" '...sure it will come back to you, sir,' " he iterated in a singsong chant that he instantly regretted as infantile. "It frigging well won'tcome back! It's lost now!"

From her straight-backed chair she looked at him, her eyes slightly narrowed, as though she were hefting his mood. "Are you feeling ill, Mr Griswald?"

'Feeling ill' was her euphemism for hungover, and Matthew answered that he was not 'feeling ill'!

Her smile thinned. "Perhaps not, sir. But you are a little tetchy this morning." She dropped the junk mail into her wastepaper basket and began opening the other letters, reading them with her rapid, vertical scan and setting them on her desk in order of urgency. "Oh, here's a letter from Mr Gold. Details of the MCA option with which you should familiarize yourself. He'll be telephoning from New York at..." she tipped up the pendant watch that was her chest's only ornament "...at one o'clock our time."

"Yes, yes, I remember," he growled. "The bloodsucking bastard."

"That's hardly fair, sir. Mr Gold stuck by us through our difficult times."

"There's no such thing as an honest agent. Certain people have a warp in their DNA spirals that cripples their consciences and lets them become drug dealers or child rapists or tobacco company executives or literary agents. And what's all this about ourdifficult times?"

"Just a manner of speaking, sir. Shall we go over your calendar?"

"No," he growled. "Where in hell is Mrs What's-her-name? This place looks like a pigsty!"

"Yes, it does, rather," Miss Plimsoll said, in a tone so expressionless that Matthew could take it for arch. "But I'm afraid Mrs O'Neil won't be in. She telephoned me this morning to say she was feeling a little off."

"Off what?"

"Off color, presumably. And off the wagon as well, I suspect."

"You disapprove of drinking, don't you, Plimsoll."

"I disapprove of anything that prevents a person from doing his work, sir."

"But particularly the vices, eh?" He was becoming frustrated with Plimsoll's disinclination to rise to his ill-humor and his taunts.

She looked at him from behind her steel-rimmed glasses and smiled with a hint of weariness. "To which vices are you referring, sir?"

"Just the usual lot. The Big Seven. Sloth, Greed, Envy, and the rest of the gang. And their insidious cousins, the Seven Deadly Virtues: Moderation, Probity, Sincerity, Thrift, Chastity, and the rest of them. How do you stand on the deadly virtue of Chastity, Plimsoll?"

Her lips compressed slightly as she returned to making notes in the margins of the letters she would answer on his behalf. "If chastity is indeed a vice, sir, one can take comfort in the knowledge that it's the one vice modern society is struggling to stamp out, and quite successful-Ah!" She held up an envelope. "We have an invitation from Somerville, my college at Oxford. You are invited to deliver a lecture next term."

"On what?" He sat at his desk with a heavy grunt.

"Let me see... There is to be a colloquy on 'the Antihero in Literature and Society'."

"The antihero exists only in literature. The same person in society is either ridiculed or crucified. ...Or both. And anyway, academics don't know the difference between an antihero, an unlikely hero, and an attractive villain. What are they offering?"

"It appears that they offer expenses and a banquet in your honour."

"A banquet in my honor, eh? Well, screw 'em, the tight-fisted bastards."

"May I paraphrase that in my reply?"

Was she was trying to be amusing, or was she was being snide? "I never got a college degree. In fact, I was kicked out of two colleges."

"Wisconsin and Northwestern."

"Right! And I never majored in literature!"

"I am aware of that, sir." She smiled. "I recall a letter to an American academic in which you expressed your view that studying literature is, for a real writer, what analysing horse droppings would be to a stallion."

"I never said droppings!No, I never studied literature, but youdid."

"Yes, sir. In fact, I published a stylistic analysis of your early work which, if I say so myself, was widely praised as a-"

"But for all your literary study and insight, you ended up a typist. There you are, Plimsoll. Some people lay the eggs; others just nibble at the omelets."

She lowered her eyes. "Well... I'll confess to nibbling my share of omelets, sir, if you'll confess to laying your share of eggs."

With a grunt and a frown he buried himself in Plimsoll's neatly typed transcript of yesterday's output, while she dashed off answers to the morning mail. She was able to type replies in so close an imitation of his style that he could get away with just signing or, in rare instances, adding a P.S. in his own scrawl.

"Well, what about you, Plimsoll?" he asked out of a long silence.

"Sir?" Her tone was distant, her attention on the letter she was typing.

"We were talking about the deadly virtue of chastity."

She was used to the non sequitur vectors his thoughts often took when he was working. "Are you asking what I think of chastity, sir?"

"I'm asking if you're guilty of it."

She was silent for a moment before pointedly changing the subject. "Have you decided what you're going to say to Mr Gold when he calls?"

"Bloodsucking ten percenter!"

"Mr Gold has proved himself a devoted friend."

"Devoted to profit. Let's get back to your chastity. What shape is it in, Plimsoll? Unassailed? Assailed but well-defended? Assailed but not within the last decade?"

"I see no reason to discuss my chastity, sir." There was an edge to her voice.

Ah! A chink in her frosty armor. At last.

"Don't think I'm asking on behalf of my own inquisitive libido. I'm working up a character not unlike you, and I was wondering how she would respond to a sexual advance."

She turned from her work and looked directly at him. "Why on earth would you want to introduce a character like me, Mr Griswald? You usually populate your novels with women of a more obvious and functional sort."

"Contrast, Plimsoll. I want to establish a character alongside whom the ordinary woman would seem to be a passionate houri."

"...I see."

"Well?"

She drew a sigh and folded her long, thin hands over her lap. "Very well. To begin with, I believe that chastity-which in my view flows from a sense of self-worth-is a most desirable quality in any person. It has been my observation that the promiscuous are either seeking to deny an unstated accusation of sexual inadequacy or attempting to find companionship at its most biological and least compassionate level. One might say that for them coitus is a prelude to handholding; fornication, an avenue to conversation. But I do not equate chastity with sexual abstinence. I see nothing unchaste in making love when one loves... even when that love is only an ephemeral flood of feeling, and neither the product nor the precursor of an enduring relationship. Have I responded adequately to your question, sir?"

"My frigging cup runneth over!" He returned to scanning yesterday's work. But after a minute he lifted his head. "How old are you, Plimsoll?"

She emitted a slight sigh that seemed to ask if she were ever to be allowed to get on with her work. "I am forty-six years old, sir."

"Forty-six. Fifteen years younger than I am. And already you're standing aside from life. You've become an observer rather than a competitor."

"I have never wanted to be a competitor, sir. Which is not to say that I don't want to be a participant."

"You can't participate unless you're willing to compete. Life is a contact sport." He liked that, so he scribbled it into in the little notebook he kept for collecting orts of colorful or apt phrasing. When he looked up, he found Plimsoll watching him.