l, must come. When she had, in May, at last taken thought for the
morrow, and applied at the Foreign Office for one of those secret jobs
which could not be mentioned because they prepared the doers to play
their parts after the great unmentionable event, she was too late. The
Foreign Office said they could not take over people from other government
departments.

So, when the unmentionable took place, Jane was badly left. The Foreign
Office Library Department people, many of them Jane's contemporaries at
Oxford and Cambridge, were hurried across the Channel into Life, for
which they had been prepared by a course of lectures on the Dangers of
Paris. There also went the confidential secretaries, the clerks and
shorthand typists, in their hundreds; degreeless, brainless beings, but
wise in their generation.

'I wish I was a shorthand typist,' Jane grumbled, brooding with Katherine
over their fire.

'Paris,' Katherine turned over the delightful word consideringly, finding
it wanting. 'The last place in the world I should choose to be in just
now. Fuss and foolishness. Greed and grabbing. The centre of the lunacies
and crimes of the next six months. Politicians assembled together....
It's infinitely common to go there. All the vulgarest people.... You'd be
more select at Southend or Blackpool.'

'History is being made there,' said Jane, quoting from her
father's press.

'Thank you; I'd rather go to Birmingham and make something clean and
useful, like glass.'

But Jane wanted to make history in Paris. She felt out of it, left, as
she had felt when other people went to the war and she stayed at home.

On a yellow, foggy day just before Christmas, Lord Pinkerton, with whom
Jane was lunching at his club (Lord Pinkerton was quite good to lunch
with; you got a splendid feed for nothing), said, 'I shall be going
over to Paris next month, Babs.' (That was what he called her). 'D'you
want to come?'

'Well, I should say so. Don't rub it in, dad.'

Lord Pinkerton looked at her, with his whimsical, affectionate paternity.

'You can come if you like, Babs. I want another secretary. Must have one.
If you'll do some of the shorthand typing and filing, you can come
along. How about it?'

Jane thought for exactly thirty seconds, weighing the shorthand typing
against Paris and the Majestic and Life. Life had it, as usual.

'Right-o, daddy. I'll come along. When do we go over?'

That afternoon Jane gave notice to her department,