small sums by way of pocket
money--"very playfully regarded by both" Father O'Connor writes, for
he had often witnessed the joke that they made of it.

"What could she do," he continues, "when Gilbert went out with
L5.18.6 or words to that effect, and came back invariably without a
copper, not knowing where his money had gone?"

At a hotel in Warsaw the manager entreated him not to bring every
beggar in town around the door. He could never refuse a beggar and
the money not given away was probably dropped in the street or in a
shop. The solution they hit upon was that of accounts at the shops
and hotels or anything that could not simply be brought home by
Frances and placed by his side. Father O'Connor wrote to Dorothy
Collins of "the loving care with which Frances anticipated all his
wishes--never was the cigar box out of date--_you_ know this, and it
was so long before you came. And his toddle to the Railway Hotel for
port or a quart according to climatic conditions. . . . She devised
and built the studio for Gilbert to play at and play in. It used to
be crowded at receptions, as on the night when Gilbert broke his arm.
He had been toying with the tankard that evening, to the detriment of
social intercourse, but not much, I thought. We were all in good
fettle. The _Ballad of the White Horse_ was just going to the
printers. That was never penned in Fleet Street. Nor _The Everlasting
Man_. He wrote verbosely there in the office. At Beaconsfield he was
pulled together, braced."

The studio, become the house, almost certainly cost more than they
had planned--building always does--but the two great drains were the
benefactions and the paper. Frances signed, as a matter of course,
every check Gilbert wanted, but I imagine it was sometimes with a
little sigh that she wrote the checks for the endless telephones,
telegrams, printers' bills and other expenses that poured out to
support a paper which to her seemed chiefly a drain on Gilbert's
energies that could not but diminish his creative writing. In the six
years 1927-1933, he paid over L3000 into the paper. 1931-2 were the
worst years. In them the checks she had to sign totalled L1500.

The last sentences quoted from Father O'Connor touch on the
deepest--perhaps the only deep--problem for them both. For far the
hardest thing was the struggle against the real danger that he might
again drink too much, as he had before the illness that so nearly
killed him in 1915. This