Parnell would agree perfectly that this was a fact, nevertheless to do so-and-so was "unlucky," and there was the end of it--it must not be done. Certain combinations of numbers, of lights or circumstances, were "omens," and must be carefully avoided. Evidently, as an intelligent child will, he had eagerly caught up and absorbed all and every suggestion offered him by the converse of his nurse and her associates, and the impressions thus made were overlaid, but not erased, as he grew up isolated, by the very reticence of his nature, from his fellows. His dislike of the colour green, as being unlucky, he could not himself understand, for it is certainly not an Irish feeling, but it was there so decidedly that he would not sit in any room that had this colour in it, nor would he allow me to wear or use any of the magnificent silks or embroideries that were so often presented to him, if, as was generally the case, they had green in their composition. Parnell had no religious conviction of creed and {309} dogma, but he had an immense reverence, learnt, I think, from the Irish peasantry, for any genuine religious conviction. He personally believed in a vast and universal law of "attraction," of which the elemental forces of Nature were part, and the whole of which tended towards some unknown, and unknowable, end, in immensely distant periods of time. The world, he considered, was but a small part of the unthinkably vast "whole" through which the "Spirit" (the soul) of man passed towards the fulfilment of its destiny in the completion of "attraction." Of a first "Cause" and predestined "End" he was convinced, though he believed their attributes to be unknown and unknowable. As I have said before, he was not a man who read, or sought to acquire the opinions or knowledge of others, unless he had some peculiar interest in a subject. He considered, and formed his own beliefs and opinions, holding them with the same quiet, convinced recognition of his right of judgment that he extended to the judgment of others. Parnell's moral standard was a high one, if it is once conceded that as regards the marriage bond his honest conviction was that there is none where intense mutual attraction--commonly called love--does not exist, _or where it ceases to exist_. To Parnell's heart and conscience I was no more the wife of Captain O'Shea when he (Parnell) first met me than I was after Captain O'Shea had divorced me, ten years later. He took nothing from Captain O'Shea that the law of the land could give, or could dispossess him of, therefore he did him no wrong. I do not presume to say whether in this conviction he was right or wrong, but here I set down Parnell's point of view, with the happy knowledge that never for one moment have I {310} regretted that I made his point of view my own in this as in all things else.