unsociability. . . . And while the English woman
in her Club does not, perhaps, stare into vacancy with the same
fervour, fixity and ferocity as the English man, still there is
something of the sort, you know." After a lecture in Philadelphia a
lady asked him, "Mr. Chesterton, what makes women talk so much?"
Heaving himself out of his chair, he answered only "God, Madam."

Two further caricatures were an impression drawn by Will Coyne for
the New York _Evening Post_ of Chesterton as Porthos of the Pen, and
another, drawn for the New York _Herald_ by Stewart Davis, of
Chesterton supplying "Paradoxygen to the World." This was accompanied
by a poem called Paradoxygen, by Edward Anthony:

O Gilbert I know there are many who like
Your talks on the darkness of light,
The shortness of length and the weakness of strength
And the one on the lowness of height.

My neighbour keeps telling me "How I adore
His legality of the illicit
And I've also a liking intense for his striking
Obscurity of the explicit."

But I am unmoved. What's the reason? 0, well,
The same I intend to expound
Some evening next week, when I'm going to speak
On the shallowness of the profound.

"Everyone who goes to America for a short time," said G.K., "is
expected to write a book; and nearly everybody does." In accordance
with this convention he wrote _What I Saw in America_. He did see a
great deal. The same imagination that had found the mediaeval aspect
of Jerusalem saw many elements missed not only by the ordinary
tourist but by the people themselves who live nearest to them. Thus
he keenly appreciated the traditional elements in Philadelphia,
Boston and Baltimore:

In coming into some of these more stable cities of the States I
felt something quite sincerely of that historic emotion which is
satisfied in the eternal cities of the Mediterranean. I felt in
America what many Americans suppose can only be felt in Europe. I
have seldom had that sentiment stirred more simply and directly than
when I saw from afar off, above that vast grey labyrinth of
Philadelphia, great Penn upon his pinnacle like the graven figure of
a god who had fashioned a new world; and remembered that his body lay
buried in a field at the turning of a lane, a league from my own door.

In Baltimore the Catholic history appealed to him yet more strongly,
and, invited to visit Cardinal Gibbons, he felt himself touchi