What if Gertrude should insist upon my removing myself to her apartment; would she accept Griselda? And how would my precious books be domiciled? How human they are, those books, even though silent! Always I have found them waiting whenever I returned from journeys, from summer visits, from the country, from anywhere. Their backs and bindings seem to shimmer and flash forth a stately greeting, to exhale that subtle fragrance of leather, ink, and paper that none but book-lovers know. They have developed a sense in me to perceive these things as no one else can perceive them. How delightful it has been to find them in their peaceful legions, arrayed and changeless, retaining the very marks and slips I have left in them, faithful servitors and friends! I take down the "Antigone" in the Cambridge Sophocles that faces me as I stand and open at random to the chorus: "Love, invincible love! who makest havoc of wealth, who keepest vigil on the soft cheek of the maiden;—no immortal can escape thee, nor any among men whose life is for a day; and he to whom thou hast come is mad." It is clear that Sophocles was no modern. Ah, me! I must tell Griselda at once, lest her Scotch probity should charge me with disingenuousness or evasion. I pressed a bell. I could not face Griselda in the kitchen which is her stronghold. I must summon her to mine. Griselda, with a heather-blue cap awry on her coarse gray hair, appeared at the door. "You called?" she demanded. "Yes, Griselda, I called. Come in; I wish to speak to you." Griselda has known me since I was seven and all my gravity counts for ever so little with her. So redolent is she of rich encrusted personality that she gives to my poor small apartment the air of an establishment. "You always call me, Mr. Randolph," she somewhat testily informed me, "just when I have my hands in the dough pan or when the pot is boiling over." "Which is it now?" I asked her, laughing somewhat ruefully. "Both," was her laconic answer. "Hurry back then," I told her. "What I wanted to say will keep." "Just like a man," muttered Griselda and left me without ceremony. The relief I felt was shameful. To face Griselda with news of a possible derangement of our lives required a courage, a girding up of one’s resolution to which at the moment I felt myself woefully unequal. There was Dibdin and his blessed archeological expedition. He had told me that there might be a berth for me as a sort of keeper of records and archives. If only he had started last week. In a mist of vision well known to daydreamers, I suddenly saw the trim shipshape steamer with holystoned decks, the glinting metal work, the opulent South-Pacific sun pouring down on lightly clad passengers lounging in deck chairs; girls in white lazily flirting with indolent men. What oceans of joy and ease were to be found in the world for those who knew how to take them!