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shut, so that they could not see what was inside. They heard something close, and water running.
    So they waited in the half-darkness, Miss Green changing her hold on her handbag every thirty seconds. She cast a glance towards the stairs, but there was nobody about. The whole building seemed deserted.
    When he came out again, he looked dispassionately at them.
    “What’s the matter?”
    “My friend has a——”
    “Pardon?”
    It was harsh, a protracted bark. She realized he was slightly deaf.
    “My friend has a bad tooth that ought to come out.”
    The dentist ran his hands through his pockets, took outa bunch of keys, worked the separate Yale key onto the ring, and slid them back into his trouser-pocket.
    “I don’t work on a Saturday,” he said gratingly. “My assistant isn’t here. She doesn’t come on Saturdays.”
    There was a short silence. There was no noise of traffic: only a very faraway sound of typewriters.
    He moved suddenly. “Which of you is it?”
    “My friend.” Katherine pointed.
    He inspected her with lowered head.
    “Are you in pain?”
    Miss Green nodded dumbly.
    “It’s very bad,” said Katherine desperately.
    The dentist searched through all his pockets, this time without finding anything. After a pause he turned his back on them.
    “Come in.”
    They followed him into the surgery. He indicated that Katherine should sit on a little straight-backed chair against the wall, next to an unlit gas fire. Miss Green drifted uncertainly towards the professional chair that was bolted to the floor in the middle of the room. Though Katherine wanted to support her, something kept them from speaking to each other: the very atmosphere separated them, surrounding Miss Green and placing her beyond any assistance. She was committed now. Katherine told herself it was all for the best.
    The surgery was as dingy as the passage outside, with the same sticky-looking, brown wainscoting. The carpet was red, blue, and green, the wallpaper dusty yellow. The chair faced the windows, the lower halves of which were boarded over, and the crooked shape of the drill hung high up by a cluster of frosted-glass lights.
    These the dentist switched on.
    “Will you sit in the chair?”
    Miss Green sat with her back to Katherine, nervously smoothing back a strand of hair: she shifted her shouldersonce or twice. Still holding her handbag, she carefully aligned her feet on the iron foot-rest. Then cautiously, almost suspiciously, she let her head lean back against the leather pads.
    The dentist went over to her and took her handbag away. “We don’t want that,” he said, as if in a remote corner of his brain he thought he was being funny. Then he came towards Katherine and lit the small gas fire at her feet with a bang. He had put on his white coat.
    “Now which tooth is giving pain?”
    “At the back—here——” Miss Green made inarticulate noises, a finger to her mouth. It seemed she had to tense her whole body to make her voice audible at all. The dentist bent over her, thrusting a mirror into her mouth, polishing it and looking again. Then he swung a little circular tray nearer his reach: on it, long, pointed instruments were laid out on a rack. Taking one, he bent over her, his own mouth slightly open. The elbows of his white coat were dirty.
    At length he announced: “There’s a lot of filling in it,” going across the room to a small cabinet of flat drawers. He returned with two tiny bits of metal rolling in his palm, and pulled down the drill, which had been folded high and remote, till it elongated like an insect’s leg. He began fitting a head into the drill.
    Miss Green spoke up in her taut, trembling voice:
    “Are you going to——”
    “Pardon?”
    He flicked on the drill with his foot and bent over her, knowing she had spoken.
    “You aren’t going to fill it, are you?”
    “Fill it? No.”
    The noise of the drill was insidious, a slack noise. There was a knot in the belt where it had broken