Ireland pure!"

"I do," said Henry, full of desire to shock the Celt.

"You do?..."

"Anybody can keep a man pure by putting him in prison. That's what the
priests have done. They've put the Irish people in gaol!..."

The kilted Celt shrank away from him. He was sorry, but he could not
possibly sit still and listen to such conversation. He hoped that he was
as broad-minded as any one, but there were limits.... Very wisely, he
thought, the Church!...

"Blast the Church!" said Henry, and the kilted Celt had gone shivering
away from him.

"That kind of person makes me foam at the mouth," Henry muttered to
Gilbert "The Irish people aren't any purer than any other race. It's all
bunkum, this talk about their 'innate purity.' If you clap the
population into gaol, you can keep them 'pure,' in act anyhow, and if
the priests won't let the sexes mingle openly, they can get up a
spurious purity just like that. If a girl gets into trouble in Ireland,
she goes to the priest and confesses, and the priest takes jolly good
care that the man marries her. That's why the rate of illegitimacy is so
low. And anyhow, the bulk of the people are agricultural, and country
people are more continent than any other people. It's the same in
England, but the English don't go about bleating of their 'innate
purity.' I tell you, Gilbert, the trouble with this country is
self-consciousness...."

"Home Rule ought to cure that!" said Gilbert.

"That's why I'm a Home Ruler," Henry replied. "If you chaff these
people, they get angry and want to fight. If anybody were to get up in a
public hall and say about the Irish one-quarter of the things that
Bernard Shaw says in public about the English, the audience would flay
him alive and wreck the building. They're too little to stand chaff
easily. It takes a big people to bear criticism good-naturedly.... All
the same, Gilbert, your damned countrymen are to blame for all this!"

"I know that," said Gilbert, "but your damned countrymen seem determined
to remain like it!"

8

Mr. Quinn and Henry had talked of Ireland and of John Marsh, after John
had returned to Dublin.

"Sometimes," said Mr. Quinn, "I think that the best thing for Ireland
would be to let the two sides fight. That might bring them together. One
damned good scrap ... and they might shake hands and become reconciled.
There was as much antagonism and bitterness between the North and South
in America as there is between the North a