“They’re fairly decent,” the other assented, in the curt tone of the collector who will not talk of his passion for fear of talking of nothing else; then, as Glennard, his hands in his pockets, began to stroll perfunctorily down the long line of bookcases—“Some men,” Flamel irresistibly added, “think of books merely as tools, others as tooling. I’m between the two; there are days when I use them as scenery, other days when I want them as society; so that, as you see, my library represents a makeshift compromise between looks and brains, and the collectors look down on me almost as much as the students.”
Glennard, without answering, was mechanically taking one book after another from the shelves. His hands slipped curiously over the smooth covers and the noiseless subsidence of opening pages. Suddenly he came on a thin volume of faded manuscript.
“What’s this?” he asked, with a listless sense of wonder.
“Ah, you’re at my manuscript shelf. I’ve been going in for that sort of thing lately.” Flamel came up and looked over his shoulders. “That’s a bit of Stendhal—one of the Italian stories—and here are some letters of Balzac to Madame Commanville.”
Glennard took the book with sudden eagerness. “Who was Madame Commanville?”
“His sister.” He was conscious that Flamel was looking at him with the smile that was like an interrogation point. “I didn’t know you cared for this kind of thing.”
“I don’t—at least I’ve never had the chance. Have you many collections of letters?”
“Lord, no—very few. I’m just beginning, and most of the interesting ones are out of my reach. Here’s a queer little collection, though—the rarest thing I’ve got—half a dozen of Shelley’s letters to Harriet Westbrook. I had a devil of a time getting them—a lot of collectors were after them.”
Glennard, taking the volume from his hand, glanced with a kind of repugnance at the interleaving of yellow cris-crossed sheets. “She was the one who drowned herself, wasn’t she?”
Flamel nodded. “I suppose that little episode adds about fifty per cent. to their value,” he said, meditatively.