you went and put that question to them there would be
a scene. Mrs. Blogg would probably fall among the fire-irons, Knollys
would foam in convulsions on the carpet, Ethel would scream and take
refuge on the mantelpiece and Gertrude faint and break off her
engagement. Frances would--but no intelligent person can affect an
interest in what she does.

Lawrence Solomon told me that Mrs. Edward Chesterton did not approve
of the rather arty-crafty atmosphere of Bedford Park--that earliest
of Garden Cities, so conventionally unconventional--where Frances
lived. She did not like her son's friendship with the Bloggs and she
had chosen for him a girl who she felt would make him an ideal wife:
"Very open air," Mr. Solomon said. "Not booky, but good at games and
practical." He was not sure whether Gilbert realised this, but
personally I believe that Gilbert realised everything.

"Of course you know," Annie Firmin wrote to me, "that Aunt Marie
never liked Frances? Or Bentley?" Annie was the girl chosen by
Gilbert's mother. She was very much a member of the family.

"Did Gilbert ever speak to you," she wrote to me recently, "of the
old Saturday night parties at Barnes, at the home of the
grandparents--every Saturday night the family, or as many of it as
could, used to go down to Barnes to supper, and the 'boys' and Tom
Gilbert, Alice Chesterton's husband, used to sing round the supper
table. Many a one I went to when I was staying at Warwick Gardens. We
used to go on a red Hammersmith bus, before the days of motor cars."

On a longer trip they stayed at Berck in Belgium, and Cecil had a
strange idea, apparently regarded by him as humorous, which measures
the family absence of a Christian sense at this date. "Cecil urged me
to sit at the foot of the big Crucifix in the village street and let
him photograph me as Mary Magdalen! I _didn't_, and I don't know how
he thought he'd get away with the modern clothing."

Whatever Gilbert's mother may have planned for them, neither she nor
Gilbert had any romantic feeling for each other. Indeed Cecil was
definitely her favourite and she believed him the favourite of both
parents also. "He had more heart," she says, "than the more brilliant
Gilbert." Anyhow, his heart was shown more openly to her.

"Cecil was not much given to versifying," she wrote in another
letter, "he sent me the enclosed when my son was born. I value it so
much." Headed "To Annie" the poem is a long one.