ology and all the things their readers had never heard
of; and their readers did not mind me a bit.*

[* _Autobiography_, pp. 185-6.]

Mr. Titterton, who worked also on the _Daily News_ and came at this
time to know G.K. in the Pharos Club, says that at first he was
rather shy of the other men on the staff but after a dinner at which
he was asked to speak he came to know and like them and to be at home
in Fleet Street. He liked to work amid human contact and would write
his articles in a public-house or in the club or even in the street,
resting the paper against a wall.

Frank Swinnerton records* a description given him by Charles
Masterman of

how Chesterton used to sit writing his articles in a Fleet St.
cafe, sampling and mixing a terrible conjunction of drinks, while
many waiters hovered about him, partly in awe, and partly in case he
should leave the restaurant without paying for what he had had. One
day . . . the headwaiter approached Masterman. "Your friend," he
whispered, admiringly, "he very clever man. He sit and laugh. And
then he write. And then he laugh at what he write."

[* _Georgian Scene_, p. 94.]

He loved Fleet Street and did a good deal of drinking there. But not
only there. When (in the _Autobiography_) he writes of wine and song
it is not Fleet Street and its taverns that come back to his mind but
"the moonstruck banquets given by Mr. Maurice Baring," the garden in
Westminster where he fenced with real swords against one more
intoxicated than himself, songs shouted in Auberon Herbert's rooms
near Buckingham Palace.

After marriage Frances seems to have given up the struggle, so
ardently pursued during their engagement, to make him tidy. By a
stroke of genius she decided instead to make him picturesque. The
conventional frock-coat worn so unconventionally, the silk hat
crowning a mat of hair, disappeared, and a wide-brimmed slouch hat
and flowing cloak more appropriately garbed him. This was especially
good as he got fatter. He was a tall man, six foot two. As a boy he
had been thin, but now he was rapidly putting on weight. Neither he
nor Cecil played games (the tennis did not last!) but they used to go
for long walks, sometimes going off together for a couple of days at
a time. Gilbert still liked to do this with Frances, but the
sedentary Daily life and the consumption of a good deal of beer did
not help towards a graceful figure. By 1903 G.K. was called a fat
h