A Town like Alice

well, it's not. We make ladies' shoes and handbags, Mr Strachan, and small ornamental attache cases for the high-class trade-the sort that sells for thirty guineas in a Bond Street shop to stupid women with more money than sense. Fitted vanity cases in rare leathers, and all that sort of thing. It's all right if you've got to earn your living, working in that sort of place. And it's been interesting, too, learning all about that trade."
    "Most jobs are interesting when you are learning them," I said.
    She turned to me. "That's true. I've quite enjoyed my time there. But I couldn't go on now, with all this money. One ought to do something more worthwhile, but I don't know what." She drank a little sherry. "I've got no profession, you see - only shorthand and typing, and a bit of book-keeping. I never had any real education-technical education, I mean. Taking a degree, or anything like that."
    I thought for a moment. "May I ask a very personal question, Miss Paget?"
    "Of course."
    "Do you think it likely that you will marry in the near future?"
    She smiled. "No, Mr Strachan, I don't think it's very likely that I shall marry at all. One can't say for certain, of course, but I don't think so."
    I nodded without comment. "Well then, had you thought about taking a university course?"
    Her eyes opened wide. "No-I hadn't thought of that. I couldn't do it, Mr Strachan I'm not clever enough. I couldn't get into a university." She paused. "I was never higher than the middle of my class at school, and I never got into the Sixth."
    "It was just a thought," I said. "I wondered if that might attract you."
    She shook her head. "I couldn't go back to school again now. I'm much too old."
    I smiled at her. "Not quite such an old woman as all that," I observed.
    For some reason the little compliment fell flat. "When I compare myself with some of the girls in the office," she said quietly, and there was no laughter in her now, "I know I'm about seventy."
    I was finding out something about her now, but to ease the situation I suggested that we should go into dinner. When the ordering was done, I said, "Tell me what happened to you in the war. You were out in Malaya, weren't you?"
    She nodded. "I had a job in an office, with the Kuala Perak Plantation Company. That was the company my father worked for, you know. Donald was with them, too."
    "What happened to you in the war?" I asked. "Were you a prisoner?"
    "A sort of prisoner," she said.
    "In a camp?"
    "No," she replied. "They left us pretty free." And then she changed the conversation very positively, and said, "What happened to you, Mr Strachan? Were you in London all the time?"
    I could not press her to talk about her war experiences if she didn't want to, and so I told her about mine - such as they were. And from that, presently, I found myself telling her about my two sons, Harry on the China station and Martin in Basra, and their war records, and their families and children. "I'm a grandfather three times over," I said ruefully. "There's going to be a fourth soon, I believe."
    She laughed. "What does it feel like?"
    "Just like it did before," I told her. "You don't feel any different as you get older. Only, you can't do so much."
    Presently I got the conversation back on to her own affairs. I pointed out to her what sort of life she would be able to lead upon nine hundred a year. As an instance, I told her that she could have a country cottage in Devonshire and a little car, and a daily maid, and still have money to spare for a moderate amount of foreign travel. "I wouldn't know what to do with myself unless I worked at something," she said. "I've always worked at something, all my life."
    I knew of several charitable appeals who would have found a first-class shorthand typist, unpaid, a perfect god-send, and I told her so. She was inclined to be critical about those.
    "Surely, if a thing is really worth while, it'll pay," she said. She evidently had quite a strong business instinct latent in her. "It wouldn't need to have an unpaid secretary."
    "Charitable organizations like to keep the overheads down," I remarked.
    "I shouldn't have thought organizations that haven't got enough margin to pay a secretary can possibly do very much good," she said. "If I'm going to work at anything, I want it to be something really worthwhile."
    I told her about the almoner's job at a hospital, and she was very much interested in that. "That's much more like it, Mr Strachan," she said. "I think