It was extraordinary, Henry thought, how little at home he had felt in Dublin. He had the feel of Ballymartin in his bones. He had kinship with the people in Belfast. At Rumpell's and at Boveyhayne he had had no sensation of alien origin. He had stepped into the life of the school as naturally as Gilbert Farlow had done, and at Boveyhayne, even when he still had difficulty in catching the dialect of the fishermen, he had felt at home. But in Dublin, he had an uneasy feeling that after all, he was a stranger. In his first year at Trinity, he had been brutally contemptuous of the city and its inhabitants. "They can't even put up the names of the streets so that people can read them," he said to John Marsh soon after he arrived in Dublin. "They're so _damned_ incompetent!" And Marsh had told him to control his Ulster blood. "You're right to be proud of Ulster," he had said, "but you oughtn't to go about talking as if the rest of Ireland were inhabited by fools!" "I know I oughtn't," Henry replied, "but I can't help it when I see the way these asses are letting Dublin down!" That was how he felt about Dublin and the Dublin people, that Dublin was being "let down" by her citizens. His first impression of the city was that it was noble, even beautiful, in spite of its untidiness, its distress. He would wander about the streets, gazing at the fine old Georgian houses, tumbling into decay, and feel so much anger against the indifferent citizens that sometimes he felt like hitting the first Dublin man he met ... hitting him hard so that he should bleed!... "I feel as if Dublin were like an old mansion left by a drunken lord in the charge of a drunken caretaker," he said to Marsh. "It's horrible to see those beautiful houses decaying, but it's more horrible to think that nobody cares!" Marsh had taken him one Sunday to a house where there were ceilings that were notable even in Dublin which is full of houses with beautiful ceilings. "If we had houses like that in Belfast," Henry had said, as they came away, "we wouldn't let them become slums!" "No," retorted Marsh, unable to restrain himself from sneering, "you'd make peep-shows out of them and charge for admission!" "Well, that would be better than turning them into slums," Henry answered good-humouredly. "Would it?" Marsh replied.