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surveyed the room in amazement. The cluttered, old- fashioned reception parlor, previously overwhelmed with mail, files and news clippings waiting to be sorted, had quickly yet brilliantly been transformed into a neat, orderly front office.
    On closer inspection I saw that the unopened mail was now carefully arranged into desk trays, labelled according to the week of the postmark. Honorine was still clacking away at the computer, but she must have felt my gaze now, so she looked up, blushed a little, and smiled. “Oh, it’s you!” she cried, pulling off her earphones.
    “What’s going on with the computer?” Jeremy asked.
    “Hope you don’t mind!” she answered, beaming. “But I got so bored watching TV. I was dying to go on the Internet.” She slid her chair aside so Jeremy could see the screen, and she demonstrated how she’d got it working again. “It’s just that the older software was fighting with the new. Mostly, it needed an upgrade, and a couple of other changes, to tell it which voice to listen to. You see?”
    Jeremy, suitably impressed, said, “Are you a programmer?”
    “No, not at all. Really it’s not that complicated,” she said modestly, “once you figure out how to get in and talk to it . . . See . . .” Honorine clacked away some more, whizzing through a demonstration of the new system, brisk and efficient. “Now it should be much faster for you.”
    I could see how hard she’d worked to impress us. “Honorine,” I said. “You’re incredible.”
    I gave Jeremy a meaningful look. “Well?” I said. “Who says a philosophy student isn’t marketable?”
    Excited, Honorine reached into her backpack lying beside her on the floor, and she pulled out a wad of papers and handed them to Jeremy. I peered over his shoulder. Page after page, in French and English, were recommendations from her teachers, saying that Honorine was scrupulous, hardworking, highly intelligent, as honorable as her name implied; and one teacher in particular made a point of saying that Honorine possessed an exceptional mind that was très subtil .
    Subtlety, evidently, is highly prized in a philosophy major. So is argument and persuasion. I read on. Honorine was versed in five languages, including Chinese. Jeremy, who’d initially taken her for a slacker, was profoundly impressed by both her accomplishments and sincerity.
    “You know,” Honorine suggested shyly, blushing a little, “perhaps . . . you think . . . I might be a suitable personal secretary here in London. Do you know of anyone who needs an assistant?” She turned beseechingly to me, obviously asking-without-asking for a job.
    “Well,” I admitted, “it’s true we need someone, but honestly we really don’t know how it will work or where things will lead . . .”
    Her face lit up with pleasure. “ Parfait! ” she cried.
    “Now, hold on,” Jeremy cautioned. “For one thing, you are vastly overqualified.”
    “It could just be temporary,” she assured him quickly, “only until I can find my true vocation.” If anybody else had put it that way, they might have sounded affected. But in Honorine’s voice, it seemed totally natural. “A little experience for me, without a long-term commitment for you.”
    I saw that it wasn’t really fair of me to leave Jeremy the role of “the heavy” in all this, what with Honorine’s face all alight with hope. So I added more cautiously, “I think we should see what your mother has to say. Why don’t we ask her when we go to visit this weekend? All three of us?”
    Honorine understood the bargain, and now she had a look of confident determination. “Yes, I will come with you. I know we can lay out a convincing case,” she declared. “ Bonne nuit! ” she said brightly, and scampered up to the guest bedroom.
    Jeremy waited until she was completely out of earshot; then he said, “Look, she’s a nice kid, and you handled her fine—you got her to agree to go back home. And I wouldn’t want to