and only serves as metaphor when it tries to pass for bronze.

So, then, behold Katharine O'Shea--handsome, wistful, winsome, vivacious
and intelligent, with a brain as keen as that of Becky Sharp, yet as
honest as Amelia--getting her husband transferred from the army to the
civil list.

He was an Irishman, and his meager salary in the office had to be helped
out with money wrung from Irish peasantry by landlords' agents. Captain
O'Shea knew little about his estate, and was beautifully ignorant of its
workings; but once he and his wife went over to Ireland, and the woman
saw things the man did not and could not.

The Irish agitation was on, and the heart of the English girl went out
to her brothers and sisters across the Channel. Marriage had tamed her,
sobered her dreams, disillusioned her fancies. In her extremity she
turned to humanity, as women turn to religion. In fact, humanity was to
her a religion: her one thought was how to relieve and benefit
Ireland--Ireland which supplied her that whereby she lived! She felt
like a cannibal at the thought of living off the labor of these poor
people.

She read and studied the Irish problem, and one day copied this passage
from Henry George into her commonplace-book:

Ireland has never yet had a population which the natural resources
of the country could not have maintained in ample comfort. At the
period of her greatest population (Eighteen Hundred Forty to
Eighteen Hundred Forty-five), Ireland contained more than eight
millions of people. But a very large proportion of them managed
merely to exist--lodging in miserable cabins, clothed in miserable
rags, and with potatoes only as their staple food. When the
potato-blight came, they died by thousands. But it was not the
inability of the soil to support so large a population that
compelled so many to live in this miserable way, and exposed them to
starvation on the failure of a single root-crop. On the contrary, it
was the same remorseless rapacity that robbed the Indian peasant of
the fruits of his toil and left him to starve where Nature offered
plenty. When her population was at its highest, Ireland was a
food-exporting country. Even during the famine, grain, meat, butter
and cheese were carted for exportation along roads lined with the
starving, and past trenches into which the dead were piled. For
these exports of food there was no return. It wen