“I’ll wait and see if it comes off,” I said doubtfully. “Ireland’s rather a small place to be as important as that. Personally, I think she’s too old to influence the world very much now. Her psyche was arrested in the days of Cuchulan. She’s pagan at heart. Christianity fits her like a hair shirt. She’s ages old. You want a new people to regenerate a world.” “You’re right. I feel the pull of pagan worship.” “I’ve been told that all through the west of Ireland the peasants still take their old pagan relics out of hiding and worship them as soon as the priest is out of sight.” “It’s true. Don’t you feel the very mountains of Ireland are sacred? How can a people like us throw off our past?” “Shoddy days, shoddy days,” Himself answered, coming out of a trance in the corner. “Let’s hope the world isn’t too old to get better. I was at A. E.’s on Sunday evening. Madam Markievicz was there, and Darrel Figgis, and James Stephens the poet, and the rest of them, and some one brought up De Valera’s letter to Lloyd George, the one where he says that Lloyd George offers Ireland margarine when Ireland wants butter. Madam Markievicz excused the use of such phraseology in political correspondence. ‘Ah, Constance, Constance,’ A. E. remonstrated, shaking his head. Then Figgis, who has the happy knack of getting in a thrust all round, said, ‘The days seem to have gone when Cromwell chose Milton for his secretary, so that his despatches might be written in the best Latin of the period.’ The thought that De Valera had a poorer literary taste than Cromwell upset us so that we all went home. If the new world is to come, let it come soon.” The avatar rose to take his departure. “Good-bye,” he said. “It’s an awful thing to be the only sane man in the world.” Mrs. Slaney was full of rage at the iniquities of Lloyd George when she first heard the British offer; but after a talk with Father Murphy, who pointed out that the terms were all that Ireland desired, she shifted her ground, and became a staunch Free Stater. From then on her fear was lest the Republicans should upset the Free State and send Ireland into anarchy. The last day in our old flat came. Mrs. O’Grady shook hands with bright round tears rolling after one another down her face. “God save us!” she said, “but I feel as if my own children were walking out of the house this very minute. Indeed, and I never looked to see the day when you would go.” Later came the good-bye to Ireland. It sank into the sea. Its own peculiar soft atmosphere hung over it and passed into a sea haze. Two days later I was having tea with a friend in London. “My dear,” she said, “what an awful time you must have had. Of course you were awfully brave to stay.” “There was no special danger if you didn’t interfere,” I assured her. “No danger? But they are murderers?” “There are plenty of murderers in the world, and they aren’t all Sinn Feiners.”