he
same smile and imperceptible gesture. Indeed, he looked much more
like a sailor than a professor; his dark square face and clear eyes
and compact figure were of a type often seen among sailors; and in
whatever academic enclave he stood, he always seemed to have walked
in from outside, bringing with him some of the winds of the world and
some light from the ends of the earth.*

[* _G.K.'s Weekly_, Nov. 27, 1926.]

To return to my own notes. It is horribly characteristic that I wrote
them in an undated notebook, but I think that luncheon which lasted
so long must have been in 1911. The same year my father persuaded
both the Synthetic Society to elect Chesterton and Chesterton to
attend the Synthetic. Of his first meeting my father wrote to George
Wyndham:

Had you been at the Synthetic last night you would have witnessed a
memorable scene.

Place: Westminster Palace Hotel. Time: 9.40.

A. J. B. [Arthur Balfour, leader of the Conservative Party] is
speaking persuasively and in carefully modulated tones to an
attentive audience. Suddenly a crash as though the door were blown
open. A. J. B. brought to a halt. The whole company look round and in
rushes a figure exactly like the pictures of Mr. Wind when he blows
open the door and forces an entrance in the German child's story "Mr.
Wind and Madame Rain"--a figure enormous and distended, a kind of
walking mountain but with large rounded corners. It was G. K. C. who,
enveloped in a huge Inverness cape of light colour, thus made his
debut at the Synthetic. He rushed (not walked) to a chair, and was
dragged chair and all by Waggett and me as near as might be to the
table, where with a fresh crash he deposited his stick, and then his
hat. And there he sat, eager and attentive, forgetting all about his
stick and hat and coat, filling up the whole space at the bottom of
the table, drawing caricatures of the company on a sheet of foolscap,
a memorable figure, very welcome to me, but arousing the fury of the
conventional and the "dreary and well-informed" well represented by
Bailey Saunders who has been at me here half the morning trying to
convince me that he will ruin the society and ought never to have
been elected.

Some of the reactions of this new recruit have been touched on in his
_Autobiography:_

There I met old Haldane, yawning with all his Hegelian abysses, who
appeared