“What do you make of that, Mr. Lenox?” he said. “A new translation.”

Lenox looked at the flyleaf. It was a thin, pebbled brown copy of The Praise of Folly by Erasmus, with an accompanying essay by one of the dons at Cambridge.

“Why not. May I take it?”

“Yes, of course. A poor bookseller I’d be if I said no,” said Mr. Chaffanbrass, placing his hands on his stomach and chortling.

“Thanks. I’ll be off, then.”

“Wrapped?”

“No,” said Lenox. “I need something to read straight away.”

“As you please,” said Mr. Chaffanbrass, taking a short stub of pencil from his breast pocket, opening a ledger, and making a small tick. “On your bill, then?”

“Graham will be around on the fifteenth.”

“No doubt of it. I set my calendar by him!”

He said this with satisfaction and then shook Lenox’s hand with great vigor, getting redder and redder and smiling furiously. After this brief ceremony he sat down again with a sigh and took his book up, groping with his other hand for a piece of toast on the stovetop. He would burn himself sooner or later. As far as Lenox could tell, the bookseller’s diet consisted of dozens of pieces of toast a day, each followed by a cup of milky coffee. Not the regimen recommended by the best physicians, perhaps, but it suited him.

On the street again, wet smoke clouded the air. The drizzle continued. It had been a beautiful late summer until then, but perhaps they were in for a wet September, he thought. It would be too bad. He looked back across the street toward his brightly lit house and saw his carriage waiting, the horses occasionally stamping their feet and the driver huddled underneath a thick black coat to keep the rain off, with only a pipe protruding out of the coat’s hood, its ember occasionally brightening to orange. Lenox dodged another cab and stepped into the carriage, and with a word to the driver he was on his way to meet his brother.