nor Socialists believed in him; yet few men were more worthy of belief.
In literature he had distinguished himself as a poet, a playwright, a
novelist and an essayist. He did everything so well that he was supposed
not to do anything quite well enough. Because of his politics other men
of letters suspected his artistic sincerity; yet few artists were more
sincere. His very distinction was unsatisfying. Without any of the
qualities that make even a minor statesman, he was so far contaminated
by politics as to be spoiled for the highest purposes of art; yet there
was no sense in which he had achieved popularity.

Everywhere he went he was an alien and suspected. Do what he would, he
fell between two countries and two courses. Ireland had cast him out and
England would none of him. He hated Catholicism and Protestantism alike,
and Protestants and Catholics alike disowned him. To every Church and
every sect he was a free thinker, destitute of all religion. Yet few men
were more religious. His enemies called him a turner and a twister; yet
on any one of his lines no man ever steered a straighter course.

A capacity for turning and twisting might have saved him. It would at
any rate have made him more intelligible. As it was, he presented to two
countries the disconcerting spectacle of a many-sided object moving with
violence in a dead straight line. He moved so fast that to a stationary
on-looker he was gone before one angle of him had been apprehended. It
was for other people to turn and twist if any one of them was to get a
complete all-round view of the amazing man.

But taken all round he passed for a man of hard wit and suspicious
brilliance.

And he belonged to no generation. In nineteen-thirteen he was not yet
forty, too old to count among the young men, and yet too young for men
of his own age. So that in all Ireland and all England you could not
have found a lonelier man.

The same queer doom pursued him in the most private and sacred relations
of his life. To all intents and purposes he was married to Vera Harrison
and yet he was not married. He was neither bound nor free.

All this had made him sorrowful and bitter.

And to add to his sorrowfulness and bitterness he had something of the
Celt's spiritual abhorrence of the flesh; and though he loved Vera,
after his manner, there were moments when Vera's capacity for
everlasting passion left him tired and bored and cold.

All his life _his_ passions had bee