“No; that’s one thing in his favor; and another is that he’s amusing. I like men to be amusing.”
“I suppose they are better so!”
“You amazing child, it’s the whole thing; don’t you know that?”
“I know that you don’t think anything of the kind, Zelda Dameron,” declared Olive.
CHAPTER XVII
DAMERON BLOCK, 1870
When Zelda asked her father one day where his office was, he answered evasively that it was in the Dameron Block. This was an old-fashioned office building, with a basement and a short stairway leading to the main corridor. It was no longer fashionable, as the better class of lawyers and real estate brokers had sought buildings of a later type that offered electric lights and elevators. The Dameron Block faced the court-house square, and was the habitat of divers small attorneys and real estate men. In the basement below, a justice of the peace sat in judgment next door to a musty old book-shop, where the proprietor, a quaint figure with a great mop of iron-gray hair, sold pens and paper and legal blanks to Dogberry Row, as this quarter of the street was called.
Zelda strayed into this thoroughfare by chance one winter afternoon shortly before Christmas and was arrested by the sight of some old books in the bookseller’s window. The venerable bookseller came out into the basement area and spoke to her of the books, holding a volume meanwhile, with his forefinger closed upon the page he had been reading. Yes; he kept French books, he said, and she went into the shop and looked over his shelves of foreign books.
“There is very little demand for them,” he said. “Some of these are rare. Here is a little volume of Hugo’s poems; very rare. I should be glad if you would take it for a dollar,—any of these poets for a dollar. But of course I can only offer. It is for you to decide.”
He took down other volumes, with praise for every one but with shy apology for offering them.
“I shall take the Hugo,” said Zelda, presently.