nd from the tavern is the
same voice as that of the hostess who, leaving the men in the dining
room, tells her husband not to stay too long over the cigars.

Of this voice he entirely approved so long as it did not ask to stay
on in the dining room. He often said that the important thing for a
country was that the men should be manly, the women womanly: the
thing he hated was the modern hybrid: the woman who gate-crashes the
male side of life: no one, he had said in a letter of his engagement
time, "takes such a fierce pleasure as I do in things being
themselves." And both he and Frances found amusement in that "eternal
equality" which Gilbert saw in the sexes so long as they kept their
eternal separateness. If everything, he said, is trying to be red
some things are redder than others, but there is an eternal and
unalterable equality between red and green.

It so happens that in the matter of the wives of great men he had
something to say more than once. He longed to hear the point of view
of Mrs. Cobbett who "remains in the background of his life in a sort
of powerful silence." He combated Shaw's notion that the young poet
would repudiate domestic toils for his wife: rather he would idealise
them--though this, Gilbert admits, might at times be hard on the
wife. But the matter is best expressed in the love scene in one of
his later romances: _Tales of the Long Bow:_

That valley had a quality of repose with a stir of refreshment,
as if the west wind had been snared in it and tamed into a summer
air. . . .

"What would you say if I turned the world upside down and set my
foot upon the sun and the moon?"

"I should say," replied Joan Hardy, still smiling, "that you wanted
somebody to look after you."

He stared at her for a moment in an almost abstracted fashion as if
he had not fully understood; then he laughed quite suddenly and
uncontrollably, like a man who has seen something very close to him
that he knows he is a fool not to have seen before. So a man will
fall over something in a game of hiding-and-seeking, and get up
shaken with laughter.

"What a bump your mother earth gives you when you fall out of an
aeroplane," he said. "What a thing is horse-sense, and how much finer
really than the poetry of Pegasus! And when there is everything else
as well that makes the sky clean and the earth kind, beauty and
bravery and the lifting of the head--well, you ar