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serious and authoritative piece of work--in fact, that of a man WHO OUGHT TO HAVE BEEN MADE AN AMBASSADOR. Charles could even extract wry satisfaction from the thought that this lesson would be learned too late, for he was fairly certain now that it WOULD be too late. He was disappointed, but realized that the character he had built up for himself would not allow him to show it.
    Anyhow, it was his secret intention that the book should reveal rather startlingly that behind the façade he really did know his job, and it pleased him in rueful moods to invent comments he would most like his friends to make--not to him but amongst themselves. 'Really, you know, I've read worse. Well-documented--almost scholarly in spots. Didn't think Stuffy had it in him. The Observer gives it the big article--calls it "a footnote to history".' The phrase suited Charles's humility at the shrine of Clio, and also his own experience, derived from Gibbon, that footnotes were apt to be more interesting than the larger print. Not, of course, that there would be much of that sort of thing in it--just a few titbits here and there . . . mostly it would deal with the Balkan and Greco-Turkish problems, would record matters of which he had been both witness and student, such as that delineation of the Macedonian frontier that had made him (for what it was worth, and it appeared nowadays to be worth nothing) the greatest living authority on the ethnographic history of the Sanjak of Belar-Novo. (Which was the only unique distinction he ever claimed for himself, and often, like so much else that he said, it raised a laugh.)
    So he replied to Gerald, thinking of all this and trying not to seem portentous: 'I really ought to tackle the damn thing, Gerald. My career, though far from outstanding, hasn't been entirely uneventful. . . . Rome--Bucharest--Athens--I happened to be there at interesting times. And other places. Some day I'll tell you about them.'
    'I'm looking forward to the book.'
    'Oh yes, that would probably be easier for both of us. You could skip when you were bored.'
    Gerald gave his father an appraising glance which he turned into a smile. 'You know, dad, you're a bit prickly, aren't you?'
    'Prickly?' Now came the perfect cue. 'I've been called STUFFY in my time, but PRICKLY . . . Well . . .'
    But Gerald passed over 'stuffy' without interest. 'I mean, you put up your defences even when nobody's attacking.'
    'Do I? Maybe a conditioned reflex after so many years in the Service. I'll try to unlearn it when I'm just a retired old has- been writing a few pages a day in that terrible handwriting of mine-- or perhaps I ought to learn to type and spare the eyesight of some unfortunate secretary.'
    'How long do you think it will take you?'
    'Two or three years--maybe more. I won't mind.'
    'Sort of a labour of love?'
    'Well, certainly not of profit. As I said, my career hasn't been outstanding enough to send the public scurrying to the bookshops.'
    'Still feeling prickly? I don't know what's eating you, but I'd say you haven't done so badly. Whatever sort of life you've had, you're fifty-three and you don't look anything like it.'
    Charles beamed; from his own son, on his own son's seventeenth birthday, and at such a moment, there could have come no more timely reassurance. 'Fifty-TWO,' he corrected. 'Not fifty-THREE. I was born at the turn of the century, on July 28th, 1900.'
    'That's a fine beginning. The Story of My Life, by Charles Anderson. Chapter One: "Early Years".'
    'Good heavens, no; not that sort of thing at all. It's my WORK I shall deal with--I'll begin when I took up my first post.'
    'Why? What's wrong about the early years? Didn't you have a good time then?'
    'Of course.' Charles seemed slightly embarrassed. 'Nothing to complain of. That's why there wouldn't be much to write about.'

'NOTHING TO COMPLAIN OF'
    Charles had just finished prep school in the summer of 1914; he started at Brookfield while those tremendous opening battles of the