Page:The haunted bookshop.djvu/204



"All right," said the bookseller amiably. "Miss Chapman, you take the book up with you and read it in bed if you want to. Are you a librocubicularist?"

Titania looked a little scandalized.

"It's all right, my dear," said Helen. "He only means are you fond of reading in bed. I've been waiting to hear him work that word into the conversation. He made it up, and he's immensely proud of it."

"Reading in bed?" said Titania. "What a quaint idea! Does any one do it? It never occurred to me. I'm sure when I go to bed I'm far too sleepy to think of such a thing."

"Run along then, both of you," said Roger. "Get your beauty sleep. I shan't be very late."

He meant it when he said it, but returning to his desk at the back of the shop his eye fell upon his private shelf of books which he kept there "to rectify perturbations" as Burton puts it. On this shelf there stood Pilgrim's Progress, Shakespeare, The Anatomy of Melancholy, The Home Book of Verse, George Herbert's Poems, The Notebooks of Samuel Butler, and Leaves of Grass. He took down The Anatomy of Melancholy, that most delightful of all books for midnight browsing. Turning to one of his favourite passages—"A Consolatory Digression, Containing the Remedies of All Manner