"Um!"
"You can't hold them, except on a desk or on your knee."
"Ah! That wouldn't do! Oh, not at all!" The customer, who was nonplussed by the names mentioned, snatched at the opportunity given to decline them.
"I've got a nice little edition in eight volumes, very handy, with outline drawings by Flaxman, and nicely printed. You don't often see it. Not like any other Shakspere I know of. Quite cheap too."
"Um!"
"I'll see if I can put my hand on it."
The shop was full of bays formed by bookshelves protruding at right-angles from the walls. The first bay was well lighted and tidy; but the others, as they receded into the gloomy backward of the shop, were darker and darker and untidier and untidier. The effect was of mysterious and vast populations of books imprisoned for ever in everlasting shade, chained, deprived of air and sun and movement, hopeless, resigned, martyrized. The bookseller stepped over piles of cast books into the farthest bay, which was carpeted a foot thick with a disorder of volumes, and lighted a candle.
"You don't use the electric light in that corner," said the client, briskly following. He pointed to a dust-covered lamp in the grimy ceiling.
"Fuse gone. They do go," the bookseller answered blandly; and the blandness was not in the least impaired by his private thought that the customer's remark came near to impudence. Searching, he went on: "We're not quite straight here yet. The truth is, we haven't been straight since 1914."
"Dear me! Five years!"