e and
injustice and misery reduced to quite manageable percentages, you found
men who were to frame or amend bills in grave and intimate exchange
with Bailey's omniscience, you heard Altiora canvassing approaching
resignations and possible appointments that might make or mar a
revolution in administrative methods, and doing it with a vigorous
directness that manifestly swayed the decision; and you felt you were
in a sort of signal box with levers all about you, and the world outside
there, albeit a little dark and mysterious beyond the window, running
on its lines in ready obedience to these unhesitating lights, true and
steady to trim termini.

And then with all this administrative fizzle, this pseudo-scientific
administrative chatter, dying away in your head, out you went into the
limitless grimy chaos of London streets and squares, roads and avenues
lined with teeming houses, each larger than the Chambers Street house
and at least equally alive, you saw the chaotic clamour of hoardings,
the jumble of traffic, the coming and going of mysterious myriads,
you heard the rumble of traffic like the noise of a torrent; a vague
incessant murmur of cries and voices, wanton crimes and accidents bawled
at you from the placards; imperative unaccountable fashions swaggered
triumphant in dazzling windows of the shops; and you found yourself
swaying back to the opposite conviction that the huge formless spirit
of the world it was that held the strings and danced the puppets on the
Bailey stage....

Under the lamps you were jostled by people like my Staffordshire uncle
out for a spree, you saw shy youths conversing with prostitutes, you
passed young lovers pairing with an entire disregard of the social
suitability of the "types" they might blend or create, you saw men
leaning drunken against lamp-posts whom you knew for the "type" that
will charge with fixed bayonets into the face of death, and you found
yourself unable to imagine little Bailey achieving either drunkenness or
the careless defiance of annihilation. You realised that quite a lot of
types were underrepresented in Chambers Street, that feral and obscure
and altogether monstrous forces must be at work, as yet altogether
unassimilated by those neat administrative reorganisations.

5

Altiora, I remember, preluded Margaret's reappearance by announcing her
as a "new type."

I was accustomed to go early to the Baileys' dinners in those days, for
a preliminary go