t
unfortunately anglicised into Blogg. They had fallen from
considerable wealth into a degree of poverty that made it necessary
for the three daughters to earn a living. Frances was never strong
and Gilbert has told how utterly exhausted she was at the end of each
day's toil--"she worked very hard as secretary of an educational
society in London."* The family lived in Bedford Park, a suburb of
London that went in for artistic housing and a kind of garden-city
atmosphere long before this was at all general. Judging by their
photographs the three girls must all have been remarkably pretty, and
young men frequented the house in great numbers, among them Brimley
Johnson who was engaged to Gertrude, and Lucian Oldershaw who later
married Ethel. Some time in 1896, Oldershaw took Gilbert to call and
Gilbert, literally at first sight, fell in love with Frances.

[* _Autobiography_, p. 153.]

TO MY LADY

God made you very carefully
He set a star apart for it
He stained it green and gold with fields
And aureoled it with sunshine
He peopled it with kings, peoples, republics
And so made you, very carefully.
All nature is God's book, filled with his rough sketches for you.*

[* _The Notebook_.]

When almost forty years later Gilbert was writing his
_Autobiography_, Frances asked him to keep her out of it. The liking
they both had for keeping private life private made him call it "this
very Victorian narrative." Nevertheless he tells us something of the
early days of their acquaintance. Gilbert had mentioned the moon:

She told me in the most normal and unpretentious tone that she
hated the moon. I talked to the same lady several times afterwards;
and found that this was a perfectly honest statement of the fact. Her
attitude on this and other things might be called a prejudice; but it
could not possibly be called a fad, still less an affectation. She
really had an obstinate objection to all those natural forces that
seemed to be sterile or aimless; she disliked loud winds that seemed
to be going nowhere; she did not care much for the sea, a spectacle
of which I was very fond; and by the same instinct she was up against
the moon, which she said looked like an imbecile. On the other hand,
she had a sort of hungry appetite for all the fruitful things like
fields and gardens and anything connected with production; about
which she was quite practical. She practised g