Carlyle and Ruskin and Meredith and Stevenson--all are dead, God rot them. He glanced over their faded titles. Collected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Ha, ha! That's good. Collected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson! Its top edge was black with dust. Dust thou art, to dust returnest. Gordon kicked Stevenson's buckram backside. Art there, old false-penny? You're cold meat, if ever Scotchman was.

Ping! The shop bell. Gordon turned round. Two customers, for the library.

A dejected, round-shouldered, lower-class woman, looking like a draggled duck nosing among garbage, seeped in, fumbling with a rush basket. In her wake hopped a plump little sparrow of a woman, red- cheeked, middle-middle class, carrying under her arm a copy of The Forsyte Saga--title outwards, so that passers-by could spot her for a high-brow.

Gordon had taken off his sour expression. He greeted them with the homey, family-doctor geniality reserved for library-subscribers.

'Good afternoon, Mrs Weaver. Good afternoon, Mrs Penn. What terrible weather!'

'Shocking!' said Mrs Penn.

He stood aside to let them pass. Mrs Weaver upset her rush basket and spilled on to the floor a much-thumbed copy of Ethel M. Dell's Silver Wedding. Mrs Penn's bright bird-eye lighted upon it. Behind Mrs Weaver's back she smiled up to Gordon, archly, as highbrow to highbrow. Dell! The lowness of it! The books these lower classes read! Understandingly, he smiled back. They passed into the library, highbrow to highbrow smiling.

Mrs Penn laid The Forsyte Saga on the table and turned her sparrow- bosom upon Gordon. She was always very affable to Gordon. She addressed him as Mister Comstock, shopwalker though he was, and held literary conversations with him. There was the free-masonry of highbrows between them.

'I hope you enjoyed The Forsyte Saga, Mrs Penn?'

'What a perfectly MARVELLOUS achievement that book is, Mr Comstock! Do you know that that makes the fourth time I've read it? An epic, a real epic!'

Mrs Weaver nosed among the books, too dim-witted to grasp that they were in alphabetical order.

'I don't know what to 'ave this week, that I don't,' she mumbled through untidy lips. 'My daughter she keeps on at me to 'ave a try at Deeping. She's great on Deeping, my daughter is. But my son- in-law, now, 'e's more for Burroughs. I don't know, I'm sure.'

A spasm passed over Mrs Penn's face at the mention of Burroughs. She turned her back markedly on Mrs Weaver.

'What I feel, Mr Comstock, is that there's something so BIG about Galsworthy. He's so broad, so universal, and yet at the same time so thoroughly English in spirit, so HUMAN. His books are real HUMAN documents.'

'And Priestley, too,' said Gordon.