He stared at her for a moment in an almost abstracted fashion as if he had not fully understood; then he laughed quite suddenly and uncontrollably, like a man who has seen something very close to him that he knows he is a fool not to have seen before. So a man will fall over something in a game of hiding-and-seeking, and get up shaken with laughter.

"What a bump your mother earth gives you when you fall out of an aeroplane," he said. "What a thing is horse-sense, and how much finer really than the poetry of Pegasus! And when there is everything else as well that makes the sky clean and the earth kind, beauty and bravery and the lifting of the head—well, you are right enough, Joan. Will you take care of me?"*

[* Pp. 89, 119.]

Frances was not especially interesting intellectually although she had much more mind than Joan in the story, but above all she carried with her a "quality of repose with a stir of refreshment."

"Will you take care of me?"

Neither of them probably had measured at first all that that care would mean. Only bit by bit would the full degree of his physical dependence, as we have seen it through the years, become clear to her. The strenuous campaign in the matter of appearances begun during the engagement might alter in direction but had rather to be intensified in degree as he grew older. Shaving, bathing, even dressing were daily problems to him. "Heat the water," an early secretary at Overroads heard Frances saying to the cook, "Mr. Chesterton is going to have a bath." And "O, need I," came in tones of deepest depression from the study. The thought of that vast form climbing into and out of the bathtub does make one realise how a matter of easy everyday practice to the normal person became to him almost a heroic venture. His tie, his boots, were equally a problem: I remember his appearing once at breakfast in two ties and claiming, when I noticed it, that it proved he paid too much, not too little, attention to dress. Doctors, dentists, oculists were all needed at times, but Gilbert would never discover the need or achieve appointments or the keeping of them. Still more serious was the question of how the two were to live and to do all the acts of generosity that to them both seemed almost more necessary than their own living. Hard as he worked, Dorothy Collins has told me that when she came to them in this year (1926) they had almost nothing saved.

It may be remembered that Gilbert wrote to Frances during their engagement that his only quality as a shopper was ability to get rid of money and that he was not good at "such minor observances" as bringing home what he had bought or even remembering what it was. Through boyhood and into manhood his parents, as we have seen, had never given him money to handle and he certainly never learnt to handle it later in life. "He spent money like water," Belloc told me. Realising his own incapacity he arranged fairly early to have Frances look after their finances, bank the money and draw checks. "When we set up a house, darling," he had said, "I think you will have to do the shopping." All he handled was small sums by way of pocket money—"very playfully regarded by both" Father O'Connor writes, for he had often witnessed the joke that they made of it.

"What could she do," he continues, "when Gilbert went out with £5.18.6 or words to that effect, and came back invariably without a copper, not knowing where his money had gone?"

At a hotel in Warsaw the manager entreated him not to bring every beggar in town around the door. He could never refuse a beggar and the money not given away was probably dropped in the street or in a shop. The solution they hit upon was that of accounts at the shops and hotels or anything that could not simply be brought home by Frances and placed by his side. Father O'Connor wrote to Dorothy Collins of "the loving care with which Frances anticipated all his wishes—never was the cigar box out of date—you know this, and it was so long before you came. And his toddle to the Railway Hotel for port or a quart according to climatic conditions. . . . She devised and built the studio for Gilbert to play at and play in. It used to be crowded at receptions, as on the night when Gilbert broke his arm. He had been toying with the tankard that evening, to the detriment of social intercourse, but not much, I thought. We were all in good fettle. The Ballad of the White Horse was just going to the printers. That was never penned in Fleet Street. Nor The Everlasting Man. He wrote verbosely there in the office. At Beaconsfield he was pulled together, braced."

The studio, become the house, almost certainly cost more than they had planned—building always does—but the two great drains were the benefactions and the paper. Frances signed, as a matter of course, every check Gilbert wanted, but I imagine it was sometimes with a little sigh that she wrote the checks for the endless telephones, telegrams, printers' bills and other expenses that poured out to support a paper which to her seemed chiefly a drain on Gilbert's energies that could not but diminish his creative writing. In the six years 1927-1933, he paid over £3000 into the paper. 1931-2 were the worst years. In them the checks she had to sign totalled £1500.