She was an assistant at a chemist's shop. Gordon put on his homey library manner. She smiled at him, and with a gait as clumsy as a bear's followed him into the library.

'What kind of book would you like this time, Miss Weeks?'

'Well'--she clutched the front of her overall. Her distorted, black-treacle eyes beamed trustfully into his. 'Well, what I'd REALLY like's a good hot-stuff love story. You know--something MODERN.'

'Something modern? Something by Barbara Bedworthy for instance? Have you read Almost a Virgin?'

'Oh no, not her. She's too Deep. I can't bear Deep books. But I want something--well, YOU know--MODERN. Sex-problems and divorce and all that. YOU know.'

'Modern, but not Deep,' said Gordon, as lowbrow to lowbrow.

He ranged among the hot-stuff modern love-stories. There were not less than three hundred of them in the library. From the front room came the voices of the two upper-middle-class ladies, the one fruity, the other curried, disputing about dogs. They had taken out one of the dog-books and were examining the photographs. Fruity-voice enthused over the photograph of a Peke, the ickle angel pet, wiv his gweat big Soulful eyes and his ickle black nosie--oh, so ducky-duck! But curry-voice--yes, undoubtedly a colonel's widow--said Pekes were soppy. Give her dogs with guts-- dogs that would fight, she said; she hated these soppy lapdogs, she said. 'You have no Soul, Bedelia, no Soul,' said fruity-voice plaintively. The door-bell pinged again. Gordon handed the chemist's girl Seven Scarlet Nights and booked it on her ticket. She took a shabby leather purse out of her overall pocket and paid him twopence.

He went back to the front room. The Nancy had put his book back in the wrong shelf and vanished. A lean, straight-nosed, brisk woman, with sensible clothes and gold-rimmed pince-nez--schoolmarm possibly, feminist certainly--came in and demanded Mrs Wharton- Beverley's history of the suffrage movement. With secret joy Gordon told her that they hadn't got it. She stabbed his male incompetence with gimlet eyes and went out again. The thin young man stood apologetically in the corner, his face buried in D. H. Lawrence's Collected Poems, like some long-legged bird with its head buried under its wing.

Gordon waited by the door. Outside, a shabby-genteel old man with a strawberry nose and a khaki muffler round his throat was picking over the books in the sixpenny box. The two upper-middle-class ladies suddenly departed, leaving a litter of open books on the table. Fruity-face cast reluctant backward glances at the dog- books, but curry-face drew her away, resolute not to buy anything.