und the fading bed of coals, Roger began hunting along
his private shelves. "Have you ever read any Gissing?" he said.

Titania made a pathetic gesture to Mrs. Mifflin. "It's awfully
embarrassing to be asked these things! No, I never heard of him."

"Well, as the street we live on is named after him, I think you ought
to," he said. He pulled down his copy of The House of Cobwebs. "I'm
going to read you one of the most delightful short stories I know.
It's called 'A Charming Family.'"

"No, Roger," said Mrs. Mifflin firmly. "Not to-night. It's eleven
o'clock, and I can see Titania's tired. Even Bock has left us and gone
in to his kennel. He's got more sense than you have."

"All right," said the bookseller amiably. "Miss Chapman, you take the
book up with you and read it in bed if you want to. Are you a
librocubicularist?"

Titania looked a little scandalized.

"It's all right, my dear," said Helen. "He only means are you fond of
reading in bed. I've been waiting to hear him work that word into the
conversation. He made it up, and he's immensely proud of it."

"Reading in bed?" said Titania. "What a quaint idea! Does any one do
it? It never occurred to me. I'm sure when I go to bed I'm far too
sleepy to think of such a thing."

"Run along then, both of you," said Roger. "Get your beauty sleep. I
shan't be very late."

He meant it when he said it, but returning to his desk at the back of
the shop his eye fell upon his private shelf of books which he kept
there "to rectify perturbations" as Burton puts it. On this shelf
there stood Pilgrim's Progress, Shakespeare, The Anatomy of Melancholy,
The Home Book of Verse, George Herbert's Poems, The Notebooks of Samuel
Butler, and Leaves of Grass. He took down The Anatomy of Melancholy,
that most delightful of all books for midnight browsing. Turning to
one of his favourite passages--"A Consolatory Digression, Containing
the Remedies of All Manner of Discontents"--he was happily lost to all
ticking of the clock, retaining only such bodily consciousness as was
needful to dump, fill, and relight his pipe from time to time.
Solitude is a dear jewel for men whose days are spent in the tedious
this-and-that of trade. Roger was a glutton for his midnight musings.
To such tried companions as Robert Burton and George Herbert he was
wont to exonerate his spirit. It used to amuse him to think of Burton,
the lonely Oxford scholar, writing that vast book to