“I don’t see any of it,” she remarked with wholesome literalness.

“Well, here at the bottom are lexicons—­think of them as roots and soil.  Above them lie maps and atlases:  consider them the surface.  Then all books are history of course.  But here is a great central trunk rising out of the surface which is called History in especial.  On each side of that, running to the right and to the left, are main branches.  Here for instance is the large limb of Philosophy—­a very weighty limb indeed.  Here is the branch of Criticism.  Here is a bough consisting principally of leaves on which live unnamed venomous little insects that poison them and die on them:  their appointed place in creation.”

“And so there is no positive fruit anywhere,” she insisted with her practical taste for the substantial.

“It is all food, Anna, edible and nourishing to different mouths and stomachs.  Some very great men have lived on the roots of knowledge, the simplest roots.  And here is poetry for dates and wild honey; and novels for cocoanuts and mushrooms.  And here is Religion:  that is for manna.”

“What is at the very top?”

His eyes rested upon the highest row of books.

“These are some of the loftiest growths, new buds of the mind opening toward the unknown.  Each in its way shows the best that man, the earth-animal, has been able to accomplish.  Here is a little volume for instance which tells what he ought to be—­and never is.  This small volume deals with the noblest ideals of the greatest civilizations.  Here is what one of the finest of the world’s teachers had to say about justice.  Aspiration is at that end.  This little book is on the sad loveliness of Greek girls; and the volume beside it is about the brief human chaplets that Horace and some other Romans wore—­and then trod on.  Thus the long story of light and shadow girdles the globe.  If you were nothing but a spirit, Anna, and could float in here some night, perhaps you would see a mysterious radiance streaming upward from this shelf of books like the northern lights from behind the world—­starting no one knows where, sweeping away we know not whither—­search-light of the mortal, turned on dark eternity.”

She stood a little behind him and watched him in silence, hiding her tenderness.

“If I were a book,” she said thoughtlessly, “where should I be?”

He drew the fingers of one hand lingeringly across the New Testament.

“Ah, now don’t do that,” she cried, “or you shall have no dinner.  Here, turn round! look at the dust! look at this cravat on one end! look at these hands!  March upstairs.”

He laid his head over against hers.

“Stand up!” she exclaimed, and ran out of the room.

Some minutes later she came back and took a seat near the door.  There was flour on her elbow; and she held a spoon in her hand.

“Now you look like yourself,” she said, regarding him with approval as he sat reading before the bookcase.  “I started to tell you what Harriet told me.”