heart-to-heart talk.

Mr. Chesterton's right hand spent a restless and rather disturbing
evening. It would start from the reading desk at which he stood and
fall to the points of that vast waistcoat which inspired the
description of him as "a fellow of infinite vest." It would wander
aimlessly a moment about his--stomach is a word that is taboo among
the polite English--equator, and then shift swiftly to the rear until
the thumb found the hip pocket. There the hand would rest a moment,
to return again to the reading desk and to describe once more the
quarter circle. Once in a while it would twist a ring upon the left
hand, once in a while it would be clasped behind the broad back, but
only for a moment. To the hip pocket and back again was its
sentry-go, and it was a faithful soldier.

Several interviewers remark on the unexpected calibre of his voice.
He himself spoke of it as "the mouse that came forth from the
mountain."

One would never suspect him of being our leading American
best-seller. His accent, mannerisms, and dress are pro-Piccadilly and
he likes his Oolong with a lump of sugar. He thinks with his cigar, a
black London cheeroot.

He, Gilbert K. Chesterton, was sipping a cup of tea, expertly
brewed by Mrs. Chesterton when a reporter yesterday entered his room
at the Blackstone [in Chicago]. Before he submitted to interrogation
he lighted the cigar.

"My muse," he explained. "A Parnassian pleasure. Tobacco smoke is
the Ichor of mental life. Some men write with a pencil, others with a
typewriter, I write with my cigar." . . .

Throughout the interview he was profoundly concerned not with the
subjects under discussion, but with the black cheeroot. Seven times
it went out. Seven times he relighted it. The eighth time he tossed
it away.

When asked which of his works he considered the greatest, he said: "I
don't consider any of my works in the least great." . . .

"Slang," he said, "is too sacred and precious to be used
promiscuously. Its use should be led up to reverently for it
expresses what the King's English could not."

"Seeing and hearing a man like Gilbert Keith Chesterton," said a
Detroit newspaper, "makes a meal for the imagination that no reading
of books by him or about him can accomplish."

He spoke Sunday in Orchestra Hall on the Ignorance of the Educated;
it grows more difficult as his tour progresses, h