benefit of all his forerunners' experience. Sarah Brown never thought
about the theory of this work, because the different coloured inks and
the beautiful writing pleased her so.

There are people to whom a ream of virgin paper is an inspiration, who
find the first sharpening of a pencil the most lovable of all labours,
who see something almost holy in the dedication of green and red
penholders to their appropriate inks, in whose ears and before whose
eyes the alphabet is like a poem or a prayer. Touch on stationery and
you touched an insane spot in Sarah Brown's mind. Her dream of a perfect
old age was staged in a stationer's shop in a quiet brown street; there
she would spend twilit days in stroking thick blotting-paper, in drawing
dogs--all looking one way--with new pen-nibs, in giving advice in a
hushed voice to connoisseur customers, who should come to buy a diary or
a book-plate or a fountain-pen with the same reverence as they now show
who come to buy old wine.

Therefore Sarah Brown's hand had found ideal employment on a charity
register. As for her mind, it usually shut its eye during office hours.
Her Dog David liked the work too, as the hearth-rug was a comfortable
one, and Charity, though it may suffer long in other directions, is
rather particular about its firing.

On the Monday after her change of home, Sarah Brown found that the
glory had gone out of the varied inks, and even a new consignment of
index-cards, exquisitely unspotted from the world, failed to arouse her
enthusiasm. This was partly because the first name in the index that she
looked up was that of Watkins, Thelma Bennett, single, machinist. The
ciphers informed the initiated that Watkins had called on the War
Association, to ask for Help and Advice, See Full Report. Sarah Brown