Aunt Marie was a bit of a tyrant in her own family! I have been many times at dinner, when there might be a joint, say, and a chicken—and she would say positively to Mr. Ed, "Which will you have, Edward?" Edward: "I think I'd like a bit of chicken!" Aunt M. fiercely: "No, you won't, you'll have mutton!" That happened so often. Sometimes Alice Grosjean, the youngest of Aunt M.'s family, familiarly known as "Sloper," was there. When asked her preference she would say, diffidently, "I think I'll take a little mutton!" "Don't be a fool, Alice, you know you like chicken,"—and chicken she got.
Visitors to the house in later years dwell on Mrs. Chesterton's immense spirit of hospitality, the gargantuan meals, the eager desire that guests should eat enormously, and the wittiness of her conversation. Schoolboy contemporaries of Gilbert say that although immensely kind, she alarmed them by a rather forbidding appearance—"her clothes thrown on anyhow, and blackened and protruding teeth which gave her a witchlike appearance. . . . The house too was dusty and untidy." She called them always by their surnames, both when they were little boys and after they grew up, "Oldershaw, Bentley, Solomon."
"Not only," says Miss May Chesterton, "did Aunt Marie address Gilbert's friends by their surnames, but frequently added darling to them. I have heard her address Bentley when a young man thus; 'Bentley darling, come and sit over here,' to which invitation he turned a completely deaf ear as he was perfectly content to remain where he was!"
"Indiscriminately, she also addressed her maids waiting at table with the same endearment."
A letter written when Gilbert was only six would seem to show that Mrs. Chesterton had not yet become so reckless about her appearance, and was still open to the appeal of millinery. ("She always was," says Annie.) The letter is from John Barker of High Street, Kensington, and is headed in handwriting, "Drapery and Millinery Establishment, Kensington High Street, September 21, 1880."
MADAM,
We are in receipt of instructions from Mr. Edward Chesterton to wait upon you for the purpose of offering for your selection a Bonnet of the latest Parisian taste, of which we have a large assortment ready for your choice; or can, if preferred, make you one to order.
Our assistant will wait upon you at any time you may appoint, unless you would prefer to pay a visit to our Millinery department yourself.
Mr. Chesterton informs us that as soon as you have made your selection he will hand us a cheque for the amount.
We are given to understand that Mr. Chesterton proposes this transaction as a remembrance of the anniversary of what, he instructs us to say, he regards as a happy and auspicious event. We have accordingly entered it in our books in that aspect.