The Bibliomaniac had come off into the country to spend Sunday with the Idiot, and, as fortune would have it, Mr. and Mrs. Pedagog also appeared on the scene. After the mid-day dinner the little party withdrew to the library, where the Bibliomaniac began to discourse somewhat learnedly upon his hobby.

"I am glad to see, my dear Idiot," he observed, as he glanced about the room at the well-filled shelves, "that as you grow older you are cultivating a love of good literature."

"I heartily echo the sentiment," said Mr. Pedagog, as he noted the titles of some of the volumes. "I may add that I am pleasurably surprised at some of your selections. I never knew, for instance, that you cared for Dryden, and yet I see here on the top shelf a voluminous edition of that poet."

"Yes," said the Idiot. "I have found Dryden very useful indeed. Particularly in that binding and in so many volumes. The color goes very well with the hangings, and the space the books occupy, eked out by a dozen others of the same color, gives to that top shelf all the esthetic effect of an attractive and tasteful frieze. Then, too, it is always well," he added, with a sly wink at Mrs. Idiot, "to have a lot of books for a top shelf that is difficult to reach that nothing under the canopy could induce you to read. It is not healthful to be stretching upward, and with Dryden upon the top shelf my wife and I are never tempted to undermine our constitutions by taking him down."

The Bibliomaniac laughed.

"Your view is at least characteristic," said he, "and to tell you the absolute truth, I do not know that your judgment of the literary value of Dryden is at variance with my own. Somebody called him the Greatest Poet of a Little Age. Perhaps if the age had been bigger he'd not have shone so brilliantly."

"Lowell," observed Mr. Pedagog, "was responsible for that remark, if I remember rightly, and I have no doubt it is a just one, and yet I do not hold it up against Dryden. Man does not make the age. The age makes the man. Had there been any inspiring influences at work to give him a motive, an incentive, Dryden might have been a greater poet. To excel his fellows was all that could rightly be expected of him, and that he did."

"Assuredly," said the Idiot. "That has always been my view, and to-day we benefit by it. If he had gone directly to oblivion, Mrs. Idiot and I should have been utterly at a loss to know what to put on that top shelf."

The Idiot offered his visitors a cigar.

"Thank you," said the Bibliomaniac, taking his and sniffing at it with all the airs and graces of a connoisseur.

"I don't know but that I will join you," said Mr. Pedagog. "I did not smoke until I was fifty, and I suppose I ought not to have taken it up then, but I did, and I have taken a great deal of comfort out of it. My allowance is fifty-two cigars a year, one for each Sunday afternoon," he added, with a kindly smile.

"Well, you want to look out you don't get smoker's heart," said the Idiot. "When a man plunges into a bad habit as rashly as that, he wants to pull up before it is too late."

"I have felt no ill effects since the first one," rejoined Mr. Pedagog. "But you, my dear Idiot, how about your allowance? Is it still as great as ever? As I remember you in the old days you were something of a cigarette fiend."

"I smoke just as much, but with this difference: I do not smoke for pleasure any more, Mr. Pedagog," the Idiot replied. "As a householder I smoke from a sense of duty. It keeps moths out of the house, and insects from the plants."

The Bibliomaniac meanwhile had been investigating the contents of the lower shelves.

"You've got a few rare things here, I see," he observed, taking up a volume of short sketches illustrated by Leech, in color. "This small tome is worth its weight in gold. Where did you pick it up?"

"Auction," said the Idiot. "I didn't buy it by weight, either. I bought it by mistake. The colored pictures fascinated me, and when it was put up I bawled out 'fifteen.' Another fellow said 'sixteen.' I wasn't going to split nickels so I bid 'twenty.' So we kept at it until it was run up to 'thirty-six.' Then I thought I'd break the other fellow's heart by bidding fifty, and it was knocked down to me."

"That's a stiff price, but on the whole it's worth it," said the Bibliomaniac, stroking the back of the book caressingly.

"But," said Mr. Pedagog, "if you bid on it consciously where did the mistake come in?"

The Idiot sighed. "I meant cents," he said, "but the other chap and the auctioneer meant dollars. I went up and planked down a half-dollar and was immediately made aware of my error."

"But you could have explained," said Mr. Pedagog.

"Oh, yes," said the Idiot, "I could, but after all I preferred to pay the extra $49.50 rather than make a public confession of such infernal innocence before some sixty or seventy habitues of a book-auction room."

