Free Less Than Angels by Barbara Pym

would not have felt capable of providing one.
    ‘I hope I may have arrived in time for a cup of tea?’ continued Professor Mainwaring, addressing the library assistant.
    She assured him that it was just made. He then went to Miss Clovis’s room, where a young woman presented him with a cup.
    ‘Ah, a fair tea-maker I ‘ he exclaimed. ‘Wasn’t it De Quincey who described her thus?’ He plucked at his beard and glanced at her quizzically, making her giggle and leave the room hastily.
    ‘Young men nowadays cannot afford to take opium,’ said Miss Clovis briskly, perhaps anxious not to dwell on the subject of tea, which had once nearly proved disastrous for her.
    ‘No, even the Foresight grants will hardly be generous enough for that,’ laughed Professor Mainwaring. ‘Have you received many applications yet?’ Miss Clovis was acting as secretary to the selection committee and enjoyed the work which was congenial to her natural curiosity about people and her desire to arrange their lives for them. The revelations of age, background and education were sometimes most surprising. Who would ever have thought, for instance … she smiled at some reminiscence.
    ‘They are coming in,’ she said. ‘Have the committee decided yet when they will hold the interviews?’
    Professor Mainwaring tweaked at his beard with an almost pizzicato gesture. ‘Ah, that\ I have a new plan this year and one which I think Fairfax and Vere should approve. I will reveal it to you in due course,’
    ‘It seems difficult to introduce any novelty into the ways of selecting holders for the grants. Are the young people to be made to sing for their supper, or entertain the board in some unacademic way?’ suggested Miss Clovis, hoping to draw out some details.
    But the Professor would not give anything away, and soon afterwards he left her, brooding among her collection of offprints which she was sorting out.
    These single articles, detached from the learned journals in which they have appeared, have a peculiar significance in the academic world. Indeed, the giving and receiving of an offprint can often bring about a special relationship between the parties concerned in the transaction. The young author, bewildered and delighted at being presented with perhaps twenty-five copies of his article, may at first waste them on his aunts and girl friends, but when he is older and wiser he realizes that a more carefully planned distribution may bring him definite advantages. It was thought by many to be ‘good policy’ to send an offprint to Esther Clovis, though it was not always known exactly why this should be. In most cases she had done nothing more than express a polite interest in the author’s work, but in others the gift was prompted by a sort of undefined fear, as a primitive tribesman might leave propitiatory gifts of food before a deity or ancestral shrine in the hope of receiving some benefit.
    Most of the offprints bore inscriptions of some kind- ‘with best wishes’, grateful thanks’, ‘cordial greetings’, ‘warmest regards’—every degree of respect and esteem short of the highest emotion was represented. Love itself had not been inspired; perhaps it was hardly likely that it would have been or that the author would have thought it fitting to express it even if it had. Some of the inscriptions were in foreign languages and one even had a photograph of its African author pinned to it.
    Each article, and some were now yellowed with age, had its memories, and Esther turned the pages thoughtfully, sometimes half smiling at the persons and incidents they recalled. Mit bestem Grüssen , Hermann Obst… This offprint, in heavy German script, was one of the first she had ever received and its auther was dead. Poor Dr. Obst… once, many years ago, at some learned conference abroad, they had been walking together one evening after dinner and he had taken hold of her in a most suggestive way. Not to put too fine a point on it, he had