Stephen stepped into the bookstore and looked around, hoping that he would find someone who would commit for sure to the choir. There were only four days left, and he'd only gotten a few definite yeses and a lot of maybes. Singers were notoriously unreliable.

There were a couple of people in the shop, but they all seemed to be absorbed in books.

He walked up to the magazine rack; the latest issue of Harper's Monthly had come in, with the next-to-last installment of Trilby. He picked it up and started perusing it.

Zechariah was minding his own business also known as judging everyone else by their book choices, hate-reading Charles Dickens, when some pompous prick who had existed in his world for all of three minutes picked up the latest Harper’s Monthly. The one with that hogwash about Jewish hypnotists and ‘bohemian’ life when most of the Romani were not even from Bohemia!

He tried to will the treacherous magazine out of the man’s hands by sheer force of side-eye.

Stephen became aware that someone was watching him. He looked up from the magazine to see a man glaring at him with a disgusted look.

"Excuse me?" he said politely. Maybe despite the man's rudeness, he would agree to join the choir...

“I canceled my Harper’s subscription months ago,” he huffed. “Am I missing anything?”

As though he had not hate-read each one at the private library since.

"Oh, did you cancel before Trilby started being serialized?" Stephen replied. "It's delightful and outlandish. I'm surprised you haven't heard any talk about it."

He showed the man the page he was looking at, which featured an illustration.

Zechariah made a sour face.

“What do you enjoy about this?” he asked with a derisive look.

"It's, hm, a scandalous story about the art and music world," Stephen said. "I'm a musician, as you may not know. I will admit the story is a tad low-brow, but I enjoy a little bit of less cerebral entertainment once in a while."

He looked the man up and down. "Do you enjoy singing?"

[CW: homophobic term]

Zechariah scrunched his nose, already unfavorably inclined toward him what with his terrible taste in books!

Then this idiot looked him up and down. Zechariah blinked, then frowned. Sodomite? He looked a little old for him, but-...

He liked Trilby, for goodness’ sake!

“What? Yes,” he answered absently with a frown.

A possible target! 

"Are you busy this Thursday night?" he said quickly. "The Whitby Choral Society is meeting for the first time. You sound like a tenor, which is excellent; we don't have many tenors."

He frowned deeper, but answered reflexively:

“Baritone.”