"And you were perfectly right!" said the Bibliomaniac. "You never would have dared set your foot in that place again if you had explained. They would have made life a burden to you. Furthermore, you have not paid too dearly for the experience. The book is worth forty dollars; and to learn better than to despise the man who makes his bid cautiously, and who advances by small bids rather than by antelopian jumps, is worth many times ten dollars to the man who collects rare books seriously. In the early days I scorned to break a five-dollar bill when I was bidding, just as you refused, as you put it, to split nickels, and many a time I have paid as high as twenty-five dollars for books that could have been had for twenty-one, because of that foolish sentiment."

"I have often wondered," Mr. Pedagog put in at this point, holding his cigar in a gingerly and awed fashion, taking a puff at it between words, by which symptoms the man who seldom smokes may always be identified, "I have often wondered what was the mission of a private library, anyhow. And now that I find you two gentlemen interested in a phase of book-collecting with which I have had little sympathy myself, possibly I may, without being offensive, ask a question. Do you, for instance, Mr. Idiot, collect books because you wish to have something nobody else has got, or do you buy your books to read?"

"That is a deep question," said the Idiot, "and I do not know that I can answer it off-hand. I have already confessed that I bought Dryden for his decorative quality. I purchased my Thackeray to read. I bought my Pepys Diary because I find it better reading than a Sunday newspaper, quite as gossipy, and with weather reports that are fully as reliable. But that particular Leech I bought because of my youthful love for colored pictures."

"But you admit that it is valuable because of its rarity, and that compared to fifty dollars' worth of books that are not rare it is not to be compared with them from a literary point of view?" said Mr. Pedagog.

"I presume," said the Idiot, "that the fifty dollars I expended on that book would have provided me with a complete Shakespeare in one volume; all of Byron in green cloth and gold top; all of Dickens, Thackeray, Bulwer, and Austen in six volumes, with a margin of forty-five dollars left with which for nine years I could have paid for a subscription to the Mercantile Library, containing all the good reading of the present day and all the standard works of the past. But I rather like to have the books, and to feel that they are my own, even if it is only for the pleasure of lending them."

"Still, if a man collects books merely for their contents – " persisted Mr. Pedagog.

"He is a wild, extravagant person," said the Idiot. "He might save himself hundreds of dollars, not to say thousands. The library on that plan need not occupy an honored place among the rooms of the house. A mere pigeon-hole with a subscriber's card to a circulating library filed away in it will do as well, or if the city or town in which he lives maintains a public library he may spare himself even that expense."

"Good for you!" exclaimed the Bibliomaniac. "That's the best answer to the critics of book-collectors I have heard yet."

"I agree with you," said Mr. Pedagog. "It is a very comprehensive reply. As for you, my dear Bibliomaniac, why do you collect books?"

"Because I love 'em as books," replied the Bibliomaniac. "Because of their associations, and because when I get a treasure I have the bliss of knowing I have something that others haven't."

"Then it is selfishness?" asked Mr. Pedagog.

"Just as everything else is," returned the Bibliomaniac. "You, sir, if I may be personal without wishing to be offensive, are wedded to Mrs. Pedagog. You take pleasure in knowing that she belongs to you and not to any one else. The Idiot here is proud of his children, and is glad they are his children and nobody else's. I am wedded to my rare books, and it rejoices my soul to pick up a volume that is unique, and to know that it belongs to me and to no one else. If that is selfishness, then all possession is selfish."

"That's about it," said the Idiot. "You collect books just as Mormons and Solomon used to collect wives. You are called a Bibliomaniac. I suppose Brigham Young and Solomon would have been known as Gamyomaniacs – though I don't suppose that age in women as in books is a requisite of value to marrying men – and they are both of them supposed to be rather canny persons."

Mr. Pedagog puffed away in silence. It was evident that the argumentum ad hominem did not please him.

"Well," he said, after awhile, "possibly you are right. If a man wants a library to be a small British Museum – "

"He will take better care of his rarities than the Idiot does," said the Bibliomaniac, putting the rare Leech back into its place. "If that were mine I'd put it out of the reach of my children."

"I didn't know you had any," said the Idiot, eagerly.

