The little room in which he found himself was plainly the bookseller’s sanctum, and contained his own private library.  Gilbert browsed along the shelves curiously.  The volumes were mostly shabby and bruised; they had evidently been picked up one by one in the humble mangers of the second-hand vendor.  They all showed marks of use and meditation.

Mr. Gilbert had the earnest mania for self-improvement which has blighted the lives of so many young men—­a passion which, however, is commendable in those who feel themselves handicapped by a college career and a jewelled fraternity emblem.  It suddenly struck him that it would be valuable to make a list of some of the titles in Mifflin’s collection, as a suggestion for his own reading.  He took out a memorandum book and began jotting down the books that intrigued him: 

     The Works of Francis Thompson (3 vols.)
     Social History of Smoking:  Apperson
     The Path to Rome:  Hilaire Belloc
     The Book of Tea:  Kakuzo
     Happy Thoughts:  F. C. Burnand
     Dr. Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations
     Margaret Ogilvy:  J. M. Barrie
     Confessions of a Thug:  Taylor
     General Catalogue of the Oxford University Press
     The Morning’s War:  C. E. Montague
     The Spirit of Man:  edited by Robert Bridges
     The Romany Rye:  Borrow
     Poems:  Emily Dickinson
     Poems:  George Herbert
     The House of Cobwebs:  George Gissing

So far had he got, and was beginning to say to himself that in the interests of Advertising (who is a jealous mistress) he had best call a halt, when his host entered the room, his small face eager, his eyes blue points of light.

“Come, Mr. Aubrey Gilbert!” he cried.  “The meal is set.  You want to wash your hands?  Make haste then, this way:  the eggs are hot and waiting.”

The dining-room into which the guest was conducted betrayed a feminine touch not visible in the smoke-dimmed quarters of shop and cabinet.  At the windows were curtains of laughing chintz and pots of pink geranium.  The table, under a drop-light in a flame-coloured silk screen, was brightly set with silver and blue china.  In a cut-glass decanter sparkled a ruddy brown wine.  The edged tool of Advertising felt his spirits undergo an unmistakable upward pressure.

“Sit down, sir,” said Mifflin, lifting the roof of a platter.  “These are eggs Samuel Butler, an invention of my own, the apotheosis of hen fruit.”

Gilbert greeted the invention with applause.  An Egg Samuel Butler, for the notebook of housewives, may be summarized as a pyramid, based upon toast, whereof the chief masonries are a flake of bacon, an egg poached to firmness, a wreath of mushrooms, a cap-sheaf of red peppers; the whole dribbled with a warm pink sauce of which the inventor retains the secret.  To this the bookseller chef added fried potatoes from another dish, and poured for his guest a glass of wine.