purpose. How was I, a child of this confusion, struggling upward through
the confusion, to take hold of things? Somewhere between politics and
literature my grip must needs be found, but where? Always I seem to
have been looking for that in those opening years, and disregarding
everything else to discover it.

2

The Baileys, under whose auspices I met Margaret again, were in the
sharpest contrast with the narrow industrialism of the Staffordshire
world. They were indeed at the other extreme of the scale, two active
self-centred people, excessively devoted to the public service. It was
natural I should gravitate to them, for they seemed to stand for the
maturer, more disciplined, better informed expression of all I was then
urgent to attempt to do. The bulk of their friends were politicians or
public officials, they described themselves as publicists--a vague yet
sufficiently significant term. They lived and worked in a hard little
house in Chambers Street, Westminster, and made a centre for quite an
astonishing amount of political and social activity.

Willersley took me there one evening. The place was almost pretentiously
matter-of-fact and unassuming. The narrow passage-hall, papered with
some ancient yellowish paper, grained to imitate wood, was choked with
hats and cloaks and an occasional feminine wrap. Motioned rather than
announced by a tall Scotch servant woman, the only domestic I ever
remember seeing there, we made our way up a narrow staircase past the
open door of a small study packed with blue-books, to discover Altiora
Bailey receiving before the fireplace in her drawing-room. She was a
tall commanding figure, splendid but a little untidy in black silk and
red beads, with dark eyes that had no depths, with a clear hard voice
that had an almost visible prominence, aquiline features and straight
black hair that was apt to get astray, that was now astray like the
head feathers of an eagle in a gale. She stood with her hands behind her
back, and talked in a high tenor of a projected Town Planning Bill with
Blupp, who was practically in those days the secretary of the local
Government Board. A very short broad man with thick ears and fat white
hands writhing intertwined behind him, stood with his back to 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 p