Like many of the women who worked at the Organization, Lidia was unmarried. Unlike them, she remained so by her own choice. Years before, she had been married to an official of the Organization who had died on his way to a regional meeting of the Global Health Commission in La Paz. (His car had overturned on a mountain road, and it was thought that he, like many of the delegates to the Commission, had been affected by the altitude.) Lidia had loved this husband. For some time after his death she kept to herself, and, even when this ceased to be the case, showed no inclination to remarry. She was admired by her male colleagues and much in demand as a companion, being fair-haired, slender, and not given to discussing her work out of office hours.

“Mustn’t forget,” Algie now said. “Got an appointment at two-thirty. Chap called Bekkus in Personnel.”

Lidia gave an absent-minded groan. “Bekkus. Dreary man.”

“A bit boring.” This was the strongest criticism Algie had ever been known to make of any of his colleagues.

“Boring isn’t the word,” said Lidia, although it was. She became more attentive. “Isn’t he on the Appointments and Terminations Board?”

“What’s that?”

“Committee for improving our caliber.”

Algie quoted:

“Improvement too, the idol of the age,

Is fed with many a victim.”

There was nothing Algie enjoyed more than the apt quotation, whether delivered by himself or another. It gave him a momentary sensation that the world had come right; that some instant of perfect harmony had been achieved by two minds meeting, possibly across centuries. His own sources, fed by fifty years of wide and joyous reading, were in this respect inexhaustible. He had an unfashionable affection, too, for those poets whom he regarded as his contemporaries—Belloc, Chesterton, de la Mare—and would occasionally look up from his work (the reader will have gathered that looking up from his work was one of Algie’s most pronounced mannerisms) to announce that “Don John of Austria is gone by Alcalar,” or to ask “Do you remember an Inn, Miranda?”

From all of which it will readily be seen why Algie’s file was in the hands of Mr. Bekkus and why Algie was not considered suitable for continued employment at the Organization. It may also be seen, however, that Algie’s resources were of the kind never yet fully utilized by organization or mankind.

“Yes, here it is.” Lidia had unearthed a printed list from a yellowing stack of papers on the heating equipment beside her. “R. Bekkus. Appointments and Terminations Board.”

“Well, I’ve been appointed,” Algie remarked, pushing his work away completely and preparing to rise to his feet, “so perhaps it’s the other thing.” He pressed his hands on the desk, heaved himself up, and presently shambled off into the corridor.