A charter for Buffett-Gates.(on the right)(Warren Buffet, Bill Gates)

New York, June 27

THE marriage of Buffett and Gates was a truly exhilarating event, even though it leaves the world hanging on the question whether there will be offspring remotely tall enough to do their parents proud.

The achievements were of separate orders. In the case of Bill Gates, you have, really, an invention. Whatever else came along, it is Microsoft's evolving operating system that was at the center of it, just as the automobile was at the center of the career of Henry Ford.

In the case of Warren Buffett, it was prudential brainpower working with the power of compound interest. His company, under his direction, bought and sold for more than 40 years. He was not a man who contributed the idea of an automobile, or an operating system to drive a computer that did the work of 10,000 scribes. He simply looked around and bought this and sold the other, and in a little while he discovered that he was the second-richest man in the world.

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What do you do when you are the second-richest? Why, unite with No. 1. The two men spoke genially of each other on the Charlie Rose Show, revealing quiet admiration for singular talents and the special kind of joy that comes to an entity (the Gates Foundation) that yesterday was worth $30 billion, today is worth $60 billion.

But here are critical matters Buffett and Gates didn't discuss. The first of these is retrospective.