"It is pure superstition," answered Blathwayte, who found it as blessed to give information as did my sister to receive it; "a fire naturally by force of contrast looks less brilliant in the sunlight than in the shade, but the sunlight has no actual effect on it whatsoever."
At this juncture I happened to catch Frank's eye, and to my delight perceived that the humour of the situation struck him as it struck me. Of course I knew how funny it was of Annabel and Arthur to take hold of all the romance of life, and transmute it—by some strange alchemy of their own—into useful and intelligent information; I had seen them at it for years and years, and had never failed to enjoy the sight; but it was very clever of Frank, who had known Arthur for two months and Annabel for twenty minutes, to see that it was funny also.
"My last question was not so silly after all," I remarked. "I think the sunshine of life is frequently extinguished by a too great absorption in the cares of the domestic hearth. See, for instance, those numerous cases where the energy of the spring-fever expends itself upon the exigencies of the spring-cleaning."
"I hate a spring-cleaning," exclaimed Frank: "it always means that everything is put back into something else's place, and you can never find anything you want till you've left off wanting it."
"But you find all the things you wanted the spring before last," I added, "and have now forgotten that you ever possessed, and have no longer any use for."
"And all your books seem to have played General Post," continued Frank; "Volume One has changed places with Volume Six, and the dictionary is where the Bible ought to be, and the cookery book is among the poems."
"I never keep a Bible in a bookcase," remarked Annabel; "it somehow doesn't seem reverent to do so."
I could not let this pass. "Yes, you do: you keep one in that bookcase in your bedroom. I've seen it there."
"Oh! a bookcase in a bedroom is quite a different thing from an ordinary library bookcase, Reggie; in fact I never keep any but religious books in my bedroom bookcase. One doesn't, somehow."
"I cannot see," I argued, "why a hanging bookcase in a bedroom—forming, mark you, a companion ornament to the medicine-chest on the other side of the wardrobe—is a more reverent resting-place for a Bible than is the shelf of a well-stocked library. Why should clothes and drugs exhale a more holy atmosphere than secular literature?"