s gashes of satisfied honour in each other's faces.*

[* _Chicago Tribune_, 12 March 1910.]

Two months after this an interviewer from the _Daily News_ visited
Beaconsfield and splashed headlines in the paper to the effect that
the spirit of Chesterton was inspiring a fight between the
leaseholders in Edwardes Square and a firm which had bought up their
garden to erect a super-garage. Barricades were erected by day and
destroyed in the night: a wild-eyed beadle held the fort with a
garden roller, and said G.K. "the creatures of my Napoleon [of
Notting Hill] have entered into the bodies of the staid burghers of
Kensington."

In none of these cases was there any likelihood, as the _Chicago
Tribune_ noted, of the actors in life having read the books they were
spiritedly staging. "Ideas have a life of their own," the _Daily
News_ interviewer tentatively ventured, but he may have been puzzled
as G.K. "agreed heartily" in the words, "I am no dirty nominalist."

Chesterton kept the reviewers busy as well as the interviewers and in
all his stories they noted one curiosity: "If time and space--or any
circumstances--interfere with the cutting of his Gordian knots, he
commands time and space to make themselves scarce, and circumstances
to be no more heard of."

About time and space this is true in a unique degree. For him time
seems to have had no existence, or perhaps rather to have been like a
telescope elongating and shortening at will. As a young man, it may
be remembered, he gave in the course of one letter two quite
irreconcilable statements of the length of time since events in his
school days. He had indeed the same difficulty about time as about
money--he mentions in the _Autobiography_ that after his watch was
stolen during a pro-Boer demonstration he never bothered to possess
another. In his stories this oddity became more marked. In _The Ball
and the Cross_ he relates adventures performed in leaping on and off
an omnibus in such fashion that the bus must have covered several
miles of ground: and then we are suddenly told it had gone the few
score yards from the bottom of Ludgate Hill to the top. Still
stranger are the records in _The Man Who Was Thursday_ and _Manalive_
of the happenings of a single day, while in _The Return of Don
Quixote_ a new organisation of society is described as though many
years old and then suddenly announced as having been on foot some
weeks.

But to return for one moment to the more