you wouldn't _mind_! (Of course you don't--you
only feel like murder!) Nor do you really mind, providing that you are
indifferent as to the ultimate fate of the volume. If you are not
indifferent . . . well, you won't have lent it, that's all; it will
recline on the bookshelf of the literary "safe"--which is in your own
bedroom, because your own bedroom is the only place where a book ever is
really safe. (Have you noticed how reluctant people always are to ask
for the loan of a book which lies beside your bed? It is as if this
traditional lodgment of the family Bible restrained them. Usually they
never even examine bedside books. They are always so embarrassed when
they happen to pick up a volume of the type of "Holy Thoughts for Every
Day of the Year." They never know what to say to that!) But a book which
lies about downstairs is the legitimate prey of every book "pincher" who
strays across your threshold. Moreover, no one has yet invented a decent
excuse for refusing to lend a book. I wish they had; I would use it
until it was threadbare. You can't very well say what you really think,
since no one likes to be refused the loan of anything because the owner
feels convinced that he will never get it back. So, unless you have a
particular gift for the Lie-Immediate, which embraces either the
assertion that the book in question does not belong to you or else that
you have promised it to somebody else, you meekly utter the prayer that
you will be delighted if the borrower thereof will only be kind enough to
let you have it back soon, which, all the time, you know he won't, and he
knows he won't, and you know that he knows he won't, and he knows that
you know that he won't--all of which passes through your respective minds
as he pockets the book, and you in your heart of hearts bid it a fond
farewell!

_Other People's Books_

I have come to the conclusion that the only books which people are really
fond of are those which rightly belong to other people. To them they are
always faithful. They are faithful to them not _in spite of themselves_,
which is the way with those "classics" which everybody is supposed to
have read while they were young, and which most people only know by name,
because they belong to that dim and distant future in which are included
all those things which can be done when they are old--they are faithful
to them for the reason that nobody wants to borrow them; they belong to
the lit