But, while impoverished scholars have a weakness for second-hand literature, the big circulating libraries, on the other hand, are the great weakness of their wives and daughters, cousins and aunts. About these vast emporiums ladies of all ages flit all day like bees around a hive. Ladies would appear but seldom to buy books; they always hire. A morning spent at Smith's or Mudie's is curiously instructive as to the methods pursued by them in the search for light literature. The library counters then usually exhibit a double or treble row of women, with a very faint sprinkling of elderly men, all waiting, in varying degrees of patience, for their turn. Several of the ladies have considerately brought pet dogs, which they hold by the chain, the dear little animals being meanwhile thoughtfully engaged in entangling themselves round all the other customers' legs. "Have you some nice, new, _good_ novels?" asks a plaintive materfamilias, with a stolid-faced bevy of half-grown up daughters behind her, just out of the schoolroom. "Something, you know, that is quite fit for young girls; no problems, or pasts, or anything of that kind." The young man looks nonplussed. "We have Miss Yonge's latest," he suggests: "or Maeterlinck's _Life of the Bee_, just out--" "Oh! Maeterlinck is so very Maeterlincky, you know. And do you think that he's always quite _safe_?" "I assure you, madam, you will find him so in this instance," urges the young man. "Well, bees are, of course, interesting; and very nice and proper too, I'm sure; but I myself prefer the lives of celebrated people. Mr. Gladstone's Life, for instance? Oh, it's not _written_ yet, is it? What a bore! Well, I suppose it's no use our waiting.... And Miss Yonge, no, thank you.... You see, she died last year, and then she's so very Early-Victorian!" The man, seeing that it is to be a long business, gives up the problem for the moment, and moves in despair to the next customer. Now it is the turn of a little old lady, with a deprecating manner: "I want something nice, and not too clever," she murmured: "something I can _knit_ over, you know, after breakfast. No, _not_ religious, I somehow find that's too depressing. How would this do?" as she picked up a volume that was flaunting itself on the counter, "_Sir Richard Calmady_. I think I'd like that, if it's at all like _Sir George Tressady_." "No, madam, not at all the sort of thing for you," the young man hastened to say with an air of authority. "Allow _me_: Try _this_; this is a very safe book, Miss Edna Lyall's latest, _In Spite of All_. This (confidentially) is an author we always recommend." Now there bustled up a young-old lady with fuzzy hair and a sailor hat: "I want all the most go-ahead novels you have," she cried: "somethin' really startling, somethin' that'll keep you awake and excited all through."