She had summered in the stifling basement and had grown thin. She toiled hopelessly upstairs with sweat upon her forehead, she limped hopelessly downstairs, groaning with the burden of living, as she stooped to gather into her hands some particularly obvious trail of dust left by her broom. As she grew lean the man in the street filled out with the new confidence of the truce. He sunned himself at the shop doors, and heard unmoved the sounds of motors back-firing. One of the avatars who roamed Dublin and called on us now and then, grew prophetic over a lobster salad in the little flat. “Ireland’s only hope now is from the North,” he said thoughtfully. “The Dail is becoming respectable. It has lost its soul.” “You expected them to reject the terms?” “Not at all. I expected them to accept. Sinn Fein has grown respectable. The North is the only hope.” He put a lobster claw on the carpet and brought his great foot down on it. “That’s a sight you wouldn’t see out of Ireland,” he said: “an avatar cracking a lobster’s claw.” “The carpet belongs to Desmond Fitzgerald,” I answered. “So you have the spectacle of an avatar cracking a lobster’s claw on a Cabinet Minister’s carpet, a sight which certainly could not be seen outside Ireland.” “It’s like this,” he continued. “Ireland is one of the spiritual poles of the earth, and the salvation of the world must come through her. The mould of Western civilisation must be broken up. It’s rotten. If Ireland can stay as she is and not sink back into the materialism of other countries, she has the power to strike the blow that will shatter the present system. There is no sham in the North, the Ulsterman is fundamental. He holds the germ of spirituality in him like every Irishman does. The North will come to blows with the South. That will start the whole thing. It’s going to be a bloody fight.” “I suppose the Irishman’s spiritual,” I answered. “He is certainly always saying he is. Personally I believe he mixes up spirituality with an astonishing ability to shift his point of view and make it fit the occasion. Look how the truce is being broken every day in the most barbarous way, and no doubt the truce breakers salve their consciences by saying they want a Republic and not a Free State, and that they are holding to a spiritual ideal. You people can be material enough. Irish landladies can hold their own with any landladies in the world.” “The trouble will start quickly,” the avatar announced. “It will start over the boundary commission, I don’t know how I know, but something tells me. A clash between England and America will follow, the colonies will be divided among themselves. The British Empire will go. Europe will go. In Ireland, nursed through all the chaos, will be a small group of people who will undertake the reconstruction of the world.”