A Man's World

through the kindness of Professor Meer. The work was to catalogue, and edit a descriptive bibliography of a large collection of early

ever some cold water was thrown on my glee by Norman Benson. He was my one friend in the library

to accept it?"

one. "I hardly hoped for such luck, at lea

and sitting on my desk. "What earthly good," he went on, "do you think it

r the question. And, realizing suddenly that I had not consi

t that a good case of this kind could be made for the study of medieval literature. I don't say it's absolutely useless. But relatively it seems-well-uninteresting to me. It's in the same class as astronomy. You could study the stars till you were black in the face and you wou

y specialty ruf

to do? Social-Settlement-ology?

y any attention to it. He got off the table and paced up and down like a caged beast, as

en men and books, between human thought that is alive and the kind that's been preserved like mummies. Why? I ask. What is there in these old books which can compare in interest to the life about us. Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more dramatic, more comic, more tragic, more beautiful. Even Shelley never wrote a l

as still sore from the wounds of my childish endeavor to comprehend God. I was afraid of life. I was afraid of the little child sucking the apple core on Stanton Street. The life about me, of which Be

the patent had made a fortune for both of them. When the first instalment of royalties had come in, Perry had stopped stirring the kettle of raspberry preserves and had not done a stroke of work since. At forty he had built a "mansion" in the city and had gone in for p

momentary he was decidedly penurious about it after the first outlay. That, I suppose, is why I, instead of a recognized authority, was

there had never been any children. These quarters were given to me. There was a private entrance,

n, he never invited me to his bachelor parties-the reverberations of which sometimes shook me out of sleep. Once every six months or so he

being few, the room was gloomy. I had often to use artificial light. At five I went for an hour's walk in the park. At least this was my theory. But the least inclemency was an excuse to take some manuscript up to my room, to my shaded lamp and open fire. The daily eight hours on the catalogue was only a beg