“Selfish!” I was too indignant to protest more than by simply repeating the word. People always called you selfish, I thought, bitterly, when you only wanted to prevent _them_ from being so. I was convinced I was capable of making the most sublime sacrifices, if there were any need for them. Indeed I had often imagined myself making such sacrifices, making them secretly, but to be discovered in the end, when all my unsuspected nobility would suddenly be revealed, in some rather public way, perhaps, but too late to save those who had wilfully misunderstood me from agonies of remorse. It was my father who was selfish, with his idea of making everybody think and act exactly as he did. He was not only selfish, but he was jealous. That was at the back of all these objections to my going to Derryaghy. Only, he never realized his own faults; he found moral justifications for them. One thing was certain, I was going there to-morrow, whether he allowed me to or not. I was so full of these thoughts that I missed a great deal of what he was saying, but the gist of it I gathered――and I had heard it frequently before――that I should have my living to earn, my way to make in the world, that I shouldn’t have Mrs. Carroll always, and that the fewer luxurious tastes I acquired, the more chance I should have of being happy in the very obscure and humble path that was apparently all my father saw before me. If he really wanted to inspire me with feelings of humility, however, he could hardly have wasted his breath on a more thankless task. It was not that I saw myself becoming remarkably successful, but simply that I seemed to have had a glimpse of what an extraordinary youth I was. My interview with my father had made me forget all about my unhappy behaviour at Derryaghy, and as soon as I was in bed I began to compose a passionate drama, of which I was, naturally, the hero, but in which, without any rehearsal, Katherine Dale appeared as heroine. I had braved my father’s anger in order to be with her, and now I was no longer shy, the right words rushed from me in a torrent. Sometimes our love story was happy, more often it was a perfect bath of tears. Indeed, I think I must have had some inborn feeling for the stage, so frequently did I lead up to the most telling and lime-lit situations, on the very weakest of which a curtain could only go down to a thunder of applause. In this present drama there was a fathomless well of sentiment, of “love interest” of the most uncompromising type. I had read lately, in bound volumes of _Temple Bar_, one or two novels by Miss Rhoda Broughton, and as I lay there in my small room, with a text above my head, I was far from anxious to “keep innocency.” On the contrary, I was one of those bold, dark, rugged, cynical creatures, one of those splendid ugly men, who carry in their breasts a smouldering fire of passion for some girl “with eyes like a shot partridge”; one