carrying it out. Nothing would induce me to be on the
same side as Gorman and his friends. Such is the nature of an Irish
gentleman.

I lay awake for a long time that night, smoking cigarettes in my berth
and meditating on the fact that, of the three of us I was the one who
was going to America for purely selfish purposes. Gorman was trying to
get money for his party, for his own ultimate advantage no doubt, but
in the first instance the money was not for himself but for a cause.
And Gorman is a politician, a member of a notoriously corrupt and
unscrupulous professional class. Ascher was taking a long journey in
order to devise some means of rescuing his clients' property from the
clutches of a people which had carried the principles of democracy
rather further than is usual. And Ascher is a financier. No one expects
anything but enlightened greed from financiers. I belong by birth and
education to an aristocracy, a class which is supposed to justify its
existence by its altruism. There was no doubt a valuable lesson to be
learned from these considerations. I fell asleep before I found out
exactly what it was.

Gorman did as he promised. He took Ascher in hand next day. He made
the poor man walk up and down the deck with him. There is nothing on
shipboard more detestable than that tramp along the deck. Only the
strongest minded man can avoid counting his steps, making an estimate of
yards, and falling into the bondage of trying to walk a fixed number of
miles. Conversation and even coherent thought become impossible when the
mind is set on the effort to keep count of the turns made at the end of
the deck. I am sure that Ascher did not enjoy himself; but Gorman kept
him at it for more than an hour. I watched them from the deck chair in
which I sat, rolled up very comfortably in my rug. At one o'clock, when
we ought to have gone down to lunch, Gorman stopped opposite my chair.
He proclaimed his success jubilantly.

"We've been talking about finance," he said, "high finance. Pity you
wouldn't join us."

Ascher bowed towards me. Gorman described Ascher's manners as foreign.
I daresay they are. There is a certain flavour of formal courtesy
about them which Englishmen rarely practise, of which Irishmen of my
generation, partly anglicised by their education, have lost the trick.

"Sir James would only have been bored," said Ascher.

"Not he," said Gorman, "he's just as keen as I am to know what bankers
do with money."