ephen she
was afraid.

"You wouldn't be, my dear, if you knew Larry," Vera said.

For Frances still refused to recognize the man who had taken Ferdinand
Cameron's place.

Lawrence Stephen was one of those Nationalist Irishmen who love Ireland
with a passion that satisfies neither the lover nor the beloved. It was
a pure and holy passion, a passion so entirely of the spirit as to be
compatible with permanent bodily absence from its object. Stephen's
body had lived at ease in England (a country that he declared his spirit
hated) ever since he had been old enough to choose a habitation
for himself.

He justified his predilection on three grounds: Ireland had been taken
from him; Ireland had been so ruined and raped by the Scotch and the
English that nothing but the soul of Ireland was left for Irishmen to
love. He could work and fight for Ireland better in London than in
Dublin. And again, the Irishman in England can make havoc in his turn;
he can harry the English, he can spite, and irritate and triumph and get
his own back in a thousand ways. Living in England he would be a thorn
in England's side.

And all this meant that there was no place in Ireland for a man of his
talents and his temperament. His enemies called him an opportunist: but
he was a opportunist gone wrong, abandoned to an obstinate idealism, one
of those damned and solitary souls that only the north of Ireland
produces in perfection. For the Protestantism of Ulster breeds rebels
like no other rebels on earth, rebels as strong and obstinate and canny
as itself. Before he was twenty-one Stephen had revolted against the
material comfort and the spiritual tyranny of his father's house.

He was the great-grandson of an immigrant Lancashire cotton spinner
settled in Belfast. His western Irish blood was steeled with this
mixture, and braced and embittered with the Scottish blood of Antrim
where his people married.

Therefore, if he had chosen one career and stuck to it he would have
been formidable. But one career alone did not suffice for his
inexhaustible energies. As a fisher of opportunities he drew with too
wide a net and in too many waters. He had tried parliamentary politics
and failed because no party trusted him, least of all his own. And yet
few men were more trustworthy. He turned his back on the House of
Commons and took to journalism. As a journalistic politician he ran
Nationalism for Ireland and Socialism for England. Neither Nationalists