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passed from this, with discreet encouragement, to satisfaction at evading what others appeared to find it so difficult to evade, and then, finally, to a feeling of futility and anti-climax. A man who made no enemies, he began to think, must be a colourless sort of man, perhaps with few friendships or at least no deep ones, the sort of man about whom nobodycared much one way or the other. He did not wish to be that sort of man.
    He remembered one time, long ago, hearing two typists discussing him, and one saying, ‘What I like about Mr. Manson, he’s such a
gentle
man,’ and the other agreeing. He had looked in the mirror and said to himself ‘Hear that?’ and pulled a face, for it was at a time when Prue was small and he was on the way to becoming an expert at face-pulling to entertain her. He would practise new faces in secret, the way other men might buy toys or make model aircraft. But even then, in his thirties, he had felt that gentleness, though undoubtedly an asset, was not a glamorous quality, would not stir up any man’s life into wild excesses of vice. Not that he wished for such things, as it happened, but it would have been nice to feel that they were immediately accessible, had he so wished: that his very nature and aspect did not preclude them without an element of choice. If he looked in the mirror again he would see the same conventional reflection—a gentle, cultured Englishman, with dark, greying hair and a face that managed to be aesthetically pleasing without being remarkable in any way. A quiet, attractive family man, well-groomed and well-dressed, to whom no one could take exception, but who had given up making faces to amuse his daughter now because he, and she, were both fifteen years older.
    ‘I think I’ve found you a secretary,’ Monica said. He did not hear her. There seemed to be a faint buzzing in the room; he went on reading the same paragraph over and over again. She cleared her throat sharply and he looked up.
    ‘I think I’ve found you a secretary.’ She smiled. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt you when you’re so busy but I think I’ve really found one who might do. If you like the sound of her I thought we could interview her next week. She’s in publishing already, she has three years’ experience with Farrer, but she wants a change and promotion. She’s only twenty-three, that’s the snag, but at least she won’t be set in her ways, andshe’d probably stay till she gets married at least.’ The unspoken ‘like me’ hung coyly in the air. ‘Here’s her letter.’
    ‘Well, I’ve no objection to poaching from Farrer,’ said Manson. ‘They’re probably paying her the minimum anyway.’ He read the letter. Nothing much emerged in the way of personality: a list of facts, concisely presented, a carefully worded paragraph on her reasons for moving as if to stress proper ambition without a shadow of disloyalty. She might as well have written ‘I am not a fly-by-night but I do want to get on’. Perhaps if anything the letter sounded just a shade smug to him. He could imagine her being very pleased with herself when she had completed it; it read as though it was the outcome of several drafts and had wound up as the perfect paradigm of a business letter, fit for use in schools. Not a word, not a comma out of place. He looked at the signature, in its neat, sharp handwriting. Well done, Sarah Francis, he thought. ‘She seems very efficient,’ he said.
    ‘Yes.’ Monica beamed as if personally responsible. ‘That’s what I thought. And that’s unusual in such a young girl.’
    He felt suddenly that this applicant was going to be his secretary, had been divinely chosen by Monica, and there was nothing he could do about it; the whole matter had been taken out of his hands and the interview she was proposing was a mere formality or, at most, a chance for
Monica
to make sure
she
approved.
    ‘Shorthand one hundred and twenty, typing one hundred,’ he read out. ‘Is that