A group of St. Louis women also heard Chesterton deliver a lecture paradoxically entitled,
“The New Enslavement of Women.”
This gave a compelling portrayal of how women exchanged the freedom of home for the slavery of office,
“Twenty million young women rose to their feet with the cry, ‘WE WILL NOT BE DICTATED TO!’ And immediately proceeded to become stenographers!”
CHAPTER SEVEN
SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF G. K. C.
Mr. Bernard Shaw told the author that he was so much struck by a review of Scott’s “Ivanhoe” which appeared in the “Daily News” while Chesterton was holding his earliest notable job as feuilletonist to the paper that he wrote to him, “asking him who he was and where he came from, as he was evidently a new star in literature. He was either too shy or too lazy to answer. The next thing I remember is his lunching with us on quite intimate terms, accompanied by Belloc.
“Our actual physical contacts, however, were few, as he never belonged to the Fabian Society nor came to its meetings (this being my set) whilst his Fleet Street Bohemianism lay outside my vegetarian, teetotal, non-smoking tastes. Besides, he apparently liked literary society; and it had the grace to like him. I avoided it and it loathed me.
“But, of course, we were very conscious of one another. I enjoyed him and admired him keenly; and nothing could have been more generous than his treatment of me. Our controversies were exhibition spars, in which nothing could have induced either of us to hurt the other.”
In July, 1933, the Canadian Authors’ Association paying its first official visit to England, was entertained at Claridge’s by the Royal Society of Literature. Miss Paty Carter recalls that at the end of the luncheon the toast was proposed by Rudyard Kipling and ably seconded by Chesterton. The contrast in appearance between the mover and seconder of the toast, caused a ripple of amusement: a contrast that might be likened to the Giant and Jack in the fairy story. Though Kipling, in reality, was only slightly below average size, and if a giant, Chesterton at least conveyed the impression of an amiable, gentle, likable giant.
“You will be much puzzled at my occupying any space—so much space—in this august assembly,” he began, “and why any word of mine could possibly add to what this great literary genius, Mr. Kipling, has said. I cannot pose as a newspaper man; one reads of newspaper men slipping in through half-closed doors.