so that he should bleed!...

"I feel as if Dublin were like an old mansion left by a drunken lord in
the charge of a drunken caretaker," he said to Marsh. "It's horrible to
see those beautiful houses decaying, but it's more horrible to think
that nobody cares!"

Marsh had taken him one Sunday to a house where there were ceilings
that were notable even in Dublin which is full of houses with beautiful
ceilings.

"If we had houses like that in Belfast," Henry had said, as they came
away, "we wouldn't let them become slums!"

"No," retorted Marsh, unable to restrain himself from sneering, "you'd
make peep-shows out of them and charge for admission!"

"Well, that would be better than turning them into slums," Henry
answered good-humouredly.

"Would it?" Marsh replied.

"_Would it?_" Henry wondered. The train was now on its way to Belfast,
and, looking idly out of the window, he could see the waves of the Irish
Sea breaking on the sands at Malahide, heaving suddenly into a
glassy-green heap, and then tumbling over into a sprawl of white foam.
Would it? he wondered, thinking again of what Marsh had said about the
Georgian houses with their wide halls and lovely Adams ceilings. There
was no beauty of building at all in Belfast, and no one there seemed
anxious that there should be: in all that city, so full of energy and
purpose and grit and acuteness of mind, there did not appear to be one
man of power who cared for the fine shape or the good look of things;
but, after all, was that so very much worse than the state of mind of
the Dublin people who, knowing what beauty is, carelessly let it decay?
He began to feel bitterly about Ireland and her indifference to culture
and beauty. He told himself that Ireland was the land of people who do
not care....

"They've got to be made to care!" he said aloud.

But how was it to be done?...

His sense of being an alien in Dublin had persisted all the time that he
had lived there. The Dublin people were gregarious and garrulous, and he
was solitary and reflective. Marsh and Galway had taken him to houses
where people met and talked without stopping, and much conversation with
miscellaneous, casually-encountered people bored Henry. He had no gift
for ready talk and he disliked crowds and he was unable to carry on
a conversation with people whom he did not know, of whose very names he
was ignorant. Sometimes, he had envied Marsh and Galway because of the
ease with which they co