pockets, obediently went upstairs, gave the message and returned
without discovering what had happened.

The boys who played these jokes on him had at the same time an
extraordinary respect, both for his intellectual acquirements and for
his moral character. One boy, who rather prided himself in private
life on being a man about town, stopped him one day in the passage
and said solemnly, "Chesterton, I am an abandoned profligate." G.K.
replied, "I'm sorry to hear it." "We watched our talk," one of them
said to me, "when he was with us." His home and upbringing were felt
by some of his schoolfellows to have definitely a Puritan tinge about
them, although on the other hand the more Conservative elements
regarded them as politically dangerous. Mr. Oldershaw relates that
his own father, who was a Conservative in politics and had also
joined the Catholic Church, seriously warned him against the
Agnosticism and Republicanism of the Chesterton household. But even
at this age his schoolfellows recognised that he had begun the great
quest of his life. "We felt," said Oldershaw, "that he was looking
for God."

I suppose it was in part the keenness of the inner vision that
produced the effect of external sleepiness and made it possible to
pack Gilbert's pockets with snow; but it was also the fact that he
was observing very keenly the kind of thing that other people do not
bother to observe. I remember my mother telling me, when I first came
out, that she had almost ceased trying to draw people's characters
and imaginatively construct their home lives, because for the first
time in her life she was trying to notice how they were dressed. She
was not noticeably successful. Gilbert Chesterton never even tried to
see what everyone else saw. All the time he was seeing qualities in