The first pipe after breakfast is a rite of some importance to seasoned
smokers, and Roger applied the flame to the bowl as he stood at the
bottom of the stairs. He blew a great gush of strong blue reek that
eddied behind him as he ran up the flight, his mind eagerly meditating
the congenial task of arranging the little spare room for the coming
employee. Then, at the top of the steps, he found that his pipe had
already gone out. "What with filling my pipe and emptying it, lighting
it and relighting it," he thought, "I don't seem to get much time for
the serious concerns of life. Come to think of it, smoking, soiling
dishes and washing them, talking and listening to other people talk,
take up most of life anyway."
This theory rather pleased him, so he ran downstairs again to tell it
to Mrs. Mifflin.
"Go along and get that room fixed up," she said, "and don't try to palm
off any bogus doctrines on me so early in the morning. Housewives have
no time for philosophy after breakfast."
Roger thoroughly enjoyed himself in the task of preparing the
guest-room for the new assistant. It was a small chamber at the back
of the second storey, opening on to a narrow passage that connected
through a door with the gallery of the bookshop. Two small windows
commanded a view of the modest roofs of that quarter of Brooklyn, roofs
that conceal so many brave hearts, so many baby carriages, so many cups
of bad coffee, and so many cartons of the Chapman prunes.
"By the way," he called downstairs, "better have some of the prunes for
supper to-night, just as a compliment to Miss Chapman."
Mrs. Mifflin preserved a humorous silence.
Over these noncommittal summits the bright eye of the bookseller, as he
tacked up the freshly ironed muslin curtains Mrs. Mifflin had allotted,
could discern a glimpse of the bay and the leviathan ferries that link
Staten Island with civilization. "Just a touch of romance in the
outlook," he thought to himself. "It will suffice to keep a blasee
young girl aware of the excitements of existence."
The room, as might be expected in a house presided over by Helen
Mifflin, was in perfect order to receive any occupant, but Roger had
volunteered to psychologize it in such a fashion as (he thought) would
convey favourable influences to the misguided young spirit that was to
be its tenant. Incurable idealist, he had taken quite gravely his
responsibility as landlord and employer of Mr. Chapman's daughter. No
chambered nautilus was to have better opportunity to expand the tender
mansions of its soul.
Beside the bed was a bookshelf with a reading lamp. The problem Roger
was discussing was what books and pictures might be the best preachers
to this congregation of one. To Mrs. Mifflin's secret amusement he had
taken down the picture of Sir Galahad which he had once hung there,
because (as he had said) if Sir Galahad were living to-day he would be
a bookseller. "We don't want her feasting her imagination on young
Galahads," he had remarked at breakfast. "That way lies premature
matrimony. What I want to do is put up in her room one or two good
prints representing actual men who were so delightful in their day that
all the young men she is likely to see now will seem tepid and
prehensile. Thus she will become disgusted with the present generation
of youths and there will be some chance of her really putting her mind
on the book business."
Accordingly he had spent some time in going through a bin where he kept
photos and drawings of authors that the publishers' "publicity men"
were always showering upon him. After some thought he discarded
promising engravings of Harold Bell Wright and Stephen Leacock, and
chose pictures of Shelley, Anthony Trollope, Robert Louis Stevenson,
and Robert Burns. Then, after further meditation, he decided that
neither Shelley nor Burns would quite do for a young girl's room, and
set them aside in favour of a portrait of Samuel Butler. To these he
added a framed text that he was very fond of and had hung over his own
desk. He had once clipped it from a copy of Life and found much
pleasure in it. It runs thus:
