"I've told you that already," Mr. Quinn replied firmly, closing his lips down tightly. "I want you to have Irish friends as well as English friends, and I've learned this much from livin', that a man seldom makes friends ... _friends,_ mind you ... after he's twenty-five. You only make acquaintances after that age. I'd like well to think there were people in Ireland that had as tight a hold on your friendship, Henry, as Gilbert Farlow and them other lads have.... An' there's another thing," he went on, leaning forward as he spoke and wagging his forefinger at Henry. "If you go to Trinity with a kindly feelin' for Ireland, it'll be something to think there's one man in the place that has a decent thought for his country an' isn't an imitation Englishman. Who knows what good you might do there?" He let his speculations consume him. "You might change the character of the whole college. You ... you might make it Irish. You ... you might be the means of turnin' the Provost into an Irishman an' start him takin' an interest in his country. The oul' lad might turn Fenian an' get transported or hung!..." When he had ceased to speculate on what might happen if Henry began an Irish crusade in Trinity, he spoke again of Marsh. "You'll like him," he said. "I know you will. He's a bit off his head, of course, but that's neither here nor there. The man's a scholar an' I think he writes bits of poetry. I've never seen any of his pieces, but somebody told me he wrote things. I'd like well to have a poet in the house!" "Is he a Catholic?" Henry asked. His father nodded his head. "An' very religious, too, I believe," he said. "Still, that's neither here nor there. I met him up in Dublin. Ernest Harper told me about him!" Ernest Harper was the painter-poet who had influenced so many young men in Ireland, and Mr. Quinn had come into the circle of his friends through the Irish co-operative movement. He had made a special visit to Dublin to consult Harper about the education of his son, telling him of his desire that Henry should have a strong national sense ... "but none of your damned theosophy, mind!..." and Harper had recommended John Marsh to him. Marsh had lately taken his B.A. degree and he was anxious to earn money in circumstances that would enable him to proceed to his M.A. "That lad'll do rightly," said Mr. Quinn, and he arranged to meet Marsh in the queer, untidy room in Merrion Square where Harper edited his weekly paper. "He has the walls of the place covered with pictures of big women with breasts like balloons," Mr. Quinn said afterwards when he tried to describe Ernest Harper's office, "an' he talks to you about fairies 'til you'd near believe a leprechaun 'ud hop out of the coalscuttle if you lifted the lid!" Soon afterwards, they met, and Mr. Quinn explained his purpose to Marsh. "I'm not a Nationalist, thank God, nor a Catholic, thank God again, but I'm Irish an' I want my son to know about Ireland an' to feel as Irish as I do myself!"