the journalist. "Inch along, old
caterpillar!"

"As far as I am concerned," Wurm continued, "I would rather go with
Charles and Mary Lamb to see _The Battle of Hexham_ in their gallery
than to any show in Times Square. I love to think of that fine old
pair climbing up the stairs, carefully at the turn, lest they tread on
a neighbor's heels. Then the pleasant gallery, with its great lantern
to light their expectant faces!"

Wurm's eyes strayed again wist