Merlin Grainger was employed by the Moonlight Quill Bookshop, which you may have visited, just around the corner from the Ritz-Carlton on Forty-seventh Street. The Moonlight Quill is a very romantic little store, considered radical and admitted dark. It is spotted interiorly with red and orange posters of breathless exotic intent, and lit no less by the shiny reflecting bindings of special editions than by the great squat lamp of crimson satin that, lighted through all the day, swings overhead. It is truly a mellow bookshop. The words “Moonlight Quill” are worked over the door in a sort of turpentine embroidery. The windows seem always full of something that has passed the literary censors with little to spare; things with covers of deep orange bearing the titles on little white paper squares. And above all there is the smell of musk, which the clever Mr. Moonlight Quill has ordered to be sprinkled about—the smell half of a curiosity shop located in Dickens’ London and half of a coffee house on the shores of the Bosphorus.

From nine until five-thirty Merlin Grainger asked old ladies in black and young men with dark circles under their eyes if they “had seen that,” if they “cared for this fellow,” if they were interested in first editions. Did they buy novels with cowboys on the cover or books which gave Shakespeare's newest sonnets as dictated psychicly to Miss Sutton of South Dakota, he sniffed. As a matter of fact, his own taste ran to these latter, but as an employee at the Moonlight Quill he assumed for the working day the attitude of a disillusioned connoisseur.

After he had crawled over the window display to pull down the front shade at five-thirty every afternoon and said good-bye to Mr. Moonlight Quill and the lady clerk, Miss McCracken, and the lady stenographer, Miss Masters, he went home to the girl, Caroline. He did not eat supper with Caroline. It is very doubtful if Caroline would have considered eating off his bureau with the collar buttons dangerously near the cottage cheese and the ends of his necktie just missing his glass of milk—he had never asked her to eat with him. He ate alone.