“It must be hard work,” said Roy. “Selling books, I mean.”
“All work is hard if you make it so,” was the reply. “In the same way the hardest work may be easy if you enjoy it. I enjoy selling books. To be a successful book agent one must be a general. Every engagement requires special study. The prospective customer is the enemy to be surrounded and captured. Your ammunition is address, tact, patience, the ability to read character and the power of presenting your wares attractively.” Mr. Noon took a third helping of preserve and cake and warmed to his subject. “To sell a set of books to some one who wants them is nothing; it brings no warmth to the heart. To sell a set of books to some one who needs them but doesn’t want to buy them is worth while but still lacks the highest artistic touch. But to sell those books to a person who doesn’t need them, doesn’t want them and will never use them—that is an accomplishment!”
“I should think so!” muttered Roy admiringly.
“Yes,” resumed Mr. Noon, smiling reminiscently, “yes. One of the most artistic sales I ever made was of a set of Brainard’s ‘Animal Kingdom’; six volumes, half morocco, profusely illustrated by the world’s foremost artists. I sold that set to a gentleman who had been blind for twenty years.”
Harry gave a gasp.
“Why, what did he want with them?” she asked.
“He wanted to possess them,” was the reply. “I pictured those books to him so graphically, so attractively, that he found he couldn’t be happy without them.”
“But he couldn’t read them, nor see the pictures,” objected Dick.
“And that,” replied Mr. Noon gravely, “was an advantage, for the ‘Animal Kingdom’ is a miserable set of books; I handled it less than three months. If he had read them he’d have been disappointed. As it was he imagined what he liked.”
“But that doesn’t seem to me to be quite—quite fair,” said Roy. “It was a good deal like—like cheating.”