reception or both.

Her dinners and gatherings were a very important feature in their

scheme. She got together all sorts of interesting people in or

about the public service, she mixed the obscurely efficient with the

ill-instructed famous and the rudderless rich, got together in one

room more of the factors in our strange jumble of a public life than

had ever met easily before. She fed them with a shameless austerity

that kept the conversation brilliant, on a soup, a plain fish, and

mutton or boiled fowl and milk pudding, with nothing to drink but

whisky and soda, and hot and cold water, and milk and lemonade.

Everybody was soon very glad indeed to come to that. She boasted

how little her housekeeping cost her, and sought constantly for

fresh economies that would enable her, she said, to sustain an

additional private secretary. Secretaries were the Baileys' one

extravagance, they loved to think of searches going on in the

British Museum, and letters being cleared up and precis made

overhead, while they sat in the little study and worked together,

Bailey with a clockwork industry, and Altiora in splendid flashes

between intervals of cigarettes and meditation. "All efficient

public careers," said Altiora, "consist in the proper direction of

secretaries."

"If everything goes well I shall have another secretary next year,"

Altiora told me. "I wish I could refuse people dinner napkins.

Imagine what it means in washing! I dare most things… But as

it is, they stand a lot of hardship here."

"There's something of the miser in both these people," said Esmeer,

and the thing was perfectly true. For, after all, the miser is

nothing more than a man who either through want of imagination or

want of suggestion misapplies to a base use a natural power of

concentration upon one end. The concentration itself is neither

good nor evil, but a power that can be used in either way. And the

Baileys gathered and reinvested usuriously not money, but knowledge

of the utmost value in human affairs. They produced an effect of

having found themselves-completely. One envied them at times

extraordinarily. I was attracted, I was dazzled-and at the same

time there was something about Bailey's big wrinkled forehead, his

lisping broad mouth, the gestures of his hands and an uncivil

preoccupation I could not endure…

3

Their effect upon me was from the outset very considerable.

Both of them found occasion on that first visit of mine to talk to

me about my published writings and particularly about my then just

published book THE NEW RULER, which had interested them very much.

It fell in indeed so closely with their own way of thinking that I

doubt if they ever understood how independently I had arrived at my

conclusions. It was their weakness to claim excessively. That

irritation, however, came later. We discovered each other

immensely; for a time it produced a tremendous sense of kindred and

cooperation.

Altiora, I remember, maintained that there existed a great army of

such constructive-minded people as ourselves-as yet undiscovered by

one another.

"It's like boring a tunnel through a mountain," said Oscar, "and

presently hearing the tapping of the workers from the other end."

"If you didn't know of them beforehand," I said, "it might be a

rather badly joined tunnel."

"Exactly," said Altiora with a high note, "and that's why we all

want to find out each other…"

They didn't talk like that on our first encounter, but they urged me

to lunch with them next day, and then it was we went into things. A

woman Factory Inspector and the Educational Minister for New

Banksland and his wife were also there, but I don't remember they

made any contribution to the conversation. The Baileys saw to that.

They kept on at me in an urgent litigious way.

"We have read your book," each began-as though it had been a joint

function. "And we consider-"

"Yes," I protested, "I think-"

That was a secondary matter.

"They did not consider," said Altiora, raising her voice and going

right over me, that I had allowed sufficiently for the inevitable

development of an official administrative class in the modern

state."

"Nor of its importance," echoed Oscar.

That, they explained in a sort of chorus, was the cardinal idea of

their lives, what they were up to, what they stood for. "We want to

suggest to you," they said-and I found this was a stock opening of

theirs-"that from the mere necessities of convenience elected

bodies MUST avail themselves more and more of the services of expert

officials. We have that very much in mind. The more complicated

and technical affairs become, the less confidence will the elected

official have in himself. We want to suggest that these expert

officials must necessarily develop into a new class and a very

powerful class in the community. We want to organise that. It may

be THE power of the future. They will necessarily have to have very

much of a common training. We consider ourselves as amateur unpaid

precursors of such a class."…

The vision they displayed for my consideration as the aim of public-

spirited endeavour, seemed like a harder, narrower, more specialised

version of the idea of a trained and disciplined state that

Willersley and I had worked out in the Alps. They wanted things

more organised, more correlated with government and a collective

purpose, just as we did, but they saw it not in terms of a growing