tered
cautiously, fearing some trap. Save for a strong tincture of cigar
smoke, everything seemed correct. Listening at his door he heard Mrs.
Schiller exclaiming shrilly in the hall, assisted by yappings from the
pug. Doors upstairs were opened, and questions were called out. He
heard guttural groans from the bearded one, mingled with oaths and some
angry remark about having fallen downstairs. The pug, frenzied with
excitement, yelled insanely. A female voice--possibly Mrs. J. F.
Smith--cried out "What's that smell of burning?" Someone else said,
"They're burning feathers under his nose to bring him to."

"Yes, Hun's feathers," chuckled Aubrey to himself. He locked his door,
and sat down by the window with his opera glasses.

Chapter IX

Again the Narrative is Retarded

Roger had spent a quiet evening in the bookshop. Sitting at his desk
under a fog of tobacco, he had honestly intended to do some writing on
the twelfth chapter of his great work on bookselling. This chapter was
to be an (alas, entirely conjectural) "Address Delivered by a
Bookseller on Being Conferred the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters
by a Leading University," and it presented so many alluring
possibilities that Roger's mind always wandered from the paper into
entranced visions of his imagined scene. He loved to build up in fancy
the flattering details of that fine ceremony when bookselling would at
last be properly recognized as one of the learned professions. He
could see the great auditorium, filled with cultivated people: men
with Emersonian profiles, ladies whispering behind their fluttering
programmes. He could see the academic beadle, proctor, dean (or
whatever he is, Roger was a little doubtful) pronouncing the august
words of presentation--

A man who, in season and out of season, forgetting private gain for
public weal, has laboured with Promethean and sacrificial ardour to
instil the love of reasonable letters into countless thousands; to
whom, and to whose colleagues, amid the perishable caducity of human
affairs, is largely due the pullulation of literary taste; in honouring
whom we seek to honour the noble and self-effacing profession of which
he is so representative a member----

Then he could see the modest bookseller, somewhat clammy in his
extremities and lost within his academic robe and hood, nervously
fidgeting his mortar-board, haled forward by ushers, and tottering
rubescent before the chancel