another."

My mind took a fearsome leap.

"All dressed in sanitary woolen?"

"Yes, I think so. Grayish-yellowish stuff."

"A sort of uniform?" He nodded. "With a number on it perhaps--a
number on a large disk of metal strapped round the left arm? D. K. F.
78,910--that sort of thing?" It was even so. "And all of them, men and
women alike, looking very well cared for? Very Utopian, and smelling
rather strongly of carbolic, and all of them quite hairless?" I was right
every time. Soames was only not sure whether the men and women were
hairless or shorn. "I hadn't time to look at them very closely," he
explained.

"No, of course not. But--"

"They stared at ME, I can tell you. I attracted a great deal of
attention." At last he had done that! "I think I rather scared them. They
moved away whenever I came near. They followed me about, at a
distance, wherever I went. The men at the round desk in the middle
seemed to have a sort of panic whenever I went to make inquiries."

"What did you do when you arrived?"

Well, he had gone straight to the catalogue, of course,--to the S
volumes,--and had stood long before SN-SOF, unable to take this volume
out of the shelf because his heart was beating so. At first, he said, he