e voluptuously. Not that he had a
peculiar interest in Irish politics! What he had was a passion for
great news, for news long expected. He could thrill responsively to a
fine event. I say that his pleasure had the voluptuousness of an
artistic sensation.

Moreover, the attraction of politics in general was increasing for him.
Politics occupied his mind, often obsessing it. And this was so in
spite of the fact that he had done almost nothing in the last election,
and that the pillars of the Liberal Club were beginning to suspect him
of being a weakling who might follow his father into the wilderness
between two frontiers.

As he read the speech, slowly disengaging its significance from the
thicket of words, it seemed incredible. A parliament in Dublin! The
Irish taxing themselves according to their own caprices! The Irish
controlling the Royal Irish Constabulary! The Irish members withdrawn
from Westminster! A separate nation! Surely Gladstone could not mean
it! The project had the same air of unreality as that of his marriage
with Hilda. It did not convince. It was too good to be true. It could
not materialise itself. And yet, as his glance, flitting from left to
right and right to left, eagerly, reached the bottom of one column and
jumped with a crinkling of paper to the top of the next, and then to the
next after that, the sense of unreality did depart. He agreed with the
principles of the Bill, and with all its details. Whatever Gladstone
had proposed would have received his sympathy. He was persuaded in
advance; he concurred in advance. All he lacked was faith. And those
sentences, helped by his image of the aged legislator dominating the
House, and by the wondrous legend of the orator's divine power--those
long stretching, majestic, misty sentences gave him faith. Henceforward
he was an ardent Home Ruler. Reason might or might not have entered
into the affair had the circumstances of it been other; but in fact
reason did not. Faith alone sufficed. For ever afterwards argument
about Home Rule was merely tedious to him, and he had difficulty in
crediting that opponents of it were neither stupid nor insincere. Home
Rule was part of his religion, beyond and above argument.

He wondered what they were saying at the Liberal Club, and smiled
disdainfully at the thought of the unseemly language that would animate
the luxurious heaviness of the Conservative Club, where prominent
publicans gathe