"Oh, you know what I mean," retorted the Bibliomaniac. "You place Dryden on the top shelf where Tommy and Mollie cannot get at him. But this book, which is worth ten larger paper editions of Dryden, you keep below, where the children can easily reach it. It's a wonder to me you've been able to keep it in its present superb condition."

"The mind of a child," said Mr. Pedagog, sententiously, "is above values, above all conceits. It is the mind of sincerity, and a rare book has no greater attraction to the boy or girl than one not so favored."

"That is not my reason," said the Idiot. "I know children pretty well, and I have observed that they are ambitious, and in a sense rebellious. They want to do what they cannot do. That is why, when mothers place jam on the top shelf of the pantry, the children always climb up to get it. If they would leave it on the dining-room table, within easy reach, the children would soon cease to regard it as a thing to be sought for. Make jam a required article of diet and the little ones will soon cease to want it. So with that book. If I should put that out of Tommy's reach, Tommy would lie awake nights to plan his campaign to get it. Leaving it where it is he doesn't think about it, doesn't want it, is not forbidden to have it, and so it escapes his notice."

"You have the right idea, the human idea," said Mr. Pedagog, and even the Bibliomaniac was inclined to agree. But just then Tommy happened in, with Mollie close after. The boy walked straight to the bookcase, and Mollie gathered up the large shears from the Idiot's table, and together they approached their father.

"Pa," said Mollie, holding up the scissors, "can I borrow these?"

"What for?" asked the Idiot.

"We want to cut the pictures out o' this," said Tommy, holding up the fifty-dollar Leech.

After all, it is difficult to lay down a cast-iron rule as to how a private library should be constructed or arranged, particularly when one's loyalty is divided between one's children and one's merely bookish treasures.

IV
AS TO A SMALL DINNER

It was sad but true. Mr. and Mrs. Idiot had invited Mr. Whitechoker and Mr. and Mrs. Pedagog and the Poet to dinner, and for some reason or another the cook had taken wings unto herself and flown, and the guests were expected within two hours.

"I see now," said the Idiot, "why they call it taking French leave. Nobody who doesn't understand French understands it. If it wasn't French, or if somebody would translate it for us, we might be able to comprehend it; as it is, it is one of the mysteries, and, as usual, we must make the best of it. Life, after all, my dear, consists largely of making the best of things."

"Well, I'm sure I don't know what to do," said Mrs. Idiot, despairfully, "unless you telegraph them all not to come, and tell them why."

"It is too late to do that," said the Idiot, looking at his watch. "They've probably all left home by this time. Poets and clergymen and old people like Mr. and Mrs. Pedagog always do start an hour too early, for fear of missing their train."

"I wouldn't care so much about the Poet," said Mrs. Idiot; "he doesn't know enough about housekeeping, anyhow, to make it matter. But Mr. Whitechoker and Mr. and Mrs. Pedagog – I simply can't ask them to camp out, as it were. The very fact that Mrs. Pedagog would become sympathetic immediately she learned what had happened would in itself be unbearable."

"I thought women liked sympathy?" said the Idiot, with a proper manifestation of surprise.

"So they do; but you might just as well talk about claret as meaning one thing as of sympathy being all of the same brand," Mrs. Idiot answered. "Certain kinds of claret are insufferable – sour and heady. I suppose there are sixty different kinds."

"Sixty-two," said the Idiot, blandly. "The sixty you mean and two more whose names I have forgotten."

"I wish you would be serious for a moment," Mrs. Idiot retorted, with as near an approach to irritation as was possible to one of her amiable disposition. "And it's just the same way with sympathy," she continued; "Mrs. Pedagog will lay this whole trouble to my inexperience. Probably she never had a servant take French leave in her life on the eve of a dinner-party."

"I'll bet she didn't," said the Idiot. "And for why? Because she never gave a dinner-party in all her life. The habits of early life cling unto old age, and even as in her early days as a boarding-house keeper she never gave anything, so now she doubtless considers giving a dinner as a reckless waste of opportunity. And she is quite right. Does a lawyer invite his friends to join him in an opinion? Never. Does Mr. Tiffany request Mr. and Mrs. Idiot to accept a diamond tiara given in their honor? Not. Does a true poet, with three names on his autograph, give a poem to anybody when he can sell it? Not if he knows it. Why, then, expect a landlady, by birth and previous training, to give a dinner?"

"I notice," said Mrs. Idiot, severely, "that you are always willing to give your views!"

