s, 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 calligraphy 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 connections, and considerable social 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 vigorou