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in the letter test, but the messages sent must have been very simple if they were really read: telepathy is an uncertain means of communication even in the most favourable circumstances.
    ‘When I was born,’ Sapphire went on, ‘they gave me the name I had in their dream, and I’ll always keep that name. A man, you see, is given a new name when he becomes a father, but a woman never changes hers, though she may change her nickname as often as she pleases.’
    ‘Sapphire, what
is
your real name? You haven’t yet told me.’
    In her confusion she upset the coffee-cup.
    The Interpreter, forgetting his part of studious impersonality, gave a shrill cry: ‘Sir, pray remember yourself! You are no longer in your own age. You could not have asked a more offensive question.’
    ‘I’m very, very sorry, though it’s your fault for not warning me. But why? What’s the reason?’
    ‘All names are secret,’ said Fig-bread earnestly. ‘Until I die only my parents, the Goddess, and the mother of my children will know what name I bear.’
    ‘In that case I can’t see the point of having one. Surely, the whole object of a name is to identify a person?’
    ‘We use a nickname for that purpose.’
    ‘But the name?’
    ‘That is the person himself, his private being which is publicly revealed only after death. We speak openly, for instance, of Cleopatra, but in her life time she had a nickname, or two or three even, now long forgotten. My name is kept secret so that no one can injure me by its use.’
    ‘Nonsense! If I said: “Fig-bread is a – is a –” well, if I said something unpleasant about you, everyone would know that it was you I meant, not your brother Starfish.’
    ‘If that were to happen, as I’m sure it won’t, I could at once change my nickname, and your arrows, as we say, would be left sticking in my sloughed skin. But if you knew my real name they would enter my heart and I should die of shame.’
    ‘How childish!’ I thought. ‘I might be back in the Bronze Age, or between the covers of Grimm’s
Fairy Tales.
I wonder whether these magicians have a racket of guessing people’s names and blackmailing them. Not Sapphire, of course, but I wouldn’t put it past Sally.’ I could not help laughing. Starfish asked me gravely what caused me so much pleasure.
    ‘Nothing much,’ I said, a little guiltily perhaps. ‘I was only – er – thinking of a fairy-tale character named Rumpelstiltskin, who challenged a princess to guess his name and then gave it away by mistake and stamped his foot so hard in rage that he broke through the floor and fell down into the cellar and killed himself.’ I added hastily: ‘A mythical character, you know, and it’s not really funny, of course, when a person falls through the floor into the cellar and breaks his neck, but you must excuse me: Rumpelstiltskin was a very unpleasant person in the story.’
    Everyone was looking very glum indeed, except Sally. Did I detect a slight twitch of her lip, a momentary gleam in her eye, which distinguished her from her solemn friends? I could not be quite sure.
    I saw I must skate rapidly over the broken ice. I turned to See-a-Bird, with whom I found it easiest to make conversation: ‘May I ask how you came by your nickname?’
    He was ready enough to tell me. ‘It happened like this. A woman named Bee-flight once sat on a porch with several young men, myself among them, teaching us the principles of counterpoint, when a servant happened to pass by with a child in her arms. Bee-flight put up her finger for silence, and asked: “Who sees a bird?” I waited, but when I found that no one else had understood, I answered quietly: “I see a bird.” “Off with you at once,” she said, “meanwhile we’ll have a break; I’ll finish when you return.” So I hurried after the woman, took the child from her and prescribed a cure. Then I returned and she continued her lesson.’
    ‘I don’t follow.’
    ‘Since no birds were to be