"Precisely, my dear, and that proves my point," replied the Idiot, amiably. "I am not a professional viewer, and I am not a photographer by trade. Therefore, why should I not give my views? But really," he added, "I wouldn't bother; it'll all come out right. I don't know just how, but I am confident we shall have the most glorious dinner of our lives. When I was down cellar this morning looking at the gas-meter I saw two big boxes full of potatoes, a can of French pease, and a bottle of sarsaparilla, and if they don't like what they get it will be because they are exacting. And I'll wager you from what I know of their manners that if you gave them dried apples, cold tongue, and milk they'd say it was the most delightful repast they ever sat down to."

"But I'd know they didn't mean it," said Mrs. Idiot, smiling in spite of her woe.

"And that brings up the question, why should your conscience be troubled by the insincerity of others?" said he. "Now, I'll tell you what we'll do. You fry the potatoes and I'll boil the can of pease; I think four minutes will boil them hard, like an egg, and together we'll put the sarsaparilla on ice, and bluff the whole thing through. Bluffing was always my strong point, and I have noticed, my dear, that in whatever I have tried to do since we were married you have contributed at least ninety per cent. to success. My bluff plus your efforts to make the thing a go will send our dinner to a premium."

Mrs. Idiot remained properly silent. As a matter of fact, she was not even listening. She was considering. What on earth to do was the question in her mind, and it so entirely absorbed it that she fortunately had little left for the rather easy views of the Idiot himself.

"What is a dinner, anyhow?" the Idiot added, after the silence had to his mind become oppressive. "Is it a mere meal? Do the Poet and Mr. and Mrs. Pedagog and Mr. Whitechoker come here merely to get something to eat? Or do they come for the pleasure of our society, or for the pleasure of leaving home, or what? As I understand it, people go out to dine not because they have not a sufficiency of food at home, but because they wish to meet other people. That's what I do. I can always have something better to eat at home than I can get at somebody else's house; and furthermore, it is a more natural meal. Dinners generally are made up of pretty little things that nobody likes, and have no sustenance in them. A successful dinner lies not in successful cooking, but in pleasing conversation. Wherefore, it is not the cook, but the host and hostess who make a failure or a success of a dinner."

"Then I presume if we simply spread the table and let you talk our guests will be satisfied?" said Mrs. Idiot, blandly.

"Precisely," the Idiot replied. "It will be delightful. Just think of the menu! Instead of oysters I will indulge in a few opinions as to the intellectual qualities of bivalves generally, finishing up with a glowing tribute to the man who is content to be a clam and not talk too much. In the place of purée we will tackle some such subject as the future of Spain. I think I could ladle out a few sound ideas on that subject that would be as clear as the purest consommé. Then for fish, that would be easy. A good trout story, with imagination sauce, would do very well. For the entrée I will give you one of my most recent poems, and the roast will be – "

"And the rest of us are to sit and twiddle our thumbs while you soliloquize?" demanded Mrs. Idiot. "I rather think not. I will provide the roast, my dear John, and it will consist largely of remarks upon the ways of cooks."

"A very proper subject for a roast," observed the Idiot, complacently, "and in your present frame of mind I think it will be not only well done, but rare as well, with plenty of crisp. And so we can simply talk this dinner through. It will be novel, certainly, and if you provide plenty of bread and butter no one need go away hungry."

"Very true," Mrs. Idiot answered. "And now that you have had your fun, suppose we put our minds on the serious aspect of the case. Two hours from now four people are coming here hungry – "

"I have it!" cried the Idiot, delightedly. "Let's borrow a cook! I don't believe it's ever been done before. It would be splendid, not only in getting us out of our troubles, but in establishing an entirely new principle in domestic science. What is the use of neighbors who will not be neighborly and lend you their most cherished possession?"

"None at all," sighed Mrs. Idiot, despairingly.

"Now, when we lived in our flat in New York the people up-stairs borrowed our ice," said the Idiot; "the people down-stairs borrowed our dining-room chairs; the people across the hall borrowed butter and milk and eggs, and I think we once borrowed a lemon from the people on the top floor."

"Never!" cried Mrs. Idiot.

