"You always went away," Dr. Pocock said, "chuckling over something,"
and he summed up the years of their friendship, saying, "You never
saw him without getting delight from his presence."

Sometimes he would grow abstracted in the train of his own thought,
and Father Ignatius Rice remembers an occasion when he was one of a
group discussing really bad lines of poetry. Gilbert broke into
something Frances was saying with the words, "That irritating person
Milton"--then, realising he had interrupted her, he broke off and
apologised profusely. When she had finished he went on "That
irritating person Milton--I can't find a single bad line in him."

Frances one day came in rather suddenly when Dr. Pocock was there,
and Gilbert exclaimed, "Oh you've broken it." She looked round
thinking she must have knocked something over. "No," he said, "it was
an idea." "It will come back," said Frances. "No," he said, "it got
broken." More usually he was indifferent to interruptions: sometimes
he welcomed them as grist for his mind's mill. Daily life went on
around him and often in his articles one can find traces of Frances's
daily activities as well as his own.

Attending him for his broken arm, Dr. Pocock told him at a certain
stage to write something--anything--to see if he could use a pen
again. After an instant's thought, Gilbert headed his paper with the
name of a prominent Jew and wrote:

I am fond of Jews
Jews are fond of money
Never mind of whose
I am fond of Jews
Oh, but when they lose
Damn it all, it's funny.

The name at the head (which wild horses would not drag from me) is
the key to this impromptu. It was really true that Gilbert was fond
of very many Jews. In his original group of J.D.C. friends, four Jews
had been included and with three of these his friendship continued
through life. Lawrence Solomon and his wife were among the
Beaconsfield neighbours and he saw them often. There was another kind
of Jew he very heartily disliked but he was at great pains to draw
this distinction himself.

Speaking at the Jewish West End Literary Society in 1911 he put the
question of what the real Jewish problem was. The Jews, he said, were
a race, born civilised. You never met a Jewish clod or yokel. They
represented one of the highest of civilised types. But while all
other races had local attachments, the Jews were universal and
scattered. They could not be expected to have patriotism for the
countries