Achilles Pylos was a Greek, and it gave him a pang to see what had become of this woman of the Western world. Had the faces of certain male colleagues been pointed out to him as correspondingly ravaged, he would have replied that, in the case of a woman, a more aesthetically pleasing article had been despoiled. For Mr. Pylos was well disposed toward women. His own wife was beautiful. He was prepared to discover beauty in almost any woman, and it depressed him when, as in the case of Sadie Graine, he was utterly thwarted. It must not be thought, however, that Pylos recoiled from Miss Graine merely for her lack of looks: he was not a profound man but he was not entirely superficial and his glance penetrated at least as far as the upper substrata of Miss Graine’s configuration. His own nature, beneath its outward pretensions, was an easy-going one, and he knew that he could not keep Miss Sadie Graine.

Miss Graine returned his smile with one of her own so pointedly summoned just for him that it seemed to seal her off from the others in the room—his new administrative chief, a flannel-suited man called Choudhury, and his fiscal officer, a Mr. Chai. Miss Graine was wearing a coat and skirt, and a blouse so unfrivolous that it at once suggested the absence of a tie. Mr. Pylos fleetingly took in these details as he walked across his new office to the windows (of which, since the room was a rather grand one by Organization standards, there were three). His token gesture toward pulling up the venetian blinds brought the others quickly to his side, and in a moment he was looking down some thirty stories to the Organization gardens below. He was unused to great heights, and steeled himself to a vertiginous future.

“This will be the west, I suppose?”

“The east,” corrected Chai. “Or so I believe.”

“Ah—the east. Of course.” Pylos bravely kept his eyes on the scene below. “And these are the gardens,” he went on, not risking further conjecture.

“The gardens,” Choudhury agreed. “Yes.”

“Is that something being built down there? Or demolished, perhaps?”

“Where, sir?” They all leaned forward to see.

“There. Near that clump of trees.”

“I don’t quite— Ah yes. Yes of course. No, that’s a sculpture, sir. The gift of Denmark, I think. Or is it the Netherlands? I can easily find out if—”

“No, no, just curiosity. Yes, I see now. Very modern, of course. Very—er—” Pylos waved a well-kept hand.

“Very free,” Choudhury supplied.

“Free, yes,” Pylos echoed, taking the opportunity to liberate himself from the window. “Now where does this lead?” He strode across the bright blue carpet and got a shock when he laid his hand on the metal knob of a door.

“The carpet, you see, sir. That’s what does it,” Miss Graine pointed out. “It’s the electricity in the carpet.”