one way or the other--she will give it you: as she will give health
or necessary money or success in a pure love. She is our Blessed
Mother.

I have not used my judgment in this letter. I am inclined to
destroy it, but I shall send it. Don't answer it.

Yours ever

H. BELLOC.

At top of letter: "My point is If it is right She knows. If it is
not right She knows."

Gilbert believed it, and he knew that as he came to the Church he was
coming to Our Lady.

Now I can scarcely remember a time when the image of Our lady did
not stand up in my mind quite definitely, at the mention or the
thought of all these things. I was quite distant from these things,
and then doubtful about these things; and then disputing with the
world for them, and with myself against them; for that is the
condition before conversion. But whether the figure was distant, or
was dark and mysterious, or was a scandal to my contemporaries, or
was a challenge to myself--I never doubted that this figure was the
figure of the Faith; that she embodied, as a complete human being
still only human, all that this Thing had to say to humanity. The
instant I remembered the Catholic Church, I remembered her; when I
tried to forget the Catholic Church, I tried to forget her! When I
finally saw what was nobler than my fate, the freest and the hardest
of all my acts of freedom, it was in front of a gilded and very gaudy
little image of her in the port of Brindisi, that I promised the
thing that I would do, if I returned to my own land.*

[* _The Well and the Shallows_, pp. 176-7.]

In his _Chaucer_, G.K. quoted with considerable amusement a learned
critic who said it was "possible" that the poet had "passed through a
period of intense devotion, more especially towards the Virgin Mary."
"It is," he comments. "It does occur from time to time. I do not
quite understand why Chaucer must have 'passed through' this fit of
devotion; as if he had Mariolatry like the measles. Even an amateur
who has encountered this malady may be allowed to testify that it
does not usually visit its victim for a brief 'period'; it is
generally chronic and (in some sad cases I have known) quite
incurable."*

[* _Chaucer_, p. 121.]

_The Queen of Seven Swords_ is the great expression of Gilbert's
"chronic" love of Our Lady:

And men looked up at the woman made for the morning
When the stars were young,