quiet, almost like a vacancy in the corporate air.

Suddenly he lifted his face to her, and her heart quickened at the flicker of his voice.

‘Give them some crayons, won’t you?’ he said, ‘so that they can make the gynaecious flowers red, and the androgynous yellow. I’d chalk them in plain, chalk in nothing else, merely the red and the yellow. Outline scarcely matters in this case. There is just the one fact to emphasise.’

‘I haven’t any crayons,’ said Ursula.

‘There will be some somewhere — red and yellow, that’s all you want.’

Ursula sent out a boy on a quest.

‘It will make the books untidy,’