g and that I shall appear at your Apartment at 10.45
or 10.30 at earliest. P.M.! You are only just returned. You are
hardly settled down. It is an intolerable nuisance. You heartily wish
I had not mentioned it.

Well, you see that [arrow pointing to "Telegrams, Coolham,
Sussex"], if you wire there before _One_ you can put me off, but if
you do I shall melt your keys, both the exterior one which forms the
body or form of the matter and the interior one which is the mystical
content thereof.

Also if you put me off I shall not have you down here ever to see
the _Oak Room_, the _Tapestry Room_, the _Green Room_ etc.

Yrs,
H.B.

Early in his Battersea life Gilbert received a note from Max
Beerbohm, the great humourist, introducing himself and suggesting a
luncheon together.

I am quite different from my writings (and so, I daresay, are you
from yours)--so that we should not necessarily fail to hit it off.

I, in the flesh, am modest, full of commonsense, very genial, and
rather dull.

What you are remains to be seen--or not to be seen--by me, according
to your decision.

Gilbert's decision was for the meeting and an instant liking grew
into a warm friendship. As in J.D.C. days Gilbert had written verse
about his friends, so now did he try to sum up an impression, perhaps
after some special talk:

And Max's queer crystalline sense
Lit, like a sea beneath a sea,
Shines through a shameless impudence
As shameless a humility.
Or Belloc somewhat rudely roared
But all above him when he spoke
The immortal battle trumpets broke
And Europe was a single sword.*

[* Unpublished fragment.]

Somewhere about this time must have occurred the incident
mentioned by George Bernard Shaw in a note which appeared
in the _Mark Twain Quarterly_ (Spring, 1937):

I cannot remember when I first met Chesterton. I was so much struck
by a review of Scott's _Ivanhoe_ which he wrote for the _Daily News_
in the course of his earliest notable job as feuilletonist to that
paper that I wrote to him asking who he was and where he came from,
as he was evidently a new star in literature. He was either too shy
or too lazy to answer. The next thing I remember is his lunching with
us on quite intimate terms, accompanied by Belloc.

The actual first meeting, forgotten by Shaw, is remembered by
Gilbert's brother-in-law, Lucian Oldershaw. He and Gilbert had gone
togeth