He heaved down Jacob’s Law Dictionary in two volumes, price one guinea, and noticed that the ghostly mouse, which nobody ever heard or saw, had been nibbling the edge of the leather binding. The beast was untrappable, since it unnaturally preferred old calf to cheese.

The damaged books certainly weren’t worth a guinea now, so Stephen marked them down to ten-and-six, more as a gesture than in any hope that they would sell. Next to them stood Macaulay’s History of England in eight scrubby volumes, all with broken spines, and then came The Art of the Farrier Improv’d in All its Parts with some Original Observations concerning The Thrush in Horses, and then Annals of My Village, by the author of Select Female Biographies and The Conchologist’s Companion: a versatile writer, thought Stephen, if a dull one. From each of the books, as he pulled them out of the shelf and opened them one by one, a year’s accumulation of dust rose up, drifted away on the draught, and formed eddying nebulae which were caught in a slanting shaft of light from the window. He became aware that Miss Pargetter, who always walked as softly as a cat, had emerged from the back shop and was standing beneath him gazing up at the swirling dust-particles with large inquisitive eyes.

“It reminds me,” she observed quietly, “of the Universe according to Sir James Jeans.”

Stephen was so astonished that he nearly dropped The Art of the Farrier upon her head; for until this moment he had entertained some doubts whether she could even read.

“I bet there are millions of germs there,” she added. “You can get awful diseases from second-hand books. When I was at school I caught measles from David Copper-field. A girl had accidentally brought it out of the san.”

“You can get more dangerous things than diseases from books,” said Stephen. “You can get ideas.”

“Yes, Mr. Tasker.” She relapsed into her formal manner, and stood at the foot of the ladder, gauche, disinterested and immobile, with her shorthand notebook open in her hand.

“I couldn’t read my notes,” she said. (She never apologised for anything.) “The Earl of Somerset laid, and then there’s a squiggle.”

“The Earl of Somerset laid?”

“Yes, laid a what?” said Miss Pargetter patiently.

“Does it look like ’egg’?”

She studied her book without smiling, and at last said: “No.”

“Then try ’ambush.’”

“Yes, Mr. Tasker.” Softly as a cat, she went towards the back room. Stephen called out to her:

“I’ve got to go to a Committee Meeting this afternoon. You’ll look after the shop?”

“Yes, Mr. Tasker.”

“The prices are all marked plainly inside the front covers.”

“Yes, Mr. Tasker.”

“I don’t suppose anybody will come in, though,” said Stephen. He put the Annals of My Village back on the shelf and jotted down its price in his notebook. TitumtitumtitUM went the typewriter, like a brief despairing fusillade. Then silence returned. The Earl of Somerset had laid an ambush; and Miss Pargetter was stuck again.

III

“Meanwhile Our maidens,” wrote Mr. Runcorn, “emulous in pulchritude,” and looked across his office, as if for inspiration, at the impeccable profile of Miss Smith who sat at her little desk in the far corner of the room. But he was old and desiccated, and the broad smooth brow, the grave eyes, the slightly-parted lips and the faultless permanent wave (free to finalists) held no inspiration for him. Indeed it struck him as more than a little unseemly that the Weekly Intelligencer should number a potential Beauty Queen among its staff; and he recollected the words which he had spoken, only ten years ago, to a cub reporter who came to the office in ankle-length plus-fours: “In our profession, we do not unduly draw attention to ourselves, Mr. Cole.” The plus-fours had been bad enough; but a Beauty Queen was unheard of. Nothing of the kind had ever happened in the office before, and the files of the paper, which was one of the oldest in the United Kingdom, went back to 1772. Nor had the style of its leading articles changed much since then; for Mr. Runcorn was a practised exponent of the art of circumlocution, which he had learned from his ancient predecessor nearly fifty years ago. His mentor, in turn, had picked it up from his predecessor; and thus the laboured, elaborate and somewhat facetious prose which distinguished the Intelligencer from any other newspaper had been handed down through an apostolic succession of editors from the original founder: a turgid stream flowing direct from its muddy source. That first editor, when he wished to imply that the champion beast at Christmas market had been slaughtered by the town’s leading butcher, used to write that it had “made the acquaintance of the pole-axe at the hands of our chief practitioner of the executioner’s trade.” Mr. Runcorn still used the same phrase in his Christmas number, merely substituting “humane killer” for “pole-axe” out of deference to the R.S.P.C.A.

It would be a serious breach of the rules to write of a Beauty Competition as a Beauty Competition, it would be almost as bad as describing the scarlet-coated followers of the chase as mere huntsmen, and Mr.