us, eager to bark interruptions into Altiora's discourse. A slender

girl in pale blue, manifestly a young political wife, stood with one

foot on the fender listening with an expression of entirely puzzled

propitiation. A tall sandy-bearded bishop with the expression of a

man in a trance completed this central group.

The room was one of those long apartments once divided by folding

doors, and reaching from back to front, that are common upon the

first floors of London houses. Its walls were hung with two or

three indifferent water colours, there was scarcely any furniture

but a sofa or so and a chair, and the floor, severely carpeted with

matting, was crowded with a curious medley of people, men

predominating. Several were in evening dress, but most had the

morning garb of the politician; the women were either severely

rational or radiantly magnificent. Willersley pointed out to me the

wife of the Secretary of State for War, and I recognised the Duchess

of Clynes, who at that time cultivated intellectuality. I looked

round, identifying a face here or there, and stepping back trod on

some one's toe, and turned to find it belonged to the Right Hon. G.

B. Mottisham, dear to the PUNCH caricaturists. He received my

apology with that intentional charm that is one of his most

delightful traits, and resumed his discussion. Beside him was

Esmeer of Trinity, whom I had not seen since my Cambridge days…

Willersley found an ex-member of the School Board for whom he had

affinities, and left me to exchange experiences and comments upon

the company with Esmeer. Esmeer was still a don; but he was

nibbling, he said, at certain negotiations with the TIMES that might

bring him down to London. He wanted to come to London. "We peep at

things from Cambridge," he said.

"This sort of thing," I said, "makes London necessary. It's the

oddest gathering."

"Every one comes here," said Esmeer. "Mostly we hate them like

poison-jealousy-and little irritations-Altiora can be a horror at

times-but we HAVE to come."

"Things are being done?"

"Oh!-no doubt of it. It's one of the parts of the British

machinery-that doesn't show… But nobody else could do it.

"Two people," said Esmeer, "who've planned to be a power-in an

original way. And by Jove! they've done it!"

I did not for some time pick out Oscar Bailey, and then Esmeer

showed him to me in elaborately confidential talk in a corner with a

distinguished-looking stranger wearing a ribbon. Oscar had none of

the fine appearance of his wife; he was a short sturdy figure with a

rounded protruding abdomen and a curious broad, flattened, clean-

shaven face that seemed nearly all forehead. He was of Anglo-

Hungarian extraction, and I have always fancied something Mongolian

in his type. He peered up with reddish swollen-looking eyes over

gilt-edged glasses that were divided horizontally into portions of

different refractive power, and he talking in an ingratiating

undertone, with busy thin lips, an eager lisp and nervous movements

of the hand.

People say that thirty years before at Oxford he was almost exactly

the same eager, clever little man he was when I first met him. He

had come up to Balliol bristling with extraordinary degrees and

prizes capturned in provincial and Irish and Scotch universities-

and had made a name for himself as the most formidable dealer in

exact fact the rhetoricians of the Union had ever had to encounter.

From Oxford he had gone on to a position in the Higher Division of

the Civil Service, I think in the War Office, and had speedily made

a place for himself as a political journalist. He was a

particularly neat controversialist, and very full of political and

sociological ideas. He had a quite astounding memory for facts and

a mastery of detailed analysis, and the time afforded scope for

these gifts. The later eighties were full of politico-social

discussion, and he became a prominent name upon the contents list of

the NINETEENTH CENTURY, the FORTNIGHTLY and CONTEMPORARY chiefly as

a half sympathetic but frequently very damaging critic of the

socialism of that period. He won the immense respect of every one

specially interested in social and political questions, he soon

achieved the limited distinction that is awarded such capacity, and

at that I think he would have remained for the rest of his life if

he had not encountered Altiora.

But Altiora Macvitie was an altogether exceptional woman, an

extraordinary mixture of qualities, the one woman in the world who

could make something more out of Bailey than that. She had much of

the vigour and handsomeness of a slender impudent young man, and an

unscrupulousness altogether feminine. She was one of those women

who are waiting in-what is the word?-muliebrity. She had courage

and initiative and a philosophical way of handling questions, and

she could be bored by regular work like a man. She was entirely

unfitted for her sex's sphere. She was neither uncertain, coy nor

hard to please, and altogether too stimulating and aggressive for

any gentleman's hours of ease. Her cookery would have been about as

sketchy as her handwriting, which was generally quite illegible, and

she would have made, I feel sure, a shocking bad nurse. Yet you

mustn't imagine she was an inelegant or unbeautiful woman, and she

is inconceivable to me in high collars or any sort of masculine

garment. But her soul was bony, and at the base of her was a vanity

gaunt and greedy! When she wasn't in a state of personal untidiness

that was partly a protest against the waste of hours exacted by the

toilet and partly a natural disinclination, she had a gypsy

splendour of black and red and silver all her own. And somewhen in

the early nineties she met and married Bailey.

I know very little about her early years. She was the only daughter

of Sir Deighton Macvitie, who applied the iodoform process to

cotton, and only his subsequent unfortunate attempts to become a

Cotton King prevented her being a very rich woman. As it was she

had a tolerable independence. She came into prominence as one of