all over England: from the King's Garden Party
to the Aylesbury Education Committee and the Oxford Union: to
Scotland for Rectorial Campaigns: dinners at the Inner Temple and the
Philosophical Society: Detection Club dinners and Mock Trials, at one
of which he was Defendant on the charge of "perversely preferring the
past to the present."

Besides the books discussed in the last chapter, the Dickens'
_Introductions_ and the _Collected Poems_ were republished in 1933.
Other books were planned, including one on Shakespeare.

That same year Gilbert's mother died. During her last illness Frances
was torn between London and Beaconsfield, for her own mother was
dying in a Nursing Home at Beaconsfield, her mother-in-law at Warwick
Gardens. Once I drove with her between the two and she told me how
she suffered at the difficulty of giving help to two dying Agnostics.
She told me on that drive how she knew her mother-in-law had not
liked her but had lately made her very happy by saying she realised
now that she had been the right wife for Gilbert. To a cousin, Nora
Grosjean, Frances spoke too of how she and Mrs. Edward had drawn
together in those last days and she added, "No mother ever thinks any
woman good enough for her son." Nora Grosjean also reports, "Aunt
Marie said to me more than once, 'I always respect Frances--she kept
Gilbert out of debt.'"

Warwick Gardens had been their home so long that vast accumulations
of papers had piled up there. "Mister Ed." too had been in a sort
keeper of the family archives. Gilbert glanced at the mass and, as I
mentioned at the beginning of this book, told the dustman to carry it
off. Half had already gone when Dorothy Collins arrived and saved the
remainder. She piled it into her car and drove back to Beaconsfield,
Gilbert keeping up a running commentary all the way on "the hoarding
habits of women."

The money that came to Gilbert and Frances after Mrs. Edward's death
made it possible for them to plan legacies not only for friends and
relatives but also for the Catholic Church in Beaconsfield with which
they had increasingly identified their lives and their interests.
Their special dream was that Top Meadow itself should be a
convent--best of all a school--and in this hope they bequeathed it to
the Church.

A year later another family event, this time a joyful one, took
Gilbert back to his youth; Mollie Kidd, daughter of Annie Firmin,
became engaged to be married. She was a rath