she would say, diffidently, "I think I'll take a little mutton!"
"Don't be a fool, Alice, you know you like chicken,"--and chicken
she got.

Visitors to the house in later years dwell on Mrs. Chesterton's
immense spirit of hospitality, the gargantuan meals, the eager desire
that guests should eat enormously, and the wittiness of her
conversation. Schoolboy contemporaries of Gilbert say that although
immensely kind, she alarmed them by a rather forbidding
appearance--"her clothes thrown on anyhow, and blackened and
protruding teeth which gave her a witchlike appearance. . . . The
house too was dusty and untidy." She called them always by their
surnames, both when they were little boys and after they grew up,
"Oldershaw, Bentley, Solomon."

"Not only," says Miss May Chesterton, "did Aunt Marie address
Gilbert's friends by their surnames, but frequently added darling to
them. I have heard her address Bentley when a young man thus;
'Bentley darling, come and sit over here,' to which invitation he
turned a completely deaf ear as he was perfectly content to remain
where he was!"

"Indiscriminately, she also addressed her maids waiting at table with
the same endearment."

A letter written when Gilbert was only six would seem to show that
Mrs. Chesterton had not yet become so reckless about her appearance,
and was still open to the appeal of millinery. ("She always was,"
says Annie.) The letter is from John Barker of High Street,
Kensington, and is headed in handwriting, "Drapery and Millinery