Hutchman lifted the squared sheet from his desk, looked at it, and felt something very strange happen to his face.

Starting at the hairline, an icy sensation moved downward in a slow wave over his forehead, cheeks, and chin. The skin in the region of the wave prickled painfully as he felt each pore open and close in an insubstantial progression, like wind patterns on a field of grain. He put a hand to his forehead and found it slippery, dewed with chill perspiration.

A cold sweat, he thought, his shocked mind seizing gratefully on the irrelevant. You really can break into a cold sweat — and I thought it was just a figure of speech.

He mopped his face and then stood up, feeling strangely weak. The squared sheet on the desk reflected sunlight up at him, seeming to glow malevolently. He stared at the close-packed strings of figures he had put there, and his consciousness ricocheted away from what they represented. What unimpressive handwriting! In some places the figures are three, four times bigger than in others. Surely that must show lack of character.

Vague colours — mauve and saffron — drifted beyond the frosted-glass partition which separated him from his secretary. He snatched the rectangle of paper and crammed it into his jacket pocket, but the area of colour was moving toward the corridor, not coming his way. Hutchman opened the connecting door and peered through at Muriel Burnley. She had the cautious, prissy face of a village postmistress, and an incongruously voluptuous figure which was nothing but a source of embarrassment to her.

“Are you going out?” Hutchman said the first words that came into his head, meanwhile looking unhappily around her office which was too small, and choked with olive-green filing cabinets.