The shop, a corner one, was part of a gigantic modern structure, with a decorated facade in pinkish terra-cotta, and topped by four pinkish cupolas.  It was brutally, tyrannously imposing.  It towered above its neighbours, dwarfing the long sky-line of the Strand; its flushed cupolas mocked the white and heavenly soaring of St. Mary’s.  Whether you approached it from the river, or from the City, or from the west, you could see nothing else, so monstrous was it, so flagrant and so new.  Though the day was not yet done, the electric light streamed over the pavement from the huge windows of the ground floor; a coronal of dazzling globes hung over the doorway at the corner; there, as you turned, the sombre windows of the second-hand department stretched half way down the side street; here, in the great thoroughfare, the newest of new books stood out, solicitous and alluring, in suits of blazing scarlet and vivid green, of vellum and gilt, of polished leather that shone like amber and malachite and lapis lazuli.

Within, a wall broken by a wide and lofty arch divided the front from the back shop.  On the right of the arch was the mahogany pew of the cashier, on the left, a tall pillar stove radiating intolerable heat.  Four steps led through the arch into the back shop, the floor of which was raised in a sort of platform.  On the platform was a table, and at the table sat the young man compiling the Quarterly Catalogue.

Front shop and back shop reeked with the smells of new mahogany, dust, pillar-stove, gum, hot-pressed paper and Russia leather.  He sat in the middle of them, in an atmosphere so thick that it could be seen hanging about him like an aura, luminous in the glare of the electric light.  His slender, nervous hands worked rapidly, with a business-like air of dexterity and dispatch.  But every now and then he raised his head and stared for quite a long time at the round, white, foolish face of the clock, and whenever he did this his eyes were the eyes of a young man who has no adequate sense of his surroundings.

The remarkable thing about the new shop was that already, like a bar or a restaurant, it drew to it a certain group of young men, punctually, irresistibly.  A small group—­you could almost count them on the fingers of one hand—­they came from Fleet Street, from the Temple, from the Junior Journalists’ Club over the way.  They were never seen looking in at the windows or hanging about the counter; they were not the least bit of good to the shop, those customers.  But they were evidently some good to the young man.  Whatever they did or did not do, they always ended by drifting to the platform, to his table.  They sat on it in friendly attitudes and talked to him.

He was so glad to be talked to, so frankly, engagingly, beautifully glad, that the pathos of it would have been too poignant, the obligation it almost forced on you too unbearable, but for his power, his monstrous, mysterious, personal glamour.