Ascher. Mrs. Ascher goes further still. She respects and admires
Gorman. But Mrs. Ascher is a peculiar woman. She respects people whom
the rest of us only like.

CHAPTER II.

We saw very little of Ascher and nothing at all of his wife during the
first two days of our voyage. My idea was that they stayed in their
cabins--they had engaged a whole suite of rooms--in order to avoid
drifting into an intimacy with Gorman and me. A millionaire would
naturally, so I supposed, be suspicious of the advance of any one who
was not a fellow millionaire. I was mistaken. Ascher was simply seasick.
When he recovered, two days before Mrs. Ascher raised her head from
the pillow, he showed every sign of wanting to know Gorman and had no
objection to dining with me.

In the meanwhile I found out a great deal about Gorman. He was
delightfully unreserved, not only about his own past, but about his
opinions of people and institutions. Old Dan Gorman had, it appeared,
married a new wife when he was about sixty. This lady turned Michael,
then a young man, out of the house. He bore her no ill will whatever,
though she deprived him in the end of his inheritance as well as his
home. For several years he "messed about"--the phrase is his--with
journalism, acting as reporter and leader writer for several Irish
provincial papers, a kind of work which requires no education or
literary talent. Then he, so to speak, emerged, becoming somehow,
novelist, playwright, politician. I have never made out how he achieved
his success. I do not think he himself knows that. According to his
own account--and I never could get him to go into details--"things just
happened to come along."

He was entirely frank about his opinions. He regarded landlords as the
curse of Ireland and said so to me. He did not seem satisfied that they
are innocuous, even when, being deprived of their estates, they are no
longer landlords. I do not like being called a curse--hardly any one
does--but I found myself listening to the things which Gorman said about
the class to which I belong without any strong resentment. His treatment
of us reminded me of Robbie Burns' address to the devil. The poet
recognised that the devil was a bad character and that the world would
be in every way a brighter and happier place if there were no such
person. But his condemnation was of a kindly sort, not wholly without
sympathy. He held out a hope that "ould Nickie Ben" might still "hae
some stak