In your last letter you enquired whether I saw anything of the Bloggs now. If you went and put that question to them there would be a scene. Mrs. Blogg would probably fall among the fire-irons, Knollys would foam in convulsions on the carpet, Ethel would scream and take refuge on the mantelpiece and Gertrude faint and break off her engagement. Frances would—but no intelligent person can affect an interest in what she does.
Lawrence Solomon told me that Mrs. Edward Chesterton did not approve of the rather arty-crafty atmosphere of Bedford Park—that earliest of Garden Cities, so conventionally unconventional—where Frances lived. She did not like her son's friendship with the Bloggs and she had chosen for him a girl who she felt would make him an ideal wife: "Very open air," Mr. Solomon said. "Not booky, but good at games and practical." He was not sure whether Gilbert realised this, but personally I believe that Gilbert realised everything.
"Of course you know," Annie Firmin wrote to me, "that Aunt Marie never liked Frances? Or Bentley?" Annie was the girl chosen by Gilbert's mother. She was very much a member of the family.
"Did Gilbert ever speak to you," she wrote to me recently, "of the old Saturday night parties at Barnes, at the home of the grandparents—every Saturday night the family, or as many of it as could, used to go down to Barnes to supper, and the 'boys' and Tom Gilbert, Alice Chesterton's husband, used to sing round the supper table. Many a one I went to when I was staying at Warwick Gardens. We used to go on a red Hammersmith bus, before the days of motor cars."
On a longer trip they stayed at Berck in Belgium, and Cecil had a strange idea, apparently regarded by him as humorous, which measures the family absence of a Christian sense at this date. "Cecil urged me to sit at the foot of the big Crucifix in the village street and let him photograph me as Mary Magdalen! I didn't, and I don't know how he thought he'd get away with the modern clothing."
Whatever Gilbert's mother may have planned for them, neither she nor Gilbert had any romantic feeling for each other. Indeed Cecil was definitely her favourite and she believed him the favourite of both parents also. "He had more heart," she says, "than the more brilliant Gilbert." Anyhow, his heart was shown more openly to her.
"Cecil was not much given to versifying," she wrote in another letter, "he sent me the enclosed when my son was born. I value it so much." Headed "To Annie" the poem is a long one. It begins with the "ancient comradeship, loyal and unbroken" in which they had "first seen life together."
Shining nights, tumultuous days,
Joy swift caught in sudden ways,
All the laughter, love and praise,
All the joys of living
These we shared together dear,
Plot and jest and story,
This is hid, shut off, unknown,
Seeing that to you alone
Is the wondrous Kingdom shown
And the power and Glory!
Annie's thoughts, then, and Cecil's were not greatly on the elder brother, who was pursuing his own romance with a heart that seems to have been fairly adequate in its energies.