What if it is rubbish

He looks up for the first time. Behind the glasses his eyes are the colour of wet slate.

“It will be,” he says, kindly. “The first one is always rubbish. So is the first loaf and the first table and the first anything. You are not being asked for a good world. You are being asked for yours, on a Tuesday, with three people round it who will forgive the rubbish parts because they were there.”

He puts the book in your hand before you decide to take it, which is a salesman's trick and also, you suspect, true kindness.