Hyacinth was amazed at her vehement admiration for the class she was accustomed to anathematize. He turned her words over and over in his mind. They recalled, as so many different things seemed to do, his father’s vision of an Armageddon. Amid the confusion of Irish politics this thought of a Protestant and aristocratic revolt was strangely attractive; only it seemed to be wholly impossible. He bewildered himself in the effort to arrange the pieces of the game into some reasonable order. What was to be thought of a priesthood who, contrary to all the traditions of their Church, had nursed a revolution against the rights of property? or of a people, amazingly quick of apprehension, idealistic of temperament, who time after time submitted themselves blindfold to the tyranny of a single leader, worshipped a man, and asked no questions about his policy? How was he to place an aristocracy who refused to lead, and persisted in whining about their wrongs to the inattentive shopkeepers of English towns, gentlemen not wanting in honour and spirit courting a contemptuous bourgeoisie with ridiculous flatteries? In what reasonable scheme of things was it possible to place Protestants, blatant in their boasts about liberty, who hugged subjection to a power which deliberately fostered the growth of an ecclesiastical tyranny? Where amid this crazy dance of self-contradictory fanatics and fools was a sane man to find a place on which to stand? How, above all, was Ireland, a nation, to evolve itself? He turned with relief from these perplexities to the work that lay before him. However a man might worry and befog himself over the confused issues of politics, it was at all events a straightforward and simple matter to fight, and Hyacinth was going to the front as the eleventh Irish volunteer. To do Miss Goold justice, she had been extremely unwilling to enrol him, and had refused to take a penny of his money. Her conscience, such as it was after years of patriotic endeavour, rebelled against committing a young man whom she really liked to the companionship of the men she had enlisted and the care of their commander, Captain Albert Quinn.