And always there was that sense in the background of a possible great disaster, of dancing on the world's thin crust that had broken once and let one through, and might break again. Its very thinness, its very fragility added a desperate gaiety to the dance. 2 Ivy Delmer (who was not the traveller alluded to above, and did not consciously think or feel any of these things) stood holding to a strap, with the novel which she was going to change in the lunch hour in one hand. Ivy Delmer, a shorthand typist at the Ministry of Brains, was young, ingenuous, soft-faced, naïve, and the daughter of a Buckinghamshire vicar. The two things she loved best in the world were marzipan and the drama. Her wide grey eyes travelled, with innocent interest, along the faces in the compartment; she was seeing if she liked them or not. Immaturely and unconsciously sexual, she looked with more hope of satisfaction at male faces than at female. Not but that she was susceptible to strong admirations for her own sex; she had a "pash" for Miss Doris Keane and Miss Teddie Gerrard, and, in private life, a great esteem for Miss Grammont, at the Ministry, whose letters she sometimes took down in shorthand. But everyone knows there is a greater number of interesting faces in trains belonging to another sex than to one's own, and it is no use pretending. Having subjected the faces within her range to her half-unconscious judgment, and passed them with varying degrees of credit, Miss Delmer, for lack of anything better to do, read the advertisements and exhortations over the windows. With satisfaction she noted that she had seen all the advertised plays. She absorbed such temporal maxims and eternal truths as "Let Mr. Mustard mix your bath," "God is not mocked," and the terrifying utterances of the Safety-if-Possible Council, "Is it safe? That is the question. No. That is the answer." "If you hope to achieve safety in a street aero (1) Do not alight before the aero does. (2) Do not attempt to jump up into an aero in motion." Then a picture: "A will be killed because he is standing immediately beneath a descending aero bus. B will be killed because he and others like him have shaken the nerve of the aviator." A series of warnings which left one certain that, wherever one might achieve safety, it would not be in, or anywhere at all near, a street aero. That, probably, is the object. In the old days it was the motor bus that was thus made a thing of terror by the princes of the nether world. Now, even as then, their efforts met with success, and the tubes were filled with a panic-stricken mob.