fe had held two tragic events--Gertrude's death and the
much sadder death of her brother, believed to have killed himself.
With her faith and her profound affections such an end had stabbed
deep. Yet certainly Frances did not view herself as other than happy:
in fact, I think she very seldom thought about herself at all. There
was something of heroism in this very self-forgetfulness. Frances
never had good health and for some years had suffered from arthritis
of the spine. Yet intimate as I was I knew this only after her death.
My husband was saying lately that had he been asked to choose
adjectives to describe Frances he would have chosen "cheerful" and
"well-balanced." Of all the people we have known we felt she was one
of the closest to the norm of sanity and mental health: quite an
achievement for a woman suffering from a really painful complaint.

Yet I think when Gilbert used the strong phrase "heroic tragedy" he
saw with his great insight that his frail wife, beside their heavy
cross of childlessness, beside the burden of her own physical and
spiritual sufferings, was carrying the weight of his achievement, and
that it was not a light one. Heroic was the right word but tragedy
the wrong, for this life given to her keeping ended on a note of
triumph.

The treatment of a situation of this kind can, of course, easily be
made unreal. In the sort of golden glow cast by the imagination on
Fleet Street with its taverns and its drinks, next morning's headache
is always omitted: but even the finer, deeper glow of the domestic
hearth has its ashy moments. No finite beings can conduct their lives
with complete absence of errors and regrets. In any human
relationship, however perfect, the people concerned sometimes bore or
annoy or even hurt one another. That is one of the main things that
sends Catholics week by week or month by month to the Confessional,
which brings for everyman something of the renewal and re-creation of
daily joy that the genius Gilbert saw when he wrote _Manalive_. In
this story the hero is always eloping with his own wife and marrying
her again. Flora Finching's "It was not ecstasy it was comfort" is a
common enough view of a reasonably successful marriage, but Gilbert
wanted to keep and did keep the flashes of ecstasy. When he wrote
_Manalive_ he had been married eleven years and he used a thought
that had inspired a poem to Frances while they were engaged. The
heroine in the story keeps changing h