Her eyebrow lowered abruptly. Mr Newman quickly returned to his chair at the desk and sat down as her face flamed.

For a long moment he did not dare raise his eyes to hers. He knew she was watching and he kept his expression immobile. Not a glimmer of his indignation and his disappointment so much as reddened his skin.

‘As you probably know,’ he said complacently, ‘we must have people with electric typing experience. I assumed you had it.’

He looked up with his cultivated air of dismissal. She turned her head around extravagantly toward the floor full of girls typing at standard machines and then, in her own time, looked at him and waited.

‘We’re replacing those as fast as possible,’ he explained. ‘The war’s held up production on them, but we intend to use them exclusively in this department …’

His brave words collapsed at the warping of her face. Her lips had parted and her brows peaked upward slightly and she seemed either about to implore him or to spit in his face, he wasn’t sure which.

‘I can run one perfect with a day’s practice. There’s nothing to running them if you already know typing as good as me.’ She looked theatrical, he thought, leaning over his desk that way.

‘We prefer people who …’

Her smooth pink chin was closing in toward him. ‘I was born Episcopalian, Mr Newman,’ she said sibilantly, and a furious little splotch of red appeared on her skin next to her nose.

There was nothing in what she said that was new to him. It was a standard speech which he had heard many times before (except that most of them chose to be Unitarians – on their way up in the elevator). And yet he felt his heart growing cold as he stared at her furious face. A fright was coming over him and he did not know why. There was something in. her eyes … in the way she sat so angrily confident waiting for him to reply. She was not moving, glaring at him … The intimacy … that’s what frightened him … yes, the intimacy was new. Her malevolence was intimate. She sat there as though she knew everything about him, as though ….

She was taking him for a Jew.

His lips parted. He wanted to run out of the office, and then he wanted to hit at her. She must not do that with her eyes!