Next to these aimless walks (‘life-eating’, she called them, when she was older and they were easier to recall than to achieve) she liked writing poetry. She had the cottage, Harry and Francis, and the pleasures derived from music, reading, flowers and trees and eating; and so she was happy.

She was not introspective. She had too many other things to think about.

Her work with the C.N.A. was definitely pleasant, and she liked it. The agency took in cables from all parts of the world which they received through another and much larger agency, whose newspaper clients were all in the United States and whose London offices, filled with large, kind Americans in their shirt-sleeves, were just across a corridor from the C.N.A.’s little dens. The C.N.A. bought the London and provincial rights of the European cables as they passed through the larger agencies’ hands on their way to America, decoded them from the jerky cablese in which they were expressed, and sold them to London and provincial papers for a retaining fee or lineage rates.

This was Sophia’s job, to decode some of the easier and shorter cables from time to time and to put them into bright and readable journalese, to take down letters from Mr Piper and Mr Burrows and type them, and to write up the mailers.

The mailers were news stories which were sent through the mail (or post) as distinguished from the cables which came over the machines.

They were typed on flimsy paper, in extremely curious English intended for consumption by the American public. They were sometimes written by foreigners employed by the American agency, and then the English was superb; it rocked drunkenly like a lorry on one wheel going down a one-in-three gradient, it tied itself into serpentine knots and flickered, it attempted to be arch and daring, with sickening effect.

A typical mailer dated from, say Bucharest, would begin thus:

Boris Bennoskwyz, hundred-year-old pesen from quent. Old world hill village of Pitesci in Moldavia tells startlingly of nacked danses in mountains. Paysants says Boris is returning to the old-world gods blaming for harvest. Men and young girls orgying together … and so on.

This she would transform into something like this:

Are the peasants of Pitesci, a small mountain-village in Moldavia, returning to the worship of the Pagan gods?

Boris Bennoskwyz, a peasant from Pitesci who is reported to be more than a hundred years old (says a message from Bucharest) tells strange stories of nude dances and orgies in which both men and women take part, which are alleged to take place in the mountains.

She often wished, in the midst of toning down the mailers, that it was possible to print them as they reached the office. ‘Nacked’ sounded so much more naked, somehow, when it was spelt in that way, and ‘orgying together’ more matey than a simple orgy.

She came to mistrust all stories from the Balkans. It was not only those reaching the C.N.A. which sounded so odd. All the Balkan stories printed by the other agencies were odd as well.