r to begin her experience as a
bookseller. The first impression the Haunted Bookshop had made on her
was one of superfluous dinginess, and as Mrs. Mifflin refused to let
her help get breakfast--except set out the salt cellars--she ran down
Gissing Street to a little florist's shop she had noticed the previous
afternoon. Here she spent at least a week's salary in buying
chrysanthemums and a large pot of white heather. She was distributing
these about the shop when Roger found her.

"Bless my soul!" he said. "How are you going to live on your wages if
you do that sort of thing? Pay-day doesn't come until next Friday!"

"Just one blow-out," she said cheerfully. "I thought it would be fun
to brighten the place up a bit. Think how pleased your floorwalker
will be when he comes in!"

"Dear me," said Roger. "I hope you don't really think we have
floorwalkers in the second-hand book business."

After breakfast he set about initiating his new employee into the
routine of the shop. As he moved about, explaining the arrangement of
his shelves, he kept up a running commentary.

"Of course all the miscellaneous information that a bookseller has to
have will only come to you gradually," he said. "Such tags of bookshop
lore as the difference between Philo Gubb and Philip Gibbs, Mrs. Wilson
Woodrow and Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, and all that sort of thing. Don't be
frightened by all the ads you see for a book called "Bell and Wing,"
because no one was ever heard to ask for a copy. That's one of the
reasons why I tell Mr. Gilbert I don't believe in advertising. Someone
may ask you who wrote The Winning of the Best, and you'll have to know
it wasn't Colonel Roosevelt but Mr. Ralph Waldo Trine. The beauty of
being a bookseller is that you don't have to be a literary critic: all
you have to do to books is enjoy them. A literary critic is the kind
of fellow who will tell you that Wordsworth's Happy Warrior is a poem
of 85 lines composed entirely of two sentences, one of 26 lines and one
of 59. What does it matter if Wordsworth wrote sentences almost as
long as those of Walt Whitman or Mr. Will H. Hays, if only he wrote a
great poem? Literary critics are queer birds. There's Professor
Phelps of Yale, for instance. He publishes a book in 1918 and calls it
The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century. To my way of
thinking a book of that title oughtn't to be published until 2018.
Then somebody will come along and