ginning his honeymoon
under the shadow of the White Horse, and compared it to a trip to
fairyland.

Can any human being read the record of this recurrent motif and
reconcile it with Mrs. Cecil's picture?

Let me refer again to _The Ballad of The White Horse_. Is it
conceivable that any man should write after ten years of frustration
and unhappiness:

Up through an empty house of stars
Being what heart you are,
Up the inhuman steeps of space
As on a staircase go in grace
Carrying the firelight on your face
Beyond the loneliest star.

This is not the way a man writes to a neurotic cold-hearted woman who
has made a hermit of him!

Mrs. Cecil was of course never in the intimacy of the family. She
only married Cecil in 1917--by which date Gilbert and Frances had
been married sixteen years--and before that she was merely an
acquaintance. But Frances's intimates could have told her how absurd
her story was, for by a rare good fortune the operation Frances
underwent to enable her to bear children is itself evidence one could
hardly have hoped for in a matter which civilized people are not much
given to discussing. Frances talked of the operation to Monsignor
O'Connor, to Dorothy Collins and to Annie Firmin, and I have quoted
the doctor's letter about it (see above, [Chapter XV]). It was an
abiding tragedy for both husband and wife that it was unsuccessful.
Frances would have shrunk from no suffering in her passionate wish
for a child.

There is another curiosity in the Legend: Gilbert, despite this
story, was apparently perfectly happy in London during the _first
eight years of marriage:_ it was only after the removal to
Beaconsfield and in almost middle life that he began to be
"frustrated."

Poor Frances: what a picture of her had been proposed for posterity:
so powerful she could waft Gilbert away from London and from his
friends, could force him to make her his banker and reduce him to a
"bounty" strictly limited to half-a-crown, yet so powerless that "she
had to sign" the cheques for _G.K.'s Weekly_, much as she hated it.
Her poetry (described as "quite charming") is spoken of as appearing
in "little Parish Magazines"--the only papers she cared to read owing
to her implacable hatred for Fleet Street. It is hard to picture
Frances with an implacable hatred for anything, and it will be
remembered that she actually begged Father O'Connor to leave Gilbert
to be "a jolly journalist." The periodic