red dollars and would have looked severe
and mannish except that the figure under it curved and bulged in just
the right places and to just the right degree.

Melroy rose, laying down knife and pencil and taking his pipe out of his
mouth.

"Good afternoon," he greeted. "Dr. von Heydenreich gave me quite a
favorable account of you--as far as it went. He might have included a
few more data and made it more so.... Won't you sit down?"

The woman laid her handbag on the desk and took the visitor's chair,
impish mirth sparking in her eyes.

"He probably omitted mentioning that the D. is for Doris," she
suggested. "Suppose I'd been an Englishman with a name like Evelyn or
Vivian?"

Melroy tried to visualize her as a male Englishman named Vivian, gave
up, and grinned at her.

"Let this be a lesson," he said. "Inferences are to be drawn from
objects, or descriptions of objects; never from verbal labels. Do you
initial your first name just to see how people react when they meet
you?"

"Well, no, though that's an amusing and sometimes instructive
by-product. It started when I began contributing to some of the
professional journals. There's still a little of what used to be called
male sex-chauvinism among my colleagues, and some who would be favorably
impressed with an article signed D. Warren Rives might snort in contempt
at the same article signed Doris Rives."

"Well, fortunately, Dr. von Heydenreich isn't one of those," Melroy
said. "How is the Herr Doktor, by the way, and just what happened to
him? Miss Kourtakides merely told me that he'd been injured and was in a
hospital in Pittsburgh."

"The Herr Doktor got shot," Doris Rives informed him. "With a charge of
BB's, in a most indelicate portion of his anatomy. He was out hunting,
the last day of small-game season, and somebody mistook him for a
turkey. Nothing really serious, but he's face down in bed, cursing
hideously in German, English, Russian, Italian and French, mainly
because he's missing deer hunting."

"I might have known it," Melroy said in disgust. "The ubiquitous
lame-brain with a dangerous mechanism.... I suppose he briefed you on
what I want done, here?"

"Well, not too completely. I gathered that you want me to give
intelligence tests, or aptitude tests, or something of the sort, to some
of your employees. I'm not really one of these so-called industrial
anthropologists," she explained. "Most of my work, for the past few
years, has been for pu