“Wait and see,” she taunted.  “So you won’t let me send you books?” she questioned after a pause.

“No.”

“No, I thank you,” she prompted.

“No, I thank you,” he amended.  “I’m an uncouth sort of person, but I meant the ‘thank you.’”

“Of course you did.  And uncouthness is the last thing in the world you could be accused of.  That’s the wonder of it....  No; I don’t suppose it really is.  It’s birth.”

“If it’s anything, it’s training.  My father was a stickler for forms, in spite of being a sort of hobo.”

“Well, forms make the game, very largely.  You won’t find them essentially different when you go out into the—­I forgot again.  That kind of prophecy annoys you, doesn’t it?  There is one book I’m going to send you, though, which you can’t refuse.  Nobody can refuse it.  It isn’t done.”

“What is that?”

Her answer surprised him.  “The Bible.”

“Are you religious?  Of course, a butterfly should be, shouldn’t she? should believe in the release of the soul from its chrysalis—­the butterfly’s immortality.  Yet I wouldn’t have suspected you of a leaning in that direction.”

“Oh, religion!” Her tone set aside the subject as insusceptible of sufficient or satisfactory answer.  “I go through the forms,” she added, a little disdainfully.  “As to what I believe and do—­which is what one’s own religion is—­why, I assume that if the game is worth playing at all, there must be a Judge and Maker of the Rules.  As far as I understand them, I follow them.”

“You have a sort of religious feeling for success, though, haven’t you?” he reminded her slyly.

“Not at all.  Just human, common sense.”

“But your creed as you’ve just given it, the rules of the game and that; that’s precisely the Bible formula, I believe.”

“How do you know?” she caught him up.  “You haven’t a Bible in the place, so far as I’ve noticed.”

“No; I haven’t.”

“You should have.”

“Probably.  But I can’t, somehow, adjust myself to that advice as coming from you.”

“Because you don’t understand what I’m getting at.  It isn’t religious advice.”

“Then what is it?”

“Literary, purely.  You’re going to write, some day.  Oh, don’t look doubtful!  That’s foreordained.  It doesn’t take a seeress to prophesy that.  And the Bible is the one book that a writer ought to read every day.  Isaiah, Psalms, Proverbs.  Pretty much all the Old Testament, and a lot of the New.  It has grown into our intellectual life until its phrases and catchwords are full of overtones and sub-meanings.  You’ve got to have it in your business; your coming business, I mean.  I know what I’m talking about, Mr. Errol Banneker—­moi qui parle.  They offered me an instructorship in Literature when I graduated.  I even threatened to take it, just for a joke on Dad. Now, will you be good and accept my fully explained and diagrammed Bible without fearing that I have designs on your soul?”