Beside the bed was a bookshelf with a reading lamp.  The problem Roger was discussing was what books and pictures might be the best preachers to this congregation of one.  To Mrs. Mifflin’s secret amusement he had taken down the picture of Sir Galahad which he had once hung there, because (as he had said) if Sir Galahad were living to-day he would be a bookseller.  “We don’t want her feasting her imagination on young Galahads,” he had remarked at breakfast.  “That way lies premature matrimony.  What I want to do is put up in her room one or two good prints representing actual men who were so delightful in their day that all the young men she is likely to see now will seem tepid and prehensile.  Thus she will become disgusted with the present generation of youths and there will be some chance of her really putting her mind on the book business.”

Accordingly he had spent some time in going through a bin where he kept photos and drawings of authors that the publishers’ “publicity men” were always showering upon him.  After some thought he discarded promising engravings of Harold Bell Wright and Stephen Leacock, and chose pictures of Shelley, Anthony Trollope, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Robert Burns.  Then, after further meditation, he decided that neither Shelley nor Burns would quite do for a young girl’s room, and set them aside in favour of a portrait of Samuel Butler.  To these he added a framed text that he was very fond of and had hung over his own desk.  He had once clipped it from a copy of Life and found much pleasure in it.  It runs thus: 

On the return of A book
lent to A friend

I give humble and hearty thanks for the safe return of this book which having endured the perils of my friend’s bookcase, and the bookcases of my friend’s friends, now returns to me in reasonably good condition.

I give humble and hearty thanks that my friend did not see fit to give this book to his infant as a plaything, nor use it as an ash-tray for his burning cigar, nor as a teething-ring for his mastiff.

When I lent this book I deemed it as lost:  I was resigned to the bitterness of the long parting:  I never thought to look upon its pages again.

But now that my book is come back to me, I rejoice and am exceeding glad!  Bring hither the fatted morocco and let us rebind the volume and set it on the shelf of honour:  for this my book was lent, and is returned again.

Presently, therefore, I may return some of the books that I myself have borrowed.

“There!” he thought.  “That will convey to her the first element of book morality.”

These decorations having been displayed on the walls, he bethought himself of the books that should stand on the bedside shelf.