trace" of investments by Rufus Isaacs in English Marconis. "For this
reason Cecil took the course he did--not through family pressure.
That pressure, _I still feel_,* was exerted, though possibly not
until the trial was over."

[* Italics mine.]

It was, then, the lady's feelings and not facts that had been offered
to me as evidence, and it was the merest luck that my book had not
appeared before Cecil's solicitors had spoken.

The account given in Lord Birkenhead's _Famous Trials_ is the Speech
for the Prosecution. Mrs. Cecil Chesterton's chapter is an
impressionist sketch of the court scene by a friend of the defendant.
What was wanted was an impartial account, but I tried in vain to
write it. The chronology of events, the connection between the
Government Commission and the Libel Case, the connection between the
English and American Marconi companies--it was all too complex for
the lay mind, so I turned the chapter over to my husband who has had
a legal training and asked him to write it for me.

_The Chestertons_ is concerned with Gilbert and Frances as well as
with Cecil; and the confusion between memory and imagination--to say
nothing of reliance on feelings unsupported by facts--pervades the
book. It can only be called a Legend, so long growing in Mrs. Cecil's
mind that I am convinced that when she came to write her book she
firmly believed in it herself. The starting-point was so ardent a
dislike for Frances that every incident poured fuel on the flame and
was seen only by its light. When I saw her, the Legend was beginning
to shape. She told me various stories showing her dislike: facts