There is no difference in the quality nor the intensity of the emotion. I am, I believe, tone deaf, and I have a perfectly deplorable taste in music. But by some music I am very profoundly moved. Sometimes it is by music with which I have personal associations--marches and dance tunes, and that, of course, strictly speaking, should not count. The emotion is inspired not by the music, but the scene evoked through it. But quite often it is by some catchy affair heard for the first time in a restaurant or across a street. I listen to it with enraptured pleasure, thrilled by the tricks and twiddles and syncopations, and I am quite prepared to accept my companion’s assurance that it is a cheap, vulgar, sentimental thing. “I do not care,” I say, “these things are relative. It moves me, therefore to me it is a masterpiece.” Everyone has, I suppose, at one time or another paused to examine the windows of the type of bookshop that abounds in certain streets in the west end of London. They are curiously alike, these places. One side of the window is stocked with articles the nature of which it is unnecessary to particularise, and the other side with such literature as the management appears to consider most likely to encourage the purchase of them. The selection of that literature does not greatly alter with the passage of time. There are no spring and autumn seasons in these bookshops. Occasionally some new novel finds a home there; occasionally a callous or unenterprising publisher allows some fading favourite to pass from circulation. But there is, on the whole, a commendable fidelity to old friends. Were you to be transplanted miraculously to the Piccadilly of 1926 you would find of the volumes that to-day adorn so proudly the front tables of Mr Hatchards’ bookshop scarcely half a dozen, but the appearance of the questionable shop window will be probably no more altered by 1930 than it has been since 1910. Victoria Cross will be there, and Elinor Glyn, and the confessions of the retiring aristocrat who is content to sign himself “A Peer.” There will be the same French classics, _Droll Stories_, _Madame Bovary_, _A Woman’s Life_. The alliterative titles of Gertie de S. Wentworth James will show against a circle of entwining arms. Between _Bel-ami_ and _Anna Lombard_ will be spread enticingly _A Bed of Roses_. The public, whatever it be, that patronises such establishments knows its mind. They are good hat-racks, these bookshops, for ridicule, for denunciation, for satire. They can make a sermon for the priest, a middle for the journalist, a simile for the politician. For the student of life they are a subject of speculative curiosity.