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 tothink of searches going on in the

British Museum, and lettersbeing 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 andmeditation. "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 perfectlytrue. 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, butknowledge

of the utmost value in human affairs. They produced aneffect 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

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