Willie and The O'Gorman Mahon had been returned at the General Election, and many and varied were the stories The O'Gorman Mahon told me subsequently of their amusing experiences. How they kissed nearly every girl in Clare and drank with every man--and poor Willie loathed Irish whisky--how Willie's innate fastidiousness in dress brought gloom into the eyes of the peasantry until his unfeigned admiration of their babies and live stock, scrambing together about the cabins, "lifted a smile to the lip." The O'Gorman Mahon was then a tall, handsome old man with a perfect snowstorm of white hair, and eyes as merry and blue as those of a boy. He could look as fierce as an old eagle on occasion, however, and had fought, in his day, more duels than he could remember. A fine specimen of the old type of Irishman. When he came down to Eltham to see us, Willie and I took him over to Greenwich and gave him a fish dinner. We sat late into the night talking of Irish affairs, and The O'Gorman Mahon said to me, "If you meet Parnell, Mrs. O'Shea, be good to him. His begging expedition to America has about finished him, and I don't believe he'll last the session out." {57} He went on to speak of Mr. Parnell; how aloof and reserved he was, and how he received any inquiries as to his obviously bad health with a freezing hostility that gave the inquirers a ruffled sense of tactlessness. Willie broke in to say that he and I were going to give some political dinners in London and would ask Parnell, though he was sure he would not come. The O'Gorman Mahon paid some idle compliment, but I was not interested particularly in their stories of Parnell, though I mentally decided that if I gave any dinners to the Irish Party for Willie I would make a point of getting Parnell. On the 26th of April the members of the Irish Party met in Dublin to elect a chairman, and the meeting was adjourned without coming to a decision, but in May Mr. Parnell was chosen as leader. Willie voted for him, with twenty-two others, and telegraphed to me to say that he had done so, but feared that Mr. Parnell might be too "advanced." The fact was that many people admired steady-going William Shaw, the then chairman, as being very "safe," and doubted whither their allegiance to Mr. Parnell would lead them. Years after, when their politics had diverged, Mr. Parnell said: "I was right when I said in '80, as Willie got up on that platform at Ennis, dressed to kill, that he was just the man we did not want in the Party." After the meeting of Parliament Willie was insistent that I should give some dinner parties in London, and, as his rooms were too small for this purpose, we arranged to have a couple of private rooms at Thomas's Hotel--my old haunt in Berkeley Square. There were no ladies' clubs in those days, but this hotel served me for many years as well as such a club could have done. {58}