series."

With that he waved his hand to an assistant and dismissed
me from his thought.

In other words, he had divined me in a moment. There was
no use in my having bought a sage-green fedora in Broadway,
and a sporting tie done up crosswise with spots as big
as nickels. These little adornments can never hide the
soul within. I was a professor, and he knew it, or at
least, as part of his business, he could divine it on
the instant.

The sales manager of the biggest book store for ten blocks
cannot be deceived in a customer. And he knew, of course,
that, as a professor, I was no good. I had come to the
store, as all professors go to book stores, just as a
wasp comes to an open jar of marmalade. He knew that I
would hang around for two hours, get in everybody's way,
and finally buy a cheap reprint of the Dialogues of Plato,
or the Prose Works of John Milton, or Locke on the Human
Understanding, or some trash of that sort.

As for real taste in literature--the ability to appreciate
at its worth a dollar-fifty novel of last month, in a
spring jacket with a tango frontispiece--I hadn't got it
and he knew it.

He despised me, of course. But it is a maxim of the book
business that a professor standing up in a corner buried