Library by night has a strange rumbling to it, accompanied mostly by chairs scraping, the click of keyboards, bags opening and closing, and sneaky phone calls being whispered like the one I just received telling me we have won a football match.

I was just knitting and puzzling my way through a digitized version of Irene Baird’s novel John. (a pastoral romance, a kind of breathless Jane Austen in a BC lake/boat/postman setting). I am glad there was a digital version as I would not like to have put aside drafty time in rare books (where the only hard copy is) to discover this was what awaited me.

Something resonant in this paragraph:

“Those were the sort, John would reflect after an evening spent in their presence, who had never discovered how good life was for its own sake. Where you spent it was not half the urgent matter that most people supposed. ”

And downright peculiar in the final line of this one:

“The sort of man, John I can’t imagine un-faithful. There are some men like that — rare ones perhaps — to whom disloyalty, once they marry, never seems to occur. That’s how he is, John; that’s how he’ll always be and yet — ”

She broke off and began nervously to twist up the hairs on John’s cuff. …”