he nations to the brightness of your house--is a thing so utterly
outside my own temperament that I was formed by nature to admire and
not understand it. God made me very simply--as he made a tree or a
pig or an oyster: to perform certain functions. The best thing he
gave me was a perfect and unshakable trust in those I love. . . .

Gilbert's sympathy with his future mother-in-law may have been put
to some slight strain by an incident related by Lucian Oldershaw.
Mrs. Blogg begged him to talk to Gilbert about his personal
appearance--clothes and such matters--and to entreat him to make an
effort to improve it. One can imagine how much he must have disliked
the commission! Anyhow, he decided it would be better to do it away
from home and he suggested to Gilbert a trip to the seaside. Arrived
there he broached the subject. Gilbert, he says, was not the least
angry, but answered quite seriously that Frances loved him as he was
and that it would be absurd for him to try to alter. It was only out
of a later and deeper experience of women that he was able to write
"A man's friends like him but they leave him as he is. A man's wife
loves him and is always trying to change him."

A good many things happened in the course of this long engagement.
Frances and Gilbert were both young and long engagements were normal
at that period, when the idea of a wife continuing to earn after
marriage was unheard of. There were obvious disadvantages in the long
delay before marriage but also certain advantages. The two got to
know each other with a close intimacy: they were comrades as well as
lovers and carried both these relationships into married life. For
the biographer the advantage has been immense, since every separation
between the pair meant a batch of letters. The discerning will have
noted that there are in these letters considerable excisions: parts
Frances would not show even to the biographer. . But they are the
richest quarry from which to dig for the most important period of any
man's life; the period richest in mental development and the shaping
of character. It is, too, the only period of his adult life when
Gilbert wrote letters at all, unless they were absolutely unavoidable.

Even in a small family two members will tend to draw together more
closely than the rest, and this was so with Frances and her sister
Gertrude. They adored one another and Frances offered her to Gilbert
as a sister, with especially confi