place in which to lunch. He would ask Luke Sharper to join him in these perilous adventures, but Luke, in his sunny way, always refused.

   “Standoffish,” said Dobson. “Damn standoffish.”

   Luke Sharper represented the literary side of the business. He wrote all the advertisements. It was a rule of the firm that the advertisements should be

   scholarly, and that none should appear which did not contain at least one quotation from a classical language. Luke had also initiated the production of various booklets dealing with the materials and the methods of business. Nominally they were published; practically they were given away to any considerable purchaser. Some of these were written by Sharper himself. There was, for example, “The Romance of the Raspberry,” of which the

    Dilborough Gazette

   had said: “An elegant little brochure.” This was a great triumph. Even Diggle had to admit it. He had gone so far as to say that one of these fine days he would really have to think about making Sharper a partner. Other of the booklets were written in collaboration. For instance, in the composition of “Thoughts on Purity,” Sharper had the assistance of the Reverend Noel Atall.

   Luke kept a set of these booklets, bound in lilac morocco, in his room at the office. He loved them. He was proud of them. He regarded them as his children, and would sit for hours patting them gently. As the issue of each booklet was limited to one hundred copies, and it was customary to present one of them with each order of £20 or upwards, some of them were out of print, and difficult to obtain. This had been enough to start the collectors. In book catalogues there would sometimes appear a complete set of the Pentlove, Postlethwaite and Sharper booklets.

   And the price asked was gratifying. Luke fainted with joy the first time he saw this in the catalogue.

   At one time he had been in the habit of taking the booklet home in order to read it aloud to Mabel. He never did it now. It was hopeless. No insight. No sympathy. No appreciation. No anything. Blind and deaf to beauty. But she really was a good housekeeper.

   Luke bicycled from home to business every morning, and from business to home every evening. He enjoyed this immensely. Every morning as he rode off he said to himself: “Further from Mabel. Further and further from Mabel. Every day, in 

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