street.

"Where are you going? To the club?" Flamel asked; adding, as the
younger man assented, "Why not come to my studio instead? You'll
see one bore instead of twenty."

The apartment which Flamel described as his studio showed, as its
one claim to the designation, a perennially empty easel; the rest
of its space being filled with the evidences of a comprehensive
dilettanteism. Against this background, which seemed the visible
expression of its owner's intellectual tolerance, rows of fine
books detached themselves with a prominence, showing them to be
Flamel's chief care.

Glennard glanced with the eye of untrained curiosity at the lines
of warm-toned morocco, while his host busied himself with the
uncorking of Apollinaris.

"You've got a splendid lot of books," he said.

"They're fairly decent," the other assented, in the curt tone of
the collector who will not talk of his passion for fear of talking
of nothing else; then, as Glennard, his hands in his pockets,
began to stroll perfunctorily down the long line of bookcases--
"Some men," Flamel irresistibly added, "think of books merely as
tools, others as tooling. I'm between the two; there are days
when I use them as scenery, other days when I want them as
society; so that, as you see, my library represents a makeshift
compromise between looks and brains, and the collectors look down
on me almost as much as the students."