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arriving in Geneva and with working for the League and she hoped that, when there, he might guide her in her work and watch over her a little.
    â€˜So you should be elated,’ he said, ‘Geneva’s the place to be. And I should be proudly happy to be your guide, dear Edith, and to watch over you.’
    Having, by her youthful admission, delivered herself into his care, she then let the train rock their bodies together, and she realised that the body also asked questions, and Ambrose kissed her, and as she played with his kiss, and gave herself to the kiss, she could not tell whether there was a difference to the kiss of a man who inhabited a place at or near the border, knowing moreabout conversation than she did about kissing. If, indeed, he did. As she looked over his shoulder, she wondered what a lady should do to give pleasure to a gentleman who inhabited this border place. And did she not believe in the ending of national borders? She returned then to the mild swoon of another kiss and, just before she entered the delight of the kiss, his body against hers, the swelling of his groin gave her the message that he belonged to the domain of men and women, definitely in that domain.

Presenting One’s Credentials

    On her first day, Edith set out for the Palais Wilson at 7.45 a.m. She was not dressed in her new yellow wool suit with the belt. She wore her familiar, but dapper, fine grey wool suit with black braid trim from her Melbourne days. She wanted not to have to worry about the feel and sensation of unacquainted clothing, especially the colour yellow, and, even though it sounded schoolgirlish, she did not want to appear ‘all new’. Dress so as to pass unobserved. She had, though, heightened her make-up because of the grey.
    She carried a parcel of personal things for her office.
    Walking along the quai Woodrow Wilson to the Palais, she let a rush of exhilaration pass through her as she looked across Lac Léman but she did not linger and nor did she reveal her exhilaration to the passing Genevans.
    She arrived at what she took to be the front door of the Palais, the entrance facing Lac Léman, but was directed to go around to the other side of the Palais by a man inside the building, gesticulating from behind the glass door.
    That is, she thought, one incontrovertible error of the League. The front door should be where people expect a front door to be, facing a natural scenic attraction. Maybe the League of Nations had a higher order of priorities which could not acknowledge natural scenic attractions. Perhaps they had not beheld the lake. She believed in the Aesthetic of the Outside of the Inside. That the Outside determined the Inside, was part of the Inside. She wondered whether that should go on to herlist of suggestions for improving the League which she felt a good officer with initiative and drive would be expected to have upon joining. She then thought that her saying, ‘The front door should be where people expect a front door to be,’ sounded like something Alice might have said to the Queen. And what would the Queen have replied? ‘Sometimes in this world,’ the Queen would have said, ‘it is better to look both ways — hence to have two fronts and no back.’
    Edith passed two dogs playing at the ‘front door’. On the steps, she had a momentary but elusive and extraneous thought about carnal love, something from a joke she remembered from the non-members’ bar at Parliament House in Melbourne about the ‘two-backed beast’, which she had, embarrassedly, asked John Latham to explain. He had not, though, made fun of her in his explanation.
    She found herself standing, at last, in the foyer of the Palais Wilson, in the foyer of the League of Nations, in Geneva. Here, in the foyer of the League of Nations, Edith Campbell Berry stands.
    This, she thought, is the very centre of the political universe. ‘But only if you think the world