given by his parents no money for which to feel responsible,
not made to keep hours--how could Frances take a man of twenty-seven,
and make him over again?

But there is, of course, a most genuine difficulty in all this, which
Gilbert once touched on when he denied the accusation of absence of
mind. It was, he claimed, presence of mind--on his thoughts--that
made him unaware of much else. And indeed no man can be using his
mind furiously in every direction at once. Anyone who has done even a
little creative work, anyone even who has lived with people who do
creative work, knows the sense of bewilderment with which the mind
comes out of the world of remoter but greater reality and tries to
adjust with that daily world in which meals are to be ordered,
letters answered, and engagements kept. What must this pain of
adjustment not have been to a mind almost continuously creative? For
I have never known anyone work such long hours with a mind at such
tension as Gilbert's.

There was no particular reason why he should have written his article
for the _Daily News_ as the reporter writes his--at top speed at a
late hour--but he usually did. The writing of it was left till the
last minute and, if at home, he would need Frances to get it off for
him before the deadline was reached. But he often wrote by preference
in Fleet Street--at the Cheshire Cheese or some little pub where
journalists gathered--and then he would hire a cab to take the
article a hundred yards or so to the _Daily News_ office.

The cab in those days was the hansom with its two huge wheels over
which one perilously ascended, while the driver sat above, only to be
communicated with by opening a sort of trap door in the roof. Gilbert
once said that the imaginative Englishman in Paris would spend his
days in a cafe, the imaginative Frenchman in London would spend his
driving in a hansom. In the _Napoleon_, the thought of the cab moves
him to write:

Poet whose cunning carved this amorous cell
Where twain may dwell.

E. V. Lucas, his daughter tells us, used to say that if one were
invited to drive with Gilbert in a hansom cab it would have to be two
cabs: but this is not strictly true. For in those days I drove with
Gilbert and Frances too in a hansom--he and I side by side, she on
his knee. We must have given to the populace the impression he says
any hansom would give on first view to an ancient Roman or a simple
barbarian--that the driver riding on