t dawned. On their second meeting Father
O'Connor had startled, indeed almost shattered Gilbert, with certain
rather lurid knowledge of human depravity which he had acquired in
the course of his priestly experience. At the house to which they
were going, two Cambridge undergraduates spoke disparagingly of the
"cloistered" habits of the Catholic clergy, saying that to them it
seemed that to know and meet evil was a far better thing than the
innocence of such ignorance. To Gilbert, still under the shock of a
knowledge compared with which "these two Cambridge gentlemen knew
about as much of real evil as two babies in the same perambulator,"
the exquisite irony of this remark suggested a thought. Why not a
whole comedy of cross purposes based on the notion of a priest with a
knowledge of evil deeper than that of the criminal he is converting?
He carried out this idea in the story of "The Blue Cross," the first
Father Brown detective story. Father O'Connor's account adds the
details that he had himself once boasted of buying five sapphires for
five shillings, and that he always carried a large umbrella and many
brown paper parcels. At the Steinthal dining table, an artist friend
of the family made a sketch of Father O'Connor which later appeared
on the wrapper of _The Innocence of Father Brown_.

Beyond one or two touches of this sort the idea had been a suggestion
for a character, not a portrait, and in the _Autobiography_ and in
the _Dickens_ Gilbert has a good deal to say of interest to the
novelist about how such suggestions come and are used. He never
believed that Dickens drew a portrait, as it were, in the round.
Nature just gives hints to the creative artist. And it used to amuse
"Father Brown" to find that such touches of observation as noting
where an ash-tray had got hidden behind a book seemed to Gilbert
quasi miraculous. Left to himself he merely dropped ashes on the
floor from his cigar. "He did not smoke a pipe and cigarettes were
prone to set him on fire in one place or another."

A frequent visitor, Father O'Connor noted his fashion of work and
reading, and the abstracted way he often moved and spoke. "Call it
mooning, but he never mooned. He was always working out something in
his mind, and when he drifted from his study to the garden and was
seen making deadly passes with his sword-stick at the dahlias, we
knew that he had got to a dead end in his composition and was getting
his thoughts into order."