I could not even guess at what she meant by that so I did not try to
answer her.

"I wonder he didn't look me up," I said.

"Ah," said Mrs. Ascher, "he has had no time. That abundant, restless
energy of his is for ever pressing out into fresh activities."

I gathered, more from her tone than from her actual words that only an
effete, devitalised creature would call on me. A man of abundant energy
would naturally sit half the day in Mrs. Ascher's studio, while she made
a fancy body for him in damp clay.

She clasped her hands and gazed with rapt intensity at the statue of
Gorman's soul.

"His patriotism!" she said. "After living in that atmosphere of nebulous
cosmopolitanism which is what we hypercivilised people have created in
the world, it is everything to get back to the barbaric simplicity of
the old love for country."

"Did he happen to mention," I asked, "whether he succeeded in wheedling
five thousand dollars out of that Detroit man?"

Mrs. Ascher did not hear that; or if she did chose to ignore it.

"The splendid destiny of Ireland," she said, "has been to escape age
after age the malarial fever of culture. The Romans never touched her
shores. The renaissance passed her by. She has not bowed the knee to our
modern fetish of education. You and I have our blood diluted with----"

Gorman must have been at his very best while he talked to Mrs. Ascher.
He had evidently made a kind of whirlpool of her mind. Her version of
his philosophy of history and politics seemed to me to be going round
and round in narrowing circles with confusing speed. The conception of
the Romans as apostles of the more malarial kinds of culture was new to
me. I had been brought up to believe--not that any one does believe this
as an actual fact--that Ireland was once and to some extent still is, an
island of Saints and Scholars. I did not obtain any very clear idea of
what Mrs. Ascher's blood was diluted with, but there must have been
several ingredients, for she went on talking for quite a long time. When
she stopped I made a protest on behalf of my country.

"We're not so backward as all that," I said. "We have a Board of
National Education and quite a large number of technical schools. In the
convents they teach girls to play the piano."

Mrs. Ascher shook her head slowly. I gathered that she knew much more
about Irish education than I did and regarded it as unworthy even of
serious contempt.

"Dear Ireland!" she said, "splen