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 co-operation.

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