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of paper, on addresses of all sorts, and in a conscious effort to win back memories of her grandfather sitting on the verandah of a stone house in a deep garden full of flame trees and lilies. “Catherine! The way to learn a language is to breathe it in. Soak it up! Live it!”
    Faced with an interview to judge her ability to translate at speed from English, French, and Italian into Portuguese and back again, she sat up all night, having cleared away the day’s disorder of dirty dishes and scraps of food and grease—luckily the power came on again at about ten in the evening—rereading the novel she had herself translated, reliving in her mind walks and talks, meals with her grandfather. By the morning her immersion in the other language was such that if she had jostled someone in the street she would have apologised in Portuguese.

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    But all this, and her anxious choosing of a suitable dress for the interview, her worry over her hair—really very suburban, and she knew it—her inner adjustments of manner away from being Mrs. Michael Brown, all turned out to be unnecessary. As she walked into the office of a Mr. Charlie Cooper, he said, “Mrs. Brown? Thank God you have been able to find the time. You are starting today, aren’t you—good.”
    She had been described by the friend and intermediary, Alan Post, as the formidably highly equipped woman-with-a-family, who had been pressed into abandoning the said family, and into relieving the embarrassment of this great international organisation. From the first she was in a special category, the amateur, made to feel as if she were doing a favour.
    It appeared that of the four replacements to the original team of four skilled translators, two had again fallen out for family and health reasons.
    “This whole thing is jinxed, it is doomed!” cried Charlie Cooper, “but I am sure our luck will turn with you.” And he hurried her along a wide passage that gleamed and shone and was many-windowed, and into a lift that was large and had a picture of a dark-skinned woman smiling agreeably while picking coffee beans off avery green bush, and along another impressive passage, passing a committee on butter, and another on sugar; and into a very large long room, in the middle of which was a gleaming oval table of the size which makes one think at once of the factory there must be somewhere whose whole business it is to create immense tables, long or oval or round, for the use of international conferences.
    A committee was in progress. The table had on it glasses of water, pencils, stylos, sheets of scribbled and doodled paper. But the chairs were awry, and empty; the delegates were all downstairs drinking—presumably coffee—and engaged in that most common of contemporary conversations, the one about the total inefficiency and incompetence of any public service or occasion, which conversation will of course get more frequent and more ill-tempered as the numbers of people everywhere multiply and the services, by the law of inertia, fall even further behind demand. Only now did the tactful Charlie Cooper tell Kate that she had been expected that morning at ten, to start her day with the beginning of the first session, and not at twelve, which it now was—but of course, she had not been told, it was not her fault, things were always thus—yes, he could believe it, she had been told to “drop in some time that morning”?—typical!
    But could she start now, yes, this very moment, or rather, when the delegates had returned from their enforced coffee break—there was on duty that day, apart from herself, precisely one properly qualified simultaneous translator for the Portuguese language.
    Kate had thought this would be a preliminary interview, and had told various interested people that she would be back to arrange food for lunch and attend to the laundry. But if she could go and make a telephone call then … Charlie Cooper’s face became agonised—the delegates