must fade into the light of common day, and the return
home meant the resumption of hard labour.

"For the moment," wrote Gilbert to Maurice Baring, "as Balzac said, I
am labouring like a miner in a landslide. Normally I would let it
slide. But if I did in this case I should break two or three really
important contracts, which I find I have returned from Jerusalem just
in time to save."

(A few years later when Sheed and Ward started, Gilbert wanted to
write a number of books for us to publish. His secretary found that
he had then thirty books contracted for with a variety of publishers!)

He had got home in April 1920: and a lecture tour was planned for the
United States at the beginning of the following year. The eight
months between saw the completion and publication of _The Uses of
Diversity_ (collected essays), _The New Jerusalem_ and _The
Superstition of Divorce_. And still went on the _New Witness_, the
_Illustrated London News_, articles, introductions, lectures,
conferences. Two letters to Maurice Baring clearly belong to these
months:

MY DEAR MAURICE,

I am so awfully distressed to hear you are unwell again; I do not
know whether I ought even to bother you with my sentiments; beyond my
sympathy; but if it is not too late, or too early, I will call on you
early next week; probably Monday, but I will let you know for certain
before then. I would have called on you long ago, let alone written,
but for this load of belated work which really seems to bury me day
after day. I never realised before that business can really block out
much bigger things. As you may possibly guess, I want to consider my
position about the biggest thing of all, whether I am to be inside it
or outside it. I used to think one could be an Anglo-Catholic and
really inside it; but if that was (to use an excellent phrase of your
own) only a Porch, I do not think I want a Porch, and certainly not a
Porch standing some way from the building. A Porch looks so silly,
standing all by itself in a field. Since then, unfortunately, there
have sprung up round it real ties and complications and difficulties;
difficulties that seemed almost duties. But I will not bother you
with all that now; and I particularly do not want you to bother
yourself, especially to answer this unless you want to. I know I have
your sympathy; and please God, I shall get things straight. Sometimes
one suspec