Sapphira was clearly puzzled and, yet, pleasantly excited as she' brandished tea to the regular weekly visitor to the Maverick flat overlooking Marble Arch, Never one to waste time on preliminaries she was soon explanatory. Jack and she had been dining out the night before and she had sat next a publisher—"one of them," as the charwoman would say. Cleverly extracting from Saphira a rough outline of her Odyssey asthe wife of a Gunner Brigadier, roaming across half the world, with only a streak or two of grey hair to show for it, he had dared to talk shop. As usual Sapphira wanted Nunky's advice. Should she write that book of reminisences. Her literary skill was not in dispute—had she not been the Dalhousie correspondent of the "Delhi Gazette?" And, when she and Jack were in the Shaforce, it had been stated that she contributed regularly to. the "Shanghai Argus"; as for. the tour of duty in Trinidad, well that place still rings with the echoes, her one-act play, wherein the local amateurs achieved something of a success. But the question was: should she sit down solemnly and give that Publisher a full-fledged book?
Joel" she observed thought fully "that there are so many travel books and why, should People want to read mine?"
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.