not been working long enough for anyone to have yet met with this fate. The children of unions perpetrated before the Mental Progress Act were at present exempt.) Families among the lower grades and among the uncertificated were thus drastically discouraged. You were uncertificated for matrimonial purposes not only if you were very stupid, but if, though yourself of brilliant mental powers, you had actual deficiency in your near family. If you were in this case, your form was marked "A (Deficiency)." And so on: the details of the regulations, their intricacies and tangled knots, the endless and complicated special arrangements which were made with various groups and classes of persons, may be easily imagined, or (rather less easily, because the index is poor) found in the many volumes of the Ministry of Brains Instructions. Anyhow, to room number 13, which was among the many rooms where this vast and intricate subject was dealt with, Ivy Delmer was summoned this Monday morning to take down a letter for Vernon Prideaux. 5 Vernon Prideaux was a fair, slim, neat, eye-glassed young man; his appearance and manners were approved by Ivy Delmer's standards and his capabilities by the heads of his department. His intellectual category was A; he had an impatient temper, a ready tongue, considerable power over papers (an important gift, not possessed by all civil servants), resource in emergency, competence in handling situations and persons, decided personal charm, was the son of one of our more notorious politicians, and had spent most of the war in having malaria on the Struma front, with one interesting break when he was recalled to England by his former department to assist in the drawing up of a new Bill, dealing with a topic on which he was an expert. He was, after all this, only thirty now, so had every reason for believing, as he did, that he would accomplish something in this world before he left it. He had been sucked into the activities of the new Ministry like so many other able young men and women, and was finding it both entertaining and not devoid of scope for his talents.