This is a question that admits of the utmost nicety of discussion.  Some authorities hold that the proper books for a guest-room are of a soporific quality that will induce swift and painless repose.  This school advises The Wealth of Nations, Rome under the Caesars, The Statesman’s Year Book, certain novels of Henry James, and The Letters of Queen Victoria (in three volumes).  It is plausibly contended that books of this kind cannot be read (late at night) for more than a few minutes at a time, and that they afford useful scraps of information.

Another branch of opinion recommends for bedtime reading short stories, volumes of pithy anecdote, swift and sparkling stuff that may keep one awake for a space, yet will advantage all the sweeter slumber in the end.  Even ghost stories and harrowing matter are maintained seasonable by these pundits.  This class of reading comprises O. Henry, Bret Harte, Leonard Merrick, Ambrose Bierce, W. W. Jacobs, Daudet, de Maupassant, and possibly even On a Slow Train Through Arkansaw, that grievous classic of the railway bookstalls whereof its author, Mr. Thomas W. Jackson, has said “It will sell forever, and a thousand years afterward.”  To this might be added another of Mr. Jackson’s onslaughts on the human intelligence, I’m From Texas, You Can’t Steer Me, whereof is said (by the author) “It is like a hard-boiled egg, you can’t beat it.”  There are other of Mr. Jackson’s books, whose titles escape memory, whereof he has said “They are a dynamite for sorrow.”  Nothing used to annoy Mifflin more than to have someone come in and ask for copies of these works.  His brother-in-law, Andrew McGill, the writer, once gave him for Christmas (just to annoy him) a copy of On a Slow Train Through Arkansaw sumptuously bound and gilded in what is known to the trade as “dove-coloured ooze.”  Roger retorted by sending Andrew (for his next birthday) two volumes of Brann the Iconoclast bound in what Robert Cortes Holliday calls “embossed toadskin.”  But that is apart from the story.

To the consideration of what to put on Miss Titania’s bookshelf Roger devoted the delighted hours of the morning.  Several times Helen called him to come down and attend to the shop, but he was sitting on the floor, unaware of numbed shins, poring over the volumes he had carted upstairs for a final culling.  “It will be a great privilege,” he said to himself, “to have a young mind to experiment with.  Now my wife, delightful creature though she is, was—­well, distinctly mature when I had the good fortune to meet her; I have never been able properly to supervise her mental processes.  But this Chapman girl will come to us wholly unlettered.  Her father said she had been to a fashionable school:  that surely is a guarantee that the delicate tendrils of her mind have never begun to sprout.  I will test her (without her knowing it) by the books I put here for her.  By noting which of them she responds to, I will know how to proceed.  It might be worth