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"Anyway, it's the truth."

"They'll ship you to Noumea, or Guayaquil, or Addis Ababa," she predicted, naming some of the traditional Siberias of the Foreign Service. "I don't want that to happen to you." She seemed genuinely troubled. "I want you to go to some place where you are needed."

"Like where?"

"Like Budapest. Or Prague. Or Rome."

He realized for the first time that she had been dropping carefully chosen pebbles into the stream of his thought, and charting the spreading ripples of his reaction. He thought it wise to parry question with question. "Susan," he asked, "exactly what do you do in the Secretary's office?"

"I'm just the stenographer who takes the nine o'clock conference. I'm rated as a confidential secretary, and I'm an FSS, Class Eight, and make fifty-four hundred, but all I actually do is take the nine o'clock conference."

"That's pretty important, isn't it? Isn't that the Planning Conference? Don't you hear a lot?"

"I hear a lot, and I never talk about it. But sometimes I think."