all forehead. He was of Anglo-Hungarian extraction,
and I have always fancied something Mongolian in his type. He peered
up with reddish swollen-looking eyes over gilt-edged glasses that were
divided horizontally into portions of different refractive power, and he
talking in an ingratiating undertone, with busy thin lips, an eager lisp
and nervous movements of the hand.

People say that thirty years before at Oxford he was almost exactly the
same eager, clever little man he was when I first met him. He had come
up to Balliol bristling with extraordinary degrees and prizes captured
in provincial and Irish and Scotch universities--and had made a name for
himself as the most formidable dealer in exact fact the rhetoricians
of the Union had ever had to encounter. From Oxford he had gone on to a
position in the Higher Division of the Civil Service, I think in the
War Office, and had speedily made a place for himself as a political
journalist. He was a particularly neat controversialist, and very full
of political and sociological ideas. He had a quite astounding memory
for facts and a mastery of detailed analysis, and the time afforded
scope for these gifts. The later eighties were full of politico-social
discussion, and he became a prominent name upon the contents list of the
NINETEENTH CENTURY, the FORTNIGHTLY and CONTEMPORARY chiefly as a half
sympathetic but frequently very damaging critic of the socialism of that
period. He won the immense respect of every one specially interested in
social and political questions, he soon achieved the limited distinction
that is awarded such capacity, and at that I think he would have
remained for the rest of his life if he had not encountered Altiora.

But Altiora Macvitie was an altogether exceptional woman, an
extraordinary mixture of qualities, the one woman in the world who could
make something more out of Bailey than that. She had much of the
vigour and handsomeness of a slender impudent young man, and an
unscrupulousness altogether feminine. She was one of those women who
are waiting in--what is the word?--muliebrity. She had courage and
initiative and a philosophical way of handling questions, and she could
be bored by regular work like a man. She was entirely unfitted for her
sex's sphere. She was neither uncertain, coy nor hard to please, and
altogether too stimulating and aggressive for any gentleman's hours of
ease. Her cookery would have been about as sketchy as her handwr