“So he can read it in bed, I guess,” said Helen.  “Perhaps he suffers from insomnia.”

“It’s a darn shame he lost it before he had a chance to read it.  I’d like to have known what he thought of it.  I’ve got a great mind to go up and call on him.”

“Charge it off to profit and loss and forget about it,” said Helen.  “How about that reading aloud?”

Roger ran his eye along his private shelves, and pulled down a well-worn volume.

“Now that Thanksgiving is past,” he said, “my mind always turns to Christmas, and Christmas means Charles Dickens.  My dear, would it bore you if we had a go at the old Christmas Stories?”

Mrs. Mifflin held up her hands in mock dismay.  “He reads them to me every year at this time,” she said to Titania.  “Still, they’re worth it.  I know good old Mrs. Lirriper better than I do most of my friends.”

“What is it, the Christmas Carol?” said Titania.  “We had to read that in school.”

“No,” said Roger; “the other stories, infinitely better.  Everybody gets the Carol dinned into them until they’re weary of it, but no one nowadays seems to read the others.  I tell you, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas to me if I didn’t read these tales over again every year.  How homesick they make one for the good old days of real inns and real beefsteak and real ale drawn in pewter.  My dears, sometimes when I am reading Dickens I get a vision of rare sirloin with floury boiled potatoes and plenty of horse-radish, set on a shining cloth not far from a blaze of English coal——­”

“He’s an incorrigible visionary,” said Mrs. Mifflin.  “To hear him talk you might think no one had had a square meal since Dickens died.  You might think that all landladies died with Mrs. Lirriper.”

“Very ungrateful of him,” said Titania.  “I’m sure I couldn’t ask for better potatoes, or a nicer hostess, than I’ve found in Brooklyn.”

“Well, well,” said Roger.  “You are right, of course.  And yet something went out of the world when Victorian England vanished, something that will never come again.  Take the stagecoach drivers, for instance.  What a racy, human type they were!  And what have we now to compare with them?  Subway guards?  Taxicab drivers?  I have hung around many an all-night lunchroom to hear the chauffeurs talk.  But they are too much on the move, you can’t get the picture of them the way Dickens could of his types.  You can’t catch that sort of thing in a snapshot, you know:  you have to have a time exposure.  I’ll grant you, though, that lunchroom food is mighty good.  The best place to eat is always a counter where the chauffeurs congregate.  They get awfully hungry, you see, driving round in the cold, and when they want food they want it hot and tasty.  There’s a little hash-alley called Frank’s, up on Broadway near 77th, where I guess the ham and eggs and French fried is as good as any Mr. Pickwick ever ate.”