The faint stirring of a usually competent sense of duty prompted Sally to say, “I oughtn’t to.”

“Why oughtn’t you?”

She threw a reluctant glance at the typewriter.

“Work.”

He picked up the letters, pulled up a chair, and straddled it.

“I’ll dictate them to you. I suppose they just want tactful answers.”

Sally gave her delightful laugh.

“And you would be so good at that!”

“Oh, I can be tactful when I choose. It’s mostly waste of time, when it’s not plain insincerity.” He used the back of the chair to prop the professor’s letter and regarded it with a gloomy eye. “What this man wants is to be told to go and boil his head. If he’s got the sort that can be bothered to read twenty-five of Marigold’s novels, it’s all it’s fit for. I’d like to tell him so.”

Sally said, “We can’t!” She very nearly said, “darling” again, but stopped in time. She typed rapidly:

“How nice of you to have read so many of my books. I am so grateful to you for your kind interest. I think it is wonderful of you to spare the time.

Yours sincerely.”

She left a space for the signature, withdrew the sheet, and read it aloud.

David relaxed into a grin.

“That’s a good score! He sends her a ticking-off, and you’ve turned it into a compliment. I’d like to see his face when he gets it. He’ll be foaming.”

Sally said,

“I hope so. And now I really have got to be tactful with a woman who wants Marigold to read a book she’s written on odd bits of paper and things.”

“Is she going to read it?”

“Nobody could! I shall have to pack it up and send it back, and I really think I had better just say straight out that Marigold can’t undertake to read manuscripts, and that no publisher will look at anything unless it’s typed. You know, I really can’t think how they managed in the old days. I’ve seen manuscript pages of Scott, and Dickens, and people like that-photographs of them, that is -and I just can’t think how anyone read them.”