“Will you? You see,” he confessed, “I’m troubled with insomnia. If I read by myself I only become interested in the book, but if someone reads aloud it makes me drowsy.”
“As a nurse I’ve done that hundreds of times. But frankly, I can’t read poetry; I begin to sing-song it at once; it becomes rime without reason. What is the book?”
Cleigh extended it to her. The moment her hands touched the volume she saw that she was holding something immeasurably precious. The form was unlike the familiar shapes of modern books. The covers consisted of exquisitely hand-tooled calf bound by thongs; there was a subtle perfume as she opened them. Illuminated vellum. She uttered a pleasurable little gasp.
“The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s,” she read.
“Fifteenth century—the vellum. The Florentine covers were probably added in the seventeenth. I have four more downstairs. They are museum pieces, as we say.”
“That is to say, priceless?”
“‘Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it; if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned!’”
“Why did you select that?”
“I didn’t select it; I remembered it—because it is true.”