e right enough,
Joan. Will you take care of me?"*

[* Pp. 89, 119.]

Frances was not especially interesting intellectually although she
had much more mind than Joan in the story, but above all she carried
with her a "quality of repose with a stir of refreshment."

"Will you take care of me?"

Neither of them probably had measured at first all that that care
would mean. Only bit by bit would the full degree of his physical
dependence, as we have seen it through the years, become clear to
her. The strenuous campaign in the matter of appearances begun during
the engagement might alter in direction but had rather to be
intensified in degree as he grew older. Shaving, bathing, even
dressing were daily problems to him. "Heat the water," an early
secretary at Overroads heard Frances saying to the cook, "Mr.
Chesterton is going to have a bath." And "O, need I," came in tones
of deepest depression from the study. The thought of that vast form
climbing into and out of the bathtub does make one realise how a
matter of easy everyday practice to the normal person became to him
almost a heroic venture. His tie, his boots, were equally a problem:
I remember his appearing once at breakfast in two ties and claiming,
when I noticed it, that it proved he paid too much, not too little,
attention to dress. Doctors, dentists, oculists were all needed at
times, but Gilbert would never discover the need or achieve
appointments or the keeping of them. Still more serious was the
question of how the two were to live and to do all the acts of
generosity that to them both seemed almost more necessary than their
own living. Hard as he worked, Dorothy Collins has told me that when
she came to them in this year (1926) they had almost nothing saved.

It may be remembered that Gilbert wrote to Frances during their
engagement that his only quality as a shopper was ability to get rid
of money and that he was not good at "such minor observances" as
bringing home what he had bought or even remembering what it was.
Through boyhood and into manhood his parents, as we have seen, had
never given him money to handle and he certainly never learnt to
handle it later in life. "He spent money like water," Belloc told me.
Realising his own incapacity he arranged fairly early to have Frances
look after their finances, bank the money and draw checks. "When we
set up a house, darling," he had said, "I think you will have to do
the shopping." All he handled was