In the event he visited Omaha and Oklahoma City and went south as far as Nashville, Tennessee.
Possibly Frances had thought she would pass unnoticed but in fact, besides constant photographs of the pair, the lynx eye of the interviewer was upon her as much as upon him. On arrival at New York:
He shook hands with some half-dozen Customs officials who welcomed him to the city on their own behalf. The impression given by Mr. Chesterton as he moved majestically along the pier or on the ship was one of huge bulk. To the ordinary sized people on the pier he seemed to blot out the liner and the river. Mrs. Chesterton was busy with the baggage.
"My wife understands these things," he said with a sweep of his stick. "I don't." . . .
In order to get the two figures into the same picture one of the newspaper photographers requested Mr. Chesterton to sit in a big armchair while his wife stood beside him. When they were settled in the required pose he exclaimed: "I say I don't like this; people will think that I am a German."
Another newspaper remarks: "He was accompanied by his wife, who looked very small beside him. She attended to the baggage examination, opening trunks and bags while her husband delivered a short essay on the equality of men and women in England since the war." This reporter was perhaps not without irony: but if it actually happened like that, G.K. must have seen the joke too for he has a similar situation in the first scene of his play "The Judgement of Dr. Johnson." The same reporter adds that Chesterton speaks in essays, so that his interviewers "received a brief essay instead of a direct reply to a leading question."
We next come upon them in their New York hotel:
I found, with Mrs. Chesterton at the Biltmore, this big, gentle, leonine man of letters six feet of him and 200 odd lbs. There is a delightful story of how an American, driving with him through London, remarked "Everyone seems to know you, Mr. Chesterton."
"Yes," mournfully responded the gargantuan author, "and if they don't they ask."
He really doesn't look anything like as fat as his caricatures make him, however, and he has a head big enough to go with his massive tallness. His eyes are brilliant English blue behind the big rimmed eyeglasses: his wavy hair, steel grey; his heavy mustache, bright yellow. Physically he is the crackling electric spark of the heaven-home-and-mother party, the only man who can give the cleverest radical debaters a Roland for their Oliver.