XIV

From that day one of his main objects in life was to acquire books. He
had little pride as a rule, in spite of all his sensitiveness, and when
books were concerned he had none at all. Having discovered that a friend
of the family, who until then had been regarded with supreme
indifference, held some sort of clerical position in a publishing house,
his devotion to Uncle Lander suddenly became effusive and he begged so
shamelessly and so successfully that at last his father had to
intercede. Out of a half-hour sermon on things that must not be done,
Keith grasped only that, as usual, he could not do what he wanted. Money
was still a mystery to him, and he never suspected that Uncle Lander
would have to pay his employers for every book taken out of the stock.

The sole check to his passion sprang logically from the very fervor of
that passion: a book being such a precious object to himself, he could
not dream of taking it away from somebody else. As in a flash the true
spirit of his father's objection to borrowed books was revealed to him.
That objection became his own and stuck to him through life: if he liked
a borrowed book, the inescapable duty of returning it was too painful to
be faced, and if he didn't like it, there was no reason for borrowing
it. Books became sacred things to him, to be cherished and protected as
nothing else. The loss of one was a catastrophe.

Soon he had a small library of his own, kept on a shelf in the huge
wardrobe that stood in the vestibule leading to the parlour. Made up at
first of odds and ends bearing no real relation to his desire for
reading matter, it gradually acquired a certain homogeneity reflecting