Love is a foolish thing judged by workaday standards, and the thoughts
and actions of lovers foolish beyond measure. But the workaday standard
is the wrong one, after all; for the utilitarian mind does but busy
itself with the trivial and transitory interests of life, behind which
looms the great and everlasting reality of the love of man and woman.
There is more significance in a nightingale's song in the hush of a
summer night than in all the wisdom of Solomon (who, by the way, was not
without his little experiences of the tender passion).

The janitor in the little glass box by the entrance to the library
inspected us and passed us on, with a silent benediction, to the lobby,
whence (when I had handed my stick to a bald-headed demigod and received
a talismanic disc in exchange) we entered the enormous rotunda of the
reading-room.

I have often thought that, if some lethal vapour of highly preservative
properties--such as formaldehyde, for instance--could be shed into the
atmosphere of this apartment, the entire and complete collection of
books and bookworms would be well worth preserving, for the
enlightenment of posterity, as a sort of anthropological appendix to the
main collection of the Museum. For, surely, nowhere else in the world
are so many strange and abnormal human beings gathered together in one
place. And a curious question that must have occurred to many observers
is: Whence do these singular creatures come, and whither do they go when
the very distinct-faced clock (adjusted to literary eye-sight) proclaims
closing time? The tragic-faced gentleman, for instance, with the
corkscrew ringlets that bob up and down like spiral springs as he walks?
Or the short, elderly gentleman in the black cassock and bowler hat, who
shatters your nerves by turning suddenly and revealing himself as a
middle-aged woman? Whither do they go? One never sees them elsewhere. Do