"Yes, we did, my dear," insisted the Idiot. "At least I did. You and the children were off in the country, and one hot summer's night, two years ago, I was consumed with a desire for a glass of lemonade, and as there were no lemons in the house, or the flat, I sent out to borrow. I began at the basement and worked up towards the roof, and ultimately got what I wanted, although, as I have said, it was the top-flat people I got it from."

"And did you ever return it?" demanded Mrs. Idiot.

"I regret to say that I didn't," said the Idiot. "But I will, and with interest. I wonder what two years' interest on a lemon is!" he added. "I suppose that a borrowed lemon compounded at the rate of six per cent. could be paid off by a lemon and one small Bermuda potato. I will send my check for both to those people to-morrow. What was their name?"

"I never knew," said Mrs. Idiot. "I never liked them, and I never called. I am sorry you are under obligations to them."

"Only for a lemon, though, dear," said the Idiot, "at six per cent."

"But what does all this prove?" demanded the poor little housekeeper.

"That the principle of lending is recognized among neighbors," the Idiot explained. "If a neighbor will lend a lemon, surely a neighbor will lend a cook. The principle involved is the same in both cases. Particularly so in this case, for my experience with cooks has been that they are, after all, for the most part nothing but human lemons. If the departed Bridget had been anything but full of sourness she would not have left us so unexpectedly."

"You don't really think for a moment, do you, that the Jimpsonberrys would lend us their cook, or that she would come, or that I would ask them?" said Mrs. Idiot.

"Well, I suppose not," said the Idiot. "I suppose not. But I don't see why! First, the Jimpsonberrys, as our neighbors, ought to be willing to get us out of our trouble. Second, we don't ask their cook to come for nothing. By coming she will receive an addition to her wages which will help her to endow a policeman with a moderate fortune some day when she marries him. As for your asking Mrs. Jimpsonberry to lend us her cook for a few hours, that is the main objection. When one borrows one must give collateral, and it may be that it would embarrass you to offer Mike as security for the safe return of the Jimpsonberrys' cook. Anyhow, I see weak points in my plan, and we'd better abandon it. If the Jimpsonberrys' cook is the only available incendiary in the neighborhood, we'd better stop where we are. When we dined at Jimpsonberrys' last week I went away feeling that Jimpsonberry ought to collect fire insurance on that dinner. It wasn't cooked; it was a plain case of arson."

It was at this precise moment, when poor Mrs. Idiot was beginning to despair of getting any advice of value from her husband, that the telephone-bell rang, and the Idiot rose up to answer the call.

"Hello!" he said.

"Oh! Hello, old man!" he added. "That you? Glad to see you."

"Yes," he continued, after a pause. "Of course we expect you."

"Seven o'clock sharp," he remarked, a moment later. "You'll surely be here?" Then after a second pause, he added:

"Good! You can stay all night if you wish; we've plenty of room. Good-bye."

"Who was it?" asked Mrs. Idiot, as the Idiot hung up the receiver of the telephone.

"The Poet," replied the Idiot. "He wanted to know at what hour dinner was."

"Oh, dear!" cried Mrs. Idiot. "Why didn't you tell him the dinner isn't for to-night, but to-morrow night?"

"Didn't need to, my dear," said the Idiot, lighting a cigarette. "We've made a slight mistake. You invited these people, it now appears, for the twenty-ninth."

"Certainly," said Mrs. Idiot.

"Well, my love," said the Idiot, with an affectionate glance, "to-day is the – ah – the twenty-eighth."

Mrs. Idiot drew a sigh of relief.

"My!" she cried, "what a blessing! I wonder how I got so mixed!"

"It's economy, perhaps," suggested the Idiot. "If you will insist on buying out-of-date diaries and last year's calendars at bargain-counters because they are cheap, I don't really see how you can expect to keep up with the times."

Mrs. Idiot laughed heartily. Her relief of mind was unmistakable.

"What would you have done, John, if this had really been the night?" she asked later.

"Oh, I don't know," said the Idiot. "I think I should have taken you to New York to dinner, and bluffed our guests into believing they had come up on the wrong night. It is very easy for a host to put his guests in the wrong if he wants to. I don't, but if I must, I must."

As it was, the family dinner that night was a great success in spite of the absence of the cook, because Mrs. Idiot, who is an expert with the chafing-dish, found several odds and ends in the late cook's domains, which, under her expert manipulation, became dishes which the Idiot said afterwards "remained long in the memory without proving too permanent a tax upon the digestion."