“I appreciate your directness,” she said to him. “Now, why don’t you sit down, in that chair right over there, and we can discuss it?”

“Thank God for Psychiatric Services,” she said to Roz on the phone, after he’d left. “But what gets into them?”

“Listen, sweetie,” said Roz. “There’s just one thing I want you to remember. You know those chemicals women have in them, when they’ve got PMS? Well, men have the very same chemicals in them all the time:”

Maybe it’s true, thinks Tony. Otherwise, where would sergeants come from?

Tony’s office is large, larger than it would be in a modern building, with the standard-issue scratched desk, the standard sawdusty bulletin board, the standard dust-laden venetian blinds. Generations of thumbtacks have woodwormed the pale green paint; leftover shards of cellophane tape glint here and there, like mica in a cave. Tony’s second-best word processor is on the desk—it’s so slow and outmoded she hardly cares if anyone steals it—and in her bookcase are a few dependable vol~ umes, which she lends out to students sometimes: Creasy’s Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, a necessary chestnut; Liddell Hart; Churchill, of course; The Fatal Decisions; and, one of her own favourites, Keegan’s The Face of Battle.

On one wall there’s a bad reproduction of Benjamin West’s “The Death of Wolfe,” a lugubrious picture in Tony’s opinion, Wolfe white as a codfish belly, with his eyes rolled piously upwards and many necrophiliac voyeurs in fancy dress grouped around him. Tony keeps it in her office as a reminder, both to herself and to her students, of the vainglory and martyrologizing to which those in her profession are occasionally prone. Beside him is Napoleon, thoughtfully crossing the Alps.