than an inch, many far smaller, that were the
delight of children. She had not, Gilbert remarked, allowed her taste
to guide her in choosing a husband.

A mixture of Gilbert's strong and weak qualities affected his
dealings with his dependents. I am not sure he felt certain that it
was quite right that he should have a gardener: anyhow, no man was
ever paid so highly and allowed to idle so completely as was the
gardener I remember there, an exceedingly able gardener when he chose
to work. To such trifles as the disappearance of coal or tools,
neither Gilbert nor Frances would dream of adverting. And they were
entirely at the mercy of a "hard case" story at all times. One man
used to call weekly to receive ten shillings--for what service no one
was able to form the faintest conception. Should he fail to appear
Gilbert mailed the money. He was found one day fighting another man
on the doorstep for daring to beg from Mr. Chesterton!

From a conventional point of view the maids were inconceivably
casual. Neither Gilbert nor Frances would have thought it right to
insist on caps or indeed on any sort of uniform. It is my impression
that I have been waited on at dinner by someone garbed in a skirt, a
sweater and a pair of bedroom slippers. And the parlor maid took for
granted her own presence beside Frances and Dorothy Collins as a
chief mourner at Gilbert's funeral.

According to Bernard Shaw, writing of Dickens, marriage between a
genius and an ordinary or normal woman could not succeed--the gap was
too wide. Dickens had thought he could go through with it, only
because he had not measured the gap. In this theory, as in so much
else, Gilbert stood violently opposed to Shaw. No doubt he must at
times have realised that there was an intellectual gap between
himself and the ordinary man or woman, but it was a thing utterly
unimportant. Character, love, sanity: these things mattered
infinitely more, and he more than once depicts the genius as
painfully climbing to reach the ordinary.

His views concerning the sexes were equally at variance with those
of Shaw and of most of the moderns. He was quite frankly the
old-fashioned man and Frances was the old-fashioned woman. They both
agreed that there is one side of life that belongs to man--the side
of endless cigars smoked over endless discussions about the universe.
Gilbert, in _What's Wrong With the World_, tells us that the voice in
which the working woman summons her husba