She hasn't read any of it at all, and, she says, she has no idea
who is winning the war. She takes some kind of capsules to reduce flesh,
which cost six dollars for fifty. She has taken twenty-five. The
extension of the draft age being spoken of, she said to Billy:

"Dearie, I'll put you under the bed where they won't get you." She
doesn't want to vote, and she can't understand why any one should want to
go to poles and vote and all that kind of thing.

Billy Henderson's wife is handsome; she is rich; she is an excellent
cook; she loves Billy Henderson.

XIX

HUMOURS OP THE BOOK SHOP

The panorama before his view is the human mind. He panders to its
divers follies, consults its varied wisdom. He stands umbrellaless in
the rain of all its idiosyncrasies. Why has he not lifted up his
voice? He, the book clerk, that lives among countless volumes of
confessions! Whose daily task is to wrestle hour by hour with a living
Comedie Humaine! Has the constant spectacle of so many books been
astringent in its effect upon any latent creative impulse? Or has he
been dumb in the colloquial sense, forsooth; a figure like Mr.
Whistler's guard in the British Museum? Sundry "lettered booksellers"
of England have, indeed, given us some reminiscences of bookselling and
its humours. But they were the old boys. They belonged to an old
order and reflected another day. "As physicians are called 'The
Faculty' and counsellors-at-law 'The Profession,'" writes Boswell, "the
booksellers of London are called 'The Trade.'" Let us look into this
Trade as it is to-day, we said. So for a space we played we were a
book clerk.

There are two, decidedly contradictory, popular conceptions of the man
whose business it is to sell books. One is the sentimental notion of
an old gentleman in a "stovepipe hat," a dreamer and an idealist, who
keeps a second-hand stall. The most delightful pictures of him are in
the pages of Anatole France. He is a man of much erudition. And books
are his wife and family, food and drink. Then there is the other idea.
"Why is it," we report the remark of an important looking gentleman in
a high hat, "that clerks in book stores never know anything about
books?" (or anything else, was perhaps not far from his thought.) This
gentleman, it was readily perceived, had an idea that he had said
something rather good. But it was not new. This conception of the
book clerk is one of the world's seven jokes-