"Hullo ... yes ... I can't quite hear ... who are you, please?... Oh ... yes, he's here.... But rather busy, you know.... Dictating.... Yes, _dictating_.... _Who_ did you say wanted him, please?... Oh, I see...." "What is it, Miss Pomfrey?" Prideaux broke in, making her start. "It's the Minister's secretary," she explained, without covering the receiver. "He says will you go to the Minister. There's a deputation--of bishops, I think he said. About the new Instruction about Clergymen's Babies.... But I said you were busy dictating...." Prideaux had jumped to his feet, frowning, and was at the door. "You'd better make a note that I'm never busy dictating or doing anything else when the Minister sends for me," he shot at her as he left the room. "And now he's cross," Miss Pomfrey murmured sadly. "I daresay he's only angry at being interrupted," said Ivy Delmer, who had been at the same secretarial college as Miss Pomfrey and thought that her days in the Ministry of Brains were numbered. "I _do_ make him cross," Miss Pomfrey observed, accepting the fact with resignation, as one of the sad, inevitable fatalities of life, and returned to her indexing. She had been set to make an index of those Ministry of Brains Instructions which had come out that month. She had only got to the 11th of the month. The draught fluttered the pages about. Ivy Delmer watched the Instructions waving to and fro in the breeze--number 801, Agriculturists, 798, Conscientious Obstructionists, 897, Residents in Ireland, 674, Parents of more than three children.... How many there were, thought Ivy, as she watched. How clever the people who dealt with such things needed to be. She thought of her father's village, and the people in it, the agriculturists, the parents of more than three children, all the little human community of lives who were intimately affected by one or other of these instructions, and the fluttering pages emerged from the dry realm to which such as Ivy relegate printed matter and ideas, and took vivid human life. It mattered, all this complicated fabric of regulations and rules and agreements and arrangements; it touched the living universe that she knew--the courting boys and girls on stiles in Buckinghamshire lanes, Emmeline, the Vicarage housemaid, who had married Sid Dean last month, Mr. and Mrs. White at the farm, all the great stupid pathetic aggrieved public, neatly filed letters from whom covered every table in the Ministry, awaiting reply, their very hand-writing and spelling calculated to touch any heart but a civil servant's.... Ivy found a moment in which to hope that everyone in the Ministry was being very careful and painstaking about this business, before she reverted to wondering whether or not she liked the colour which Miss Pomfrey had dyed her jersey. Having decided that she didn't, and also that she had better go away and wait for Mr. Prideaux to send for her again, she departed. 6