The reception area [at the college] turned out to be very small indeed. It was really only a conference room furnished with one long table. A few dubious looking refreshments resided on one end and Cousin Bartholomew lounged at the other.

“University food’s rubbish,” he said, glowering at the tray across from him and chewing the end of a pencil with a vengeance, as if to proclaim it more edible than said ‘rubbish.’ “Hallo, Dad. Barney.”

“I’ll just go find Messr. Clyde, shall I?” Uncle Baxter patted Barney briskly on the back. “Do catch up in the meantime, boys; I know it’s been a while.”

The door closed behind his tousled silvery pate, and the two young men were left staring at one another.

“I take it you didn’t mention our meeting yesterday,” Bartholomew said at last. “What! Afraid he’d find out about your tantrum?”

“Barty, I’m really—”

“—wasting my time? Yes. I’d offer you a sandwich, but that would be wasting both your time and appetite. Tea?” He sprang out of the chair suddenly and strolled around the table to the tea tray.

“Bartholomew.”

“Water’s tepid, if that,” his cousin sniffed, fiddling with the creamer jug.

“Bartholomew.”

“Good heavens. Cream bordering on sour.”

“Bartholomew…”

“Hum. Best check the sugar, too. Um.” He crunched a sugar lump ponderously. “Yes. Still good. Then again, better try another one. I mean, sugar can’t go bad, allegedly, but a college setting’s enough to sour anything—”

“BARTHOLOMEW BARTEMIUS BAXTER BLUNT THE THIRD!”

The man in question choked on his third lump of sugar. His red-crested brow furrowed above a pair of violently watering eyes. “Lower your voice, cousin!” he wheezed furiously. “’Bartholomew’ on its own is bad enough to threaten the healthy state of one’s social life. But the full name? Try feeding a pig arsenic—it has that sort of effect on friendships. You can’t just tell people your old man hung “Bartholomew Bartemius Baxter Blunt” about your neck and expect them to continue in company with you, even if it happened before you were old enough to argue the matter. Tacking on ‘the third’ only convinces them that some long-standing multi-generational lunacy resides in the family. And I don’t care if there’s nobody else right here—this place is cheaply built. Walls like parchment-paper. Someone who knows me might be walking by and hear you.” He peered curiously into the sugar bowl again. “I say, I didn’t think sugar would taste so good on its own. Have you tried it?”

“Did you say ‘social life’? The last time I saw you, you were hobnobbing rather closely with some dusty old volumes—but even if one of them does happen to be lying about these hallowed hallways, I think you’re safe. Books don’t commonly have ears.”

Bartholomew chose to ignore this jab. He was better occupied with a fourth piece of sugar.

Here's a bit of what I wrote yesterday:

The door jangled sleepily in his wake. He could almost smell the dust on the air—dust mixed with mildew and the smell of old paper and leather. There was nobody behind the counter—if that flat surface surrounded by a heap of books was the counter, that is. There didn’t seem to be a bell, sign, or register—nothing besides books and fragments of broken books filling the sagging frames of bookshelves and most of the floor space.

“Hullo?” he called tentatively, staggering a little over a pile of paper and broken bindings that had seemingly jumped unannounced into his path. He brushed against a bookshelf trying to avoid colliding with another pile and stirred up a cloud of dust. “I say, hull…oootish!” He sneezed.

“Over here,” came a muffled response at last. “Behind the shelf.”

“There are at least fifty shelves,” Barney replied exasperatedly. “To say nothing of the piles of books that one can't tell whether they are shelves or not.” No further information was volunteered, so he sighed and continued. “What do you mean, 'behind the shelf'? Which shelf, exactly?”

“Find the window, you dolt. The shelf in front of the window. Or at least I presume that's why you came in here—because you saw me in the window.”

Barney located the window with more difficulty than one would think and began to wade towards it. “This is worse than when Uncle Baxter took us on that excursion to the swamp,” he complained. He stubbed his toe on a shelf and bashed his head against the wall. “Ouch!”

“See, you only found that experience painful because you fell in. Some of us are coordinated, and swamps are quite enjoyable things.”

“You? Find the swamp enjoyable? Ha! If I remember rightly, the swamp found you quite enjoyable, a fact you did not exactly appreciate. You were scratching mosquito bites for days—and complaining.”

“Well, there are those who are just sweeter by nature, and the skeeters know it. But enough about me. Are you going to get here before tomorrow? We close at dark—no money for lamp oil, you know.”

Barney rounded a bookshelf, squeezing himself between it and a corner of the window seat, and nearly fell at the feet of the lad reading in the window, a ginger-haired youth with his face shoved behind an enormous tome. He had a quill clenched between his teeth which steadily dripped ink all over the grey smock he wore (presumably for the same reason). He did not bother to look up.

“I didn’t expect to see you here,” Barney said at last.

“I’d think you’d be used to it by now,” pontificated the shock of red hair—all that was visible behind the book. The quill dropped unheeded into his lap, where it dribbled gleefully all over a scrap of torn paper. “I am becoming too predictably unpredictable. I must remember to do something completely predictable sometime, so as to completely catch you off guard.”