_Autobiography_ of his grandfather's feeling that he himself was
something of a landmark in Kensington and that the family business
was honourable and important.

[* See Appendix A.]

The Chestertons, whatever the ups and downs of their past history,
were by now established in that English middle-class respectability
in which their son was to discover--or into which he was to bring--a
glow and thrill of adventurous romance. Edward Chesterton, Gilbert's
father, belonged to a serious family and a serious generation, which
took its work as a duty and its profession as a vocation. I wonder
what young house-agent today, just entering the family business,
would receive a letter from his father adjuring him to "become an
active steady and honourable man of business," speaking of "abilities
which only want to be judiciously brought out, of course assisted
with your earnest co-operation."

Gilbert's mother was Marie Grosjean, one of a family of twenty-three
children. The family had long been English, but came originally from
French Switzerland. Marie's mother was from an Aberdeen family of
Keiths, which gave Gilbert his second name and a dash of Scottish
blood which "appealed strongly to my affections and made a sort of
Scottish romance in my childhood." Marie's father, whom Gilbert never
saw, had been "one of the old Wesleyan lay-preachers and was thus
involved in public controversy, a characteristic which has descended
to his grandchild. He was also one of the leaders of the early
Teetotal movement, a characteristic which has not."*

[* _Autobiography_, pp. 11-12.]

When Edward became engaged to Marie Grosjean he complained that his
"dearest girl" would not believe that he had any work to do, but he
was in fact much occupied and increasingly responsible for the family
business.

There is a flavour of a world very remote from ours in the packet of
letters between the two and from their various parents, aunts and
sisters to one another during their engagement. Edward illuminates
poems "for a certaln dear good little child," sketches the "look out
from home" for her mother, hopes they did not appear uncivil in
wandering into the garden together at an aunt's house and leaving the
rest of the company for too long. He praises a friend of hers as
"intellectual and unaffected, two excellent things in woman,"
describes a clerk sent to France with business papers who "lost them
all, the careless dog, except the _Illustrated Lond