hief figure, its pride and joy. "I lost
Gilbert," Lucian Oldershaw once said, "first when I introduced him to
Belloc, next when he married Frances, and finally when he joined the
Catholic Church. . . . I rejoiced, though perhaps with a maternal
sadness, at all these fulfillments."

Cecil wanted his brother always on hand. Belloc was already in the
country--a far more remote country--but even he, coming up to London,
mourned to my mother, "she has taken my Chesterton from me." Talking
it over however after the lapse of years, he agreed that in all
probability the move was a wise one. What may be called the smaller
fry of Fleet Street are less reasonable. One cannot avoid the feeling
that in all this masculine life so sure of its manhood, there
lingered something of the "schwaermerei" of the Junior Debating Club
furiously desiring each to be first with Gilbert. And in his love of
Fleet Street he so identified himself with them all that they felt he
was one of them and did not recognise the horizons wider than theirs
that were opening before him.

My husband and I are experts in changing residences and we listened
with the amusement of experts to the talk of theorists. For it was so
constantly assumed that on one side of a choice is disaster, on the
other perfection. Actually perfection does not belong to this earthly
state: if you go to Rome, as Gilbert himself once said, you sacrifice
a rich suggestive life at Wimbledon. Newman writing of a far greater
and more irrevocable choice called his story _Loss and Gain_--but he
had no doubt that the gain outweighed the loss. There were in
Gilbert's adult life three other big decisions--decisions of the
scale that altered its course. The first was his marriage. The second
was his reception into the Church. The third was his continued
dedication to the paper that his brother and Belloc had founded. In
deciding to marry Frances he was acting against his mother's wishes,
to which he was extremely sensitive. His decision to become a
Catholic had to be made alone: he had the sympathy of his wife but
not her companionship. In the decision to edit the paper he had not
even fully her sympathy: she always felt his creative work to be so
much more important and to be imperilled by the overwork the paper
brought. Gilbert was a man slow in action but it would be exceedingly
difficult to find instances of his doing anything that he did not
want to do. The theorists about marriage are like t