He was back on the top floor of the Circus, in his own plain office with the Oxford prints, just as he had left it a year ago. Beyond his door lay the low-ceilinged anteroom where Control’s grey-haired ladies, the mothers, softly typed and answered telephones; while here in the hotel an undiscovered genius along the corridor night and day tapped patiently at an old machine. At the anteroom’s far end—in Mrs. Pope Graham’s world there was a bathroom there, and a warning not to use it—stood the blank door that led to Control’s sanctuary: an alley of a place, with old steel cupboards and old red
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