en, the lady's feelings and not facts that had been offered
to me as evidence, and it was the merest luck that my book had not
appeared before Cecil's solicitors had spoken.

The account given in Lord Birkenhead's _Famous Trials_ is the Speech
for the Prosecution. Mrs. Cecil Chesterton's chapter is an
impressionist sketch of the court scene by a friend of the defendant.
What was wanted was an impartial account, but I tried in vain to
write it. The chronology of events, the connection between the
Government Commission and the Libel Case, the connection between the
English and American Marconi companies--it was all too complex for
the lay mind, so I turned the chapter over to my husband who has had
a legal training and asked him to write it for me.

_The Chestertons_ is concerned with Gilbert and Frances as well as
with Cecil; and the confusion between memory and imagination--to say
nothing of reliance on feelings unsupported by facts--pervades the
book. It can only be called a Legend, so long growing in Mrs. Cecil's
mind that I am convinced that when she came to write her book she
firmly believed in it herself. The starting-point was so ardent a
dislike for Frances that every incident poured fuel on the flame and
was seen only by its light. When I saw her, the Legend was beginning
to shape. She told me various stories showing her dislike: facts
offered by me were either denied or twisted to fit into the pattern.
I do not propose to discuss here the details of a thoroughly
unreliable book. Most of them I think answer themselves in the course
of this biography. With one or two points I deal in Appendix C. But I
will set down here one further incident that serves to show just how
little help this particular witness could ever be.

For, like Cecil's solicitors, I spoilt one telling detail for her.
She told me with great enthusiasm that Cecil had said that Gilbert
was really in love not with Frances but with her sister Gertrude, and
that Gertrude's red hair accounted for the number of red-headed
heroines in his stories. I told her, however, on the word of their
brother-in-law, that Gertrude's hair was not red. Mr. Oldershaw in
fact seemed a good deal amused: he said that Gilbert never looked at
either of the other sisters, who were "not his sort," and had eyes
only for Frances. Mrs. Cecil however would not relinquish this dream
of red hair and another love. In her book she wishes "red-gold" hair
on to Annie Firmin, because