THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

the more able of the little shoal of young women who were led into

politico-philanthropic activities by the influence of the earlier

novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward-the Marcella crop. She went

"slumming" with distinguished vigour, which was quite usual in those

days-and returned from her experiences as an amateur flower girl

with clear and original views about the problem-which is and always

had been unusual. She had not married, I suppose because her

standards were high, and men are cowards and with an instinctive

appetite for muliebrity. She had kept house for her father by

speaking occasionally to the housekeeper, butler and cook her mother

had left her, and gathering the most interesting di

could, and had married off four orphan nieces in a harsh and

successful ma

as a writer upon social questions and a scathing critic of the

Charity Organisation Society, and she was three and thirty and a

little at loose ends when she met Oscar Bailey, so to speak, in the

CONTEMPORARY REVIEW. The lurking woman in her nature was fascinated

by the ease and precision with which the little man rolled over all

sorts of important and authoritative people, she was the first to

discover a sort of imaginative bigness in his still growingmind,

the forehead perhaps carried him off physically, and she took

occasion to meet and subjugate him, and, so soon as he had

sufficiently recovered from his abject humility and a certain panic

at her attentions, marry him.

This had opened a new phase in the lives of Bailey and herself. The

two supplemented each other to an extraordinary extent. Their

subsequent career was, I think, almost entirely her invention. She

was aggressive, imaginative, and had a great capacity for ideas,

while he was almost destitute of initiative, and could do nothing

with ideas except remember and discuss them. She was, if not exact,

at least indolent, with a strong disposition to save energy by

sketching-even her handwriting showed that-while he was

inexhaustibly industrious with a relentless invariable caligraphy

that grew larger and clearer as the years passed by. She had a

considerable power of charming; she could be just as nice to people-

and incidentally just as nasty-as she wanted to be. He was always

just the same, a little confidential and SOTTO VOCE, artlessly rude

and egoistic in an undignified way. She had considerable social

experience, good social co

ambition, while he had none of these things. She saw in a flash her

opportunity to redeem his defects, use his powers, and do large,

novel, rather startling things. She ran him. Her marriage, which

shocked her friends and relations beyond measure-for a time they

would only speak of Bailey as "that gnome"-was a stroke of genius,

and forthwith they proceeded to make themselves the most formidable

and distinguished couple conceivable. P. B. P., she boasted, was

engraved inside their wedding rings, Pro Bono Publico, and she meant

it to be no idle threat. She had discovered very early that the

last thing influential people will do is to work. Everything in

their lives tends to make them dependent upon a supply of

confidently administered detail. Their business is with the window

and not the stock behind, and in the end they are dependent upon the

stock behind for what goes into the window. She linked with that

the fact that Bailey had a mind as orderly as a museum, and an

invincible power over detail. She saw that if two people took the

necessary pains to know the facts of government and administration

with precision, to gather together knowledge that was dispersed and

confused, to be able to say precisely what had to be done and what

avoided in this eventuality or that, they would necessarily become a

centre of reference for all sorts of legislative proposals and

political expedients, and she went unhesitatingly upon that.

Bailey, under her vigorous direction, threw up his post in the Civil

Service and abandoned sporadic controversies, and they devoted

themselves to the elaboration and realisation of this centre of

public information she had conceived as their role. They set out to

study the methods and organisation and realities of government in

the most elaborate ma

hitherto dreamt of doing it. They pla

thoroughly satisfying scale, and arranged their lives almost

entirely for it. They took that house in Chambers Street and

furnished it with severe economy, they discovered that Scotch

domestic who is destined to be the guardian and tyrant of their

declining years, and they set to work. Their first book, "The

Permanent Official," fills three plump volumes, and took them and

their two secretaries upwards of four years to do. It is an

amazingly good book, an enduring achievement. In a hundred

directions the history and the administrative treatment of the

public service was clarified for all time…

They worked regularly every morning from nine to twelve, they

lunched lightly but severely, in the afternoon they "took exercise"

or Bailey attended meetings of the London School Board, on which he

served, he said, for the purposes of study-he also became a railway

director for the same end. In the late afternoon Altiora was at

home to various callers, and in the evening came di