I signed on the dotted line and accepted his congratulations, while he accepted my two dollar deposit.
About a week later the box arrived. Eagerly I lifted forth the magic volumes which were to put me on a new intellectual plane. Somehow the bindings seemed to need breaking in. They creaked and cracked at the hinges and the pages clung together in little groups clannishly. The gluing of the backs was queer, yet casual. The "hand" that had tinted the "elegant colored frontispieces" was evidently a heavy one.
No matter: Hawthorne and Irving were mine. I had been taken into the higher circles of culture.
That very evening I plunged into "Mosses from an Old Manse". I stuck at it. Each day I balanced my morning's Shredded Wheat with Hawthorne Mosses at night, till the entire volume had been systematically consumed. Then, having created my new literary universe, I rested.
Today no one can stump me on Mosses. Mention the Old Manse to me and my whole manner changes. My face lights up with intelligence. My eyes sparkle. My nostrils dilate like those of an old fire engine horse at the clang of an alarm gong. Yes, right this minute I can give you moss for moss.
If only I had gone on and read all the other volumes of the set.... Who knows? I might now be dean of a college or a second Dr. Frank Crane. Alas, I continued to rest on my Mosses, arguing sophistically with my conscience that these books, the nucleus of my ultimate library, were precious possessions not necessarily for immediate perusal. Time-defying classics like Hawthorne and Irving would keep and be equally enjoyable years hence, if not more so; in fact, it would be almost extravagant to use them all up in the beginning. So it was tacitly decided that we three—Nathaniel, Washington, and I (the first two in red buckram, the latter in invisible yet palpable Freshman green)—should grow old together.
The fourth member of our little group, he who had introduced us, had dropped out. I neither saw nor heard from him again. It would seem that he worked like lightning, striking in the same place only once. Not so his firm, however. They struck me by mail each month with awful iteration.
But before a year had passed there descended upon me another emissary of intellectualism. This personage expounded to me the doctrine of the De Luxe. I learned that an edition of any author, no matter how reputable that author may be, was mere dross if published for the public at large. Only as a subscriber, possessing a numbered set of a limited edition, could one obtain the quintessence of literature. Fiat de lux. Let there be e-lite.
The fact that this prophet of almost-vellum exclusiveness was physically a fat and florid Irishman whom a wiser man than I might have mistaken for a saloon keeper in his Sunday clothes, did not hamper his spirit. Enthrallingly yet confidentially he discoursed on Selected Literature for the Serene Few. I could be one of those Serene Few.
I could. I did. I signed.