"Well, Miss Titania," resumed Roger. "You see what I'm driving at. I want to give people an entirely new idea about bookshops. The grain of glory that I hope will cure both my fever and my lethargicness is my conception of the bookstore as a power-house, a radiating place for truth and beauty. I insist books are not absolutely dead things: they are as lively as those fabulous dragons' teeth, and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. How about Bernhardi? Some of my Corn Cob friends tell me books are just merchandise. Pshaw!"
"I haven't read much of Bernard Shaw" said Titania.
"Did you ever notice how books track you down and hunt you out? They follow you like the hound in Francis Thompson's poem. They know their quarry! Look at that book The Education of Henry Adams! Just watch the way it's hounding out thinking people this winter. And The Four Horsemen—you can see it racing in the veins of the reading people. It's one of the uncanniest things I know to watch a real book on its career—it follows you and follows you and drives you into a corner and MAKES you read it. There's a queer old book that's been chasing me for years: The Life and Opinions of John Buncle, Esq., it's called. I've tried to escape it, but every now and then it sticks up its head somewhere. It'll get me some day, and I'll be compelled to read it. Ten Thousand a Year trailed me the same way until I surrendered. Words can't describe the cunning of some books. You'll think you've shaken them off your trail, and then one day some innocent-looking customer will pop in and begin to talk, and you'll know he's an unconscious agent of book-destiny. There's an old sea-captain who drops in here now and then. He's simply the novels of Captain Marryat put into flesh. He has me under a kind of spell; I know I shall have to read Peter Simple before I die, just because the old fellow loves it so. That's why I call this place the Haunted Bookshop. Haunted by the ghosts of the books I haven't read. Poor uneasy spirits, they walk and walk around me. There's only one way to lay the ghost of a book, and that is to read it."
"I know what you mean," said Titania. "I haven't read much Bernard Shaw, but I feel I shall have to. He meets me at every turn, bullying me. And I know lots of people who are simply terrorized by H. G. Wells. Every time one of his books comes out, and that's pretty often, they're in a perfect panic until they've read it."
Roger chuckled. "Some have even been stampeded into subscribing to the New Republic for that very purpose."
"But speaking of the Haunted Bookshop, what's your special interest in that Oliver Cromwell book?"
"Oh, I'm glad you mentioned it," said Roger. "I must put it back in its place on the shelf." He ran back to the den to get it, and just then the bell clanged at the door. A customer came in, and the one-sided gossip was over for the time being.