he books. There was the same untidiness
here. The table was littered with papers and pens, tobacco jars,
numerous pipes, some photographs. From the floor to the ceiling were
books--rows on rows--flung apparently into the shelves with no order or
method.

"I'm no good as far as books go," said Harry, laughing. "There never
was such a heathen. There have always been other things to do, and I
must confess it is a mystery to me how men get time to read at all. If
I do get time I'm generally done up, and a novel's the only thing I'm
fit for."

"Ah, then, you don't know the book craze," Bethel Said. "It's worse
than drink. I've seen it absolutely ruin a man. You can't stop--if
you see a book you must get it, whether you really want it or no. You
go on buying and buying and buying. You get far more than you can ever
read. But you're a miser and you hate even lending them. You sit in
your room and count the covers, and you're no fit company for man or
beast."

Harry looked at him--"You've known it?"

"Oh yes! I've known it. I'm a bit better now--I'm out such a lot.
But even now there's a great deal here that I've never read, and I add
to it continually. The worst of it is," he said, laughing, "that we
can't afford it. It's very hard on Mary and the wife, but I'm a rotten
loafer, and that's the end of it."

He said it so gaily and with so little sense of responsibility that you
couldn't possibly think that it weighed on him. But he looked such a
boy, standing there with his hands in his pockets and that
half-penitent, half-humorous look in his eyes, that you couldn't be
angry. Harry laughed.

"Upon my word, you're amazing!"

"Oh! you'll get sick of me. It's all so selfish and slack, I know.
But I struggled once--I'm in the grip now." He talked about Borrow and
displayed a little grey-bound "Walden" with pride. He spoke of Richard
Jefferies with an intimate affection as though he had known the man.

He gave Harry some of his enthusiasm, and he lent him "Lavengro." He
described it and Harry compared mentally Isobel Berners with Mary
Bethel.

Then they went up to the little drawing-room--an ugly room, but
redeemed by a great window overlooking the sea, and a large photograph
of Mary on the mantelpiece. Under the light of the lamp the silver
frame glittered and sparkled.

He sat by the window and talked to her, and again he had that same
curious sense of having known her before: he spoke of it.