e Gilbert and
Frances were much in contact with the extreme Anglo-Catholic group in
the Church of England. In the best of that group--and many of them
are very very good--there is a sense of taking part in a crusade to
restore Catholicism to the whole country. Canon Scott Holland led a
campaign for social justice and many of the same group mixed this
with devotion to Our Lady, belief in the Real Presence, and a
profound love of the Catholic past of England. George Wyndham's wife,
Lady Grosvenor, was one of this group and also her friend Father
Philip Waggett of the Cowley Fathers. Father Waggett, a member of the
Synthetic Society and intimate with my parents, became also intimate
with the Chestertons.

Ralph Adams Cram described his own meeting with Chesterton, arranged
by Father Waggett.

Father Waggett asked my wife and myself once when we were staying
in London, whom we would like best to meet--"anyone from the King
downward." We chose Chesterton who was a very particular friend of
Father Waggett. At that time we put on a dinner at the Buckingham
Palace Hotel (in those days the haunt of all the County families) and
in defiance of fate, had this dinner in the public dining room. We
had as guests Father Waggett, G. K. C. and Mrs. Chesterton. The
entrance into the dining room of the short processional created
something of a sensation amongst the aforesaid County families there
assembled. Father Waggett, thin, cropheaded monk in cassock and rope;
G. K. C., vast and practically globular; little Mrs. Chesterton, very
South Kensington in moss green velvet; my wife and myself.

The dinner was a riot. I have the clearest recollection of G. K. C.
seated ponderously at the table, drinking champagne by magnums,
continually feeding his face with food which, as he was constantly
employed in the most dazzling and epigrammatic conversation, was apt
to fall from his fork and rebound from his corporosity, until the
fragments disappeared under the table.

He and Father Waggett egged each other on to the most preposterous
amusements. Each would write a triolet for the other to illustrate.
They were both as clever with the pencil as with the pen, and they
covered the backs of menus with most astonishing literary and
artistic productions. I particularly remember G. K. C. suddenly
looking out of the dining room window towards Buckingham Palace and
announcing th