s direction, threw up his post in the
Civil Service and abandoned sporadic controversies, and they devoted
themselves to the elaboration and realisation of this centre of public
information she had conceived as their role. They set out to study
the methods and organisation and realities of government in the most
elaborate manner. They did the work as no one had ever hitherto dreamt
of doing it. They planned the research on a thoroughly satisfying scale,
and arranged their lives almost entirely for it. They took that house
in Chambers Street and furnished it with severe economy, they discovered
that Scotch domestic who is destined to be the guardian and tyrant of
their declining years, and they set to work. Their first book, "The
Permanent Official," fills three plump volumes, and took them and their
two secretaries upwards of four years to do. It is an amazingly good
book, an enduring achievement. In a hundred directions the history and
the administrative treatment of the public service was clarified for all
time....

They worked regularly every morning from nine to twelve, they lunched
lightly but severely, in the afternoon they "took exercise" or Bailey
attended meetings of the London School Board, on which he served, he
said, for the purposes of study--he also became a railway director
for the same end. In the late afternoon Altiora was at home to various
callers, and in the evening came dinner or a reception or both.

Her dinners and gatherings were a very important feature in their
scheme. She got together all sorts of interesting people in or about
the public service, she mixed the obscurely efficient with the
ill-instructed famous and the rudderless rich, got together in one room
more of the factors in our strange jumble of a public life than had ever
met easily before. She fed them with a shameless austerity that kept the
conversation brilliant, on a soup, a plain fish, and mutton or boiled
fowl and milk pudding, with nothing to drink but 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 to think of searches going
on in the British Museum, and letters being cleared up and precis made
overhead, while they sat in the little