Half a hundred volumes in calf and nearly as many in Morocco dated from a youthful period when bindings mattered. College years were represented by a shabby row--Eschuylus, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Plutarch, Virgil and Horace. He had another Horace in immaculate tree calf. There was a group of early Italians; an imposing Dante; a Boccaccio, very rare, in a dated Florentine binding; a gleaning of French history, philosophy and _belles-lettres_ from Phillippe de Comines and Villon through Rabelais, Le Sage. Racine, Corneille and the others, to Bergson, Brieux, Rolland and Anatole France--with, of course, Flaubert, de Maupassant and a tattered series of _Les Trois Mousquetaires_ in seven volumes; some modern German playwrights, Hauptmann and Schnitzler among them; Ibsen in two languages; Strindberg in English; Gogol, Tchekov, Gorky, Dostoïevski, of the Russians (in that tongue); the modern psychologists--Forel, Havelock Ellis, Freud--and the complete works of William James in assorted shapes and bindings, gathered painstakingly through the years. Walt Whitman was there, Percy's _Reliques_, much of Galsworthy, Wells and Conrad, _The Story of Gosta Berling_, John Masefield, and a number of other recent poets and novelists. All his earthly treasures were on those shelves; there, until now, had his heart been also. He took from its shelf the rare old Boccaccio in the dated binding, tied a string around it, went down the corridor with it to the bathroom, filled the tub with cold water and tossed the book in. It bobbed up to the surface and floated there. He frowned--sat on the rim of the tub and watched it for ten minutes. It still floated. He brought it back to the studio then and set to work methodically making up parcels of books, using all the newspapers he could find. Into each parcel went a weight--the two ends of the brass book-holder on the desk, a bronze elephant, a heavy glass paper-weight, a pint bottle of ink, an old monkey-wrench, the two bricks from the fireplace that had served as andirons. He worked in a fever of determination. By two o'clock that afternoon he had completed a series of trips across the West Side and over various ferry lines, and his entire library lay at the bottom of the North River. From the last of these trips, feeling curiously light of heart, he returned to find a taxi waiting at the curb and in the studio Peter, hat, coat and one glove on, his suit-case on a chair, furiously writing a note. Peter finished, leaned back, mopped his forehead. “The books,” he murmured, waving a vague hand toward the shelves. “Where are they?” “I'm through with books. Going in for reality.” “Oh,” mused the eminent playwright--“a girl.” “Pete, you're wonderful.” “Chucking your whole past life?”