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 broken the binding. Barney saw no suggestion of her there. The underscored line seemed merely silly. “Though mountains meet not, lovers may!” Pickles!

For him, all books were divided into three classes: school books, religious books, and books to read. “The Queen’s Choir” was evidently a hybrid of the first and second, combining the offensiveness of both. The pictures told no story, and therefore, probably, they were intended to be instructive; the binding was fit only for a First Communion souvenir; the contents were merely verse. In school, he had been made to commit poems to memory from the pages of his reader, and he supposed that all verses were rhymed to make them more easily remembered. He knew that they were always nauseatingly moral and hence supposed to be medicinal. Out of school, he would no more read them than he would order a drink of castor oil at a soda fountain.

He dropped “The Queen’s Choir